Another Local Services Directory

I stumbled across a TechCrunch discussion of Trusty’s, which is analogous to InsiderPages when it launched. It’s a services directory seeking community reviews. The article’s headline is “Yelp Meets LinkedIn For Blue-Collar Workers.”

I was unaware of the site. The headline promises something more interesting that what the site delivers, however. And the site’s stated mission and blog posts imply that there aren’t already scores of sites operating directly or indirectly in the segment: IYP directories, local search engines, Citysearch, Yelp, ServiceMagic, specific vertical directories and a host of others. The lone difference, from what I can tell, is that the site is trying to cultivate a numerical score for the business (a la Avvo).

Success or failure is going to be all about SEO in the near term. It also doesn’t appear they’ve bought one of the standard databases so their content is very thin. I would recommend that they focus on a single market and not try and go national for some time, especially if they don’t have a national database. They simply won’t be able to gain the critical mass of content they need otherwise.

We won’t even talk about the challenges of selling ads to SMBs . . .