Adding a Directory to Website

[ListrBrands]

Hiya! So we have an odd request and we wanted to see if want we want to do will add any SEO benefit. We operate a printing/design firm in Houston, Texas and have been thinking of adding a directory to our website. It would sit on our top level domain www.website.com/print-directory,  it would much be a like a yelp directory listing all the print, design, and bindery shops all across the USA.  We want to expand our footprint online and and to boost to our position in other cities. For example Yelp is always the top spot when you search for (CITY) + (PRINTING)/(DESIGN) the yelp directories pull up first. Now... i know why this is with their DA/UR off the charts. We have vendor that will provide all the info/data/images of all businesses in the USA something around 5K business so. The design will mesh with our current design and look seamless with the current design.The idea is that we would populate and optimize all the city pages for all those cities and provide content on each major city. So we can optimize with H tags, keywords and interlink all the other pages plus not to mention we have a great blog section and plan on interlink that throughout website.   The catch would be..... is that we would put our listing first,  on top of all those other local shops. Maybe we would do this for all of them but maybe a few of our target cities.  We would use our addresses and nothing would be faked.

URL Structure www.website.com/print-directory/austin-texas/printshops/ABCPrinter/

Questions

1. Would this confuse Google and cause some issues with our current SERPS?   We do very well in our home city and don't want to jeopardize all our hard work. Or real harm or benefit just seems to confusing people?

2. Could we get penalized?

3. Content would be unique (except listing information)

[Chris.Menke]

There are LOTS of potholes on that path because it is an extremely well-worn path and many a hopeful implementer have ended up wishing they'd gone another route.  Take it from them--spend your time and/or money on building person to person relationships with your local business and figuring out with them how your businesses (and your customers) complement each other and work those relationships into links between your website brands. That's how real businesses do it and that's what the search engines reward.  : )

Cheers

[ListrBrands]

Thanks for the reply! I agree  with you that its a risky proposition and marketing funds could be better used elsewhere. But humor me....  if lets say we have a small listings section of people we recommend or we work with will Google have an issue with this per se?

[Chris.Menke]

Properly implemented, curated, and maintained, there's not really a risk of problems with Google. It's just that for 99% of them there's so little-if any-ranking benefit to it, why bother.  It's not necessarily great for your brand, either.