About LocalsKnow

LocalsKnow lists businesses, clubs and places across New South Wales and Victoria. Trades, cafes, bakeries, pubs, motels, wineries, sporting clubs, hobby groups. Every listing shows the sources its details came from and the date those sources were last read. Nothing on this site is ranked by who paid.

Who runs it

LocalsKnow is built and operated by Automatrix Digital, a small web and software shop. The same people write the code, load the data, check the licences and answer the email. There is no investor, no parent directory group and no outsourced content desk. When a page is wrong, one small team is responsible for it, and the contact address goes to that team.

That is worth saying plainly because most directories will not say it. If you cannot find out who is behind a site, who checked its facts, or what happens to your details when you fill in its form, the answer to all three is usually the one you would not like.

Why it started on the border

Albury sits in New South Wales. Wodonga sits in Victoria. The two centres are about four kilometres apart across the Murray and share one labour market, one hospital catchment and one pool of tradespeople. Every directory we checked treats the river as a wall.

A plumber based in Lavington who works in Wodonga five days a week gets filed under New South Wales and disappears from the Victorian searches he should own. Ask for an emergency electrician in Wodonga and half the ones who will actually turn up inside an hour are not on the page. The same thing happens at Corowa and Yarrawonga, at Echuca and Moama, at Mildura and Wentworth.

This is a data modelling problem, not a content problem. Where a business is registered and where a business works are two different facts, and most directories store only the first one. We store both. Albury Wodonga was the obvious place to prove it, because there the failure is visible from the main street.

Three things that make this different

1. Service area is stored separately from the address

Every listing carries a registered locality and a list of localities it will travel to. A business appears on a town page when it sits there or when it services there, and the card says which. A mobile trade with no shopfront gets no street address in its structured data at all, because inventing one is a lie that Google can check against the map pack. Cross border operators are marked, so nobody has to guess whether the quote will include an hour of travel.

2. Trade licences are checked against the state registers

A licence number on a listing means somebody put that number into the relevant register and it came back current. New South Wales licences are checked against NSW Fair Trading. Victorian plumbing and building registrations are checked against the Victorian Building Authority. The listing prints the register link and the date of the check, so anyone can repeat it in under a minute.

A licence we could not confirm is not shown. There is no partial credit and no "licence pending" badge, because a badge that means "we asked and did not get an answer" is worse than no badge.

3. Every fact carries its source and the date it was read

Each listing publishes the URLs its details were read from and a last checked date. Details taken from the business’s own site or an official register are marked as high confidence. Details from a single third party source are marked lower. Where a Google rating appears, it was read from the Places API on the date printed beside it, and where it does not appear we simply do not have it. A directory that will not say where its facts came from is asking to be trusted for no reason.

How a listing gets on the site

1. Found. The business is picked up from public sources: its own website, a council or tourism board listing, an industry register, a published local news item.
2. Recorded. Name, address, phone, hours, categories and service areas are entered together with the URL each one came from. Anything we cannot source is left blank rather than guessed at.
3. Claimed. The owner claims the listing and takes over the details. Claiming is free, takes a few minutes, and does not expire.
4. Checked. If the business holds a trade licence, the number is run against the state register and the result is recorded with the date it was run.
5. Verified. A confirmed licence earns the verified badge, and the outbound link to the business website loses its nofollow. Both are earned by the check. Neither can be bought, and neither is given in exchange for a link back.

Steps one and two happen whether or not the owner has ever heard of us, which is how a directory gets useful before it gets popular. Steps three to five are the owner’s move, and the claim page explains what each one involves.

How the site makes money

Listings are free. Claiming, editing, opening hours, photos, service areas, review replies: free, permanently, with no trial that quietly ends.

Revenue comes from two products. Enquiry routing, where a business pays to have quote requests sent through the site delivered to it. And multi location tools, for operators running several sites who want one dashboard instead of nine logins. Advertising, where it runs, sits in a labelled box outside the organic list and is excluded from the structured data, which is set out in full in the advertising policy.

Ranking is not one of the products. Ordering comes from a quality score computed from profile completeness, claim status, licence verification and review volume, then average rating, then name. A business paying us every month and a business that has never replied to an email go through the same function in the same order.

What this site will not do

• Sell a position in a list, a place in a curated list, or the verified badge.
• Remove or demote a business because a competitor asked for it, or paid for it.
• Publish a rating, a price or an opening time that cannot be traced to a source.
• Put an aggregate rating in structured data on a page where the reviews themselves are not visible.
• Trade a dofollow link for a link back. Google’s spam policies name that arrangement specifically, and the link partner page explains why we agree with them.
• Delete a page that once ranked. Pages that fall under the 3 listing threshold go noindex, follow and keep their links until they cross back over it.

Coverage, honestly stated

961 listings across 263 localities and 32 regions today, with 0 verified. A town goes live when it has content on it, not before, so a place with no page yet is a place we have not got to. Coverage grows out from the border corridor: Albury Wodonga first, then Wagga, Shepparton, Wangaratta, Corowa and Deniliquin, then the larger regional centres. Sydney and Melbourne come last, on purpose.

If something on this site is wrong, the corrections page has a form that goes straight to a person, and every correction is answered within two business days.