Did you know that search engines provide search results for other search engines and those search results contain directories, or databases of websites like superpages.com or thomasnet.com? These databases or directories, that is a site with drop downs or drill downs to the specific area that you service. People do use these directories because they are human derived, meaning they go through approval by an admin before they are put into the directory. You do have to submit your site, it doesn’t just automatically appear in their search results. Being listed in a directory for traffic is not an effective way to draw traffic. Use this as an opportunity to build some sort of link trust within the search engine industry. If that directory has 50,000 monthly visitors, that’s 50,000 visitors to the site, not your specific industry. Say if 10%, 5000 visitors per month were potential site visitors to your industry, where there are over 100 other sites competing for those potential visitors. 10% is a very hopeful number and realistically would be great but isn’t the truth.
Your best bet overall is to have your site in the major search engines and play the SEO game of trying to increase your site rankings for keywords you choose based on the content of your site. Direct traffic from the major search engines may not wield the kind of conversion rates that the second tier or third tier search engines may have. However these 2nd and 3rd tier search engines may not have the same amount of traffic that the may have either. Use both of the options, but just don’t pay for higher position in the lesser engines. This is just going to cause you to spend a lot of unnecessary money, save it for Google Adwords or Yahoo! PPC.