Best citation sites in Egypt

Yellow Pages Egypt (YP.eg) is the most recognised of Egypt's business directories, with a straightforward add-your-company path and crawlable, categorised company pages. Egypt Directory (InfoEG) organises listings by sector and city, which suits a business that wants to be found under a specific trade rather than a generic category. Dalil Masr publishes an Arabic-first directory of Egyptian companies by governorate, which matters because a share of local search in Egypt still happens in Arabic even when the business itself trades in English. List on all three with identical details, since each is a structured record search engines and AI assistants can cross-check.

Cairo, Giza and Alexandria concentrate a large share of Egypt's registered businesses into a small number of districts, so a shopper searching for a service in Nasr City, Zamalek or Downtown Cairo typically sees several similarly named competitors in the same results. In that environment, a business whose name, address and phone number match exactly across every business directory it appears on is easier for an engine to trust and easier for a customer to recognise as the right listing. A single stale phone number or an old shop address left on one directory is often enough to make an otherwise strong local business look less established than a newer competitor with a cleaner record.

Foursquare and OpenStreetMap feed the places data behind Apple Maps and a long tail of navigation and delivery apps used across Egypt's cities; Bing Places covers the Microsoft ecosystem; Facebook remains one of the most checked sources for a business's hours and phone number in Egypt specifically. Brownbook and Hotfrog add free, crawlable corroboration on top. None of these require payment to list on, and together they are the layer that lets a foreign visitor's phone or a locally used AI assistant confirm a business exists and is open, even before that person opens a native Egyptian site. The recommended order for building this layer is in our citation building guide.

Egyptian business names and addresses commonly exist in both Arabic and English, and directories differ in which language they default to. Decide once which form is canonical, register that exact spelling everywhere, and if a directory only accepts Arabic, keep the transliteration consistent rather than improvising a new one on each site. Addresses in Egypt typically read as street name, building number, district, city and governorate (for example a business in Heliopolis, Cairo Governorate, or in Smouha, Alexandria Governorate); keep that structure identical on every listing rather than switching the order between directories. Phone numbers should always carry the +20 country code and the correct area code (2 for Cairo, 3 for Alexandria, and so on for other governorates), written the same way on every profile. Check how a business reads today with the free NAP checker.

Yellow Pages Egypt, Egypt Directory and Dalil Masr cover the general layer, and for most small and mid-sized Egyptian businesses that plus the global anchors is a realistic full set. Where a genuine vertical platform exists it is worth more than a fourth general listing: tourism operators around Sharm El Sheikh, Hurghada and Luxor have travel-focused directories foreign visitors actually browse, and import-export and manufacturing businesses have trade-focused portals that buyers outside Egypt search before placing an order.

If a category has no real vertical platform in Egypt, resist the urge to pad the profile with low-quality directories just to raise a count. A short, accurate set of business listing sites that are genuinely indexed and visible beats a long list of pages search engines have stopped crawling.

Egyptian businesses relocate within a district, switch from a landline to a mobile-first contact number, or open a second branch in a different governorate, and each change quietly leaves an outdated copy behind on any directory nobody thought to update. A customer who calls the old number, or a delivery app that still routes to the old address, reads to that customer as an unreliable business even when the current listing elsewhere is correct.

Treat the citation set as one canonical record with several copies rather than a one-time submission task. Decide the address format once, keep the +20 phone number identical everywhere, and when anything changes, update every copy of the record rather than only the one or two directories that come to mind first.