What is Barnacle SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a fairly well understood concept these days. The practice of making your website favourable to search engines (predominantly Google) has been a popular form of digital marketing for over a decade, and companies that have invested in this marketing tactic have reaped the rewards for just as long.

However, Google’s continuous updates and algorithms mean that the tactics utilised within SEO are in constant flux, and as Digital Marketers we have to consistently come up with new and innovative ways to keep our clients at the top and get them as much traffic as possible from Google.

Especially in recent years, there’s been an increasing trend of searchers not clicking through to businesses websites at quite the same rate as before. There’s numerous reasons for this, one of which is called ‘zero click searches’ and this has its own strategy to counter it, which is known as ‘SERP optimisation’ or some variant thereof. We are proud to continuously achieve great success for our clients, ensuring they don’t suffer from the rise in zero click searches, by employing SERP optimisation strategies.

In addition, another reason for less website traffic is because directory websites are featuring higher and higher in search results. This has led to another tactic that any good Digital Marketer should be employing in the modern-day search landscape, and that is something termed ‘barnacle SEO’.

What is Barnacle SEO?

Barnacle SEO is the search engine optimisation technique of having your business feature on a site which generally ranks highly, so you can benefit from their visibility. It’s especially prevalent as a local SEO strategy, with businesses creating high quality listings on directory websites such as Yelp and the Scoot network.

How to Do Barnacle SEO Well?

As with anything in SEO, the most effective method will always be to produce something of genuine quality which has great benefit to a user. At Active Internet Marketing (UK), we make this the centre of all of our digital marketing strategies and it is no different when it comes to barnacle SEO.

To do barnacle SEO well, you must avoid creating lots of low quality, spammy mentions of your business on high-ranking websites. Instead, create detailed and thorough business listings that provide genuinely useful information for those browsing these sites looking for recommendations and services.

Not only are you more likely to show up in internal searches on those sites if your profile is of a high quality, but users will respond better too!

What Are the Benefits of Barnacle SEO?

Digital Marketing is all about taking a holistic approach to your online presence, and standard website SEO is a really important element of that. We would never recommend barnacle SEO in isolation, because then you’d be missing out on all those times searchers are looking for a business website! This still happens plenty and SEO continues to thrive as a top marketing channel.

However, the benefits of including barnacle SEO in your search engine optimisation strategy are numerous:

• You get to feature on an established website where people are directly looking for your services
• You showcase yourself as an active business to Google, which will help your overall search presence
• It gives people extra places to leave good reviews about your company which increases your online reputation
• Your business will have a chance to feature highly for searches where top results are directories rather than company websites

Is It Right for You?

Overall, here at Active Internet Marketing (UK) we believe barnacle SEO is yet another exciting addition to the overall search engine marketing toolkit, and we employ it for all of our clients along with a robust onsite SEO strategy.

If you’re interested in learning more about how your business could benefit from barnacle SEO, or any other of our digital marketing services, get in touch with our SEO experts today.