Small business owners are generally a frugal lot.
Of course there are some who’ve got the budget to invest heavily as long as they see a return, but what about those who don’t?
A long time ago someone coined the phrase “Parasite SEO” talking about the abuse of Blogger and WordPress.com to get better search term positioning. I love the term, but “parasite” is just so ugly sounding. I prefer “Barnacle SEO.”
Barnacle SEO: attaching oneself to a large fixed object and waiting for the customers to float by in the current.
As we know, there are lots of large trusted sites out there which, by virtue of all those factors we know and love, take very little coaxing to rank well for long-tail phrases.
And if I’ve said it once I’ve said it a thousand times.. “local search IS long tail search.”
So, here are a few of those large fixed objects:
- Merchant Circle (just kidding — here’s their site
- Yahoo! Local
- Yelp
- Insider Pages
- Super Pages
Local profiles have a lot of benefit for Barnacle SEO. In many instances they play supporting roles — helping to increase the number of web references, or “citations” as David likes to call them.
The following examples are from real, ‘Main Street’ clients who pay less than $500.00 per month for SEO services. Obviously these are not our most competitive categories, but we’ve found that for many small businesses it doesn’t take a lot to move the needle.
Clearly we could (and will over time) better optimize the profile pages themselves. And amazingly, in one of these cases the site uses a bad CMS so we can’t even control the on-page content.
Merchant Circle and Yahoo in supporting roles:
Notice the client, Puroclean RI, has top billing in both Organic and on the Map for “Property Damage Rhode Island,” even with a very bad title tag, and is present with both Merchant Circle and Yahoo! Local listings. So, with a little Barnacle SEO, we’ve got 30% of page 1 (and this is just one of many search terms) without breaking the bank.
Merchant Circle in a leading role:
As you can see, with the Merchant Circle listing we have two of the top three for “Accounting Firm Louisiana” for ASU, LLC in Metairie, LA. And this one is very early in our process. Within 60 days or so we would expect his listing to supplant the Merchant Circle listing and hopefully knock out that top one as well.
Like all SEO it’s not a case of “build it and they will come;” each of these listings needs to be cultivated, linked to and promoted around the web.
But, as the above examples demonstrate, a little bit can go a long way when you first attach yourself to a big heavy object. With Barnacle SEO, even a Sam’s Club shopper can compete with the Neiman Marcus set.
Image Credit: Gooseneck barnacles taken at Limekiln Point on San Juan Island
Will Scott is president and founder of Search Influence, a website promotion company in New Orleans, LA focused on local search engine optimization for small business.
Related posts:
- Onebox vs. Natural Results In October of 2008 I spoke at SMX East on...
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Tags: google, listings, Local Search
Another classic Will!
You had me laughing me head off - I love the term “Barnacle SEO.” We’ll all be using that term for a long time…
But seriously I appreciate the concrete examples in here. Great post.
Good post Will.
I see you’re using keywords/phrases in the business names (”Property Damage Rhode Island - Puroclean” and “Accounting Firm Louisiana - ASU LLC”).
I’ve seen this working well for many businesses, but believe it is only a matter of time before places like Google Maps, Yahoo! Local ,etc. stop using keywords in the business name as a ranking signal - it’s too easy to game.
Also, do you run the risk of sending mixed signals to the search engines when you use keywords in the business name. For instance, if Puroclean has a listing in the print yellowpages, it probably has them listed as “Puroclean” - not “Property Damage Rhode Island - Puroclean”. So then you have a listing in G Maps (et al) that you change to include the keywords. But Google still sees the listing from yellow pages (or maybe it’s getting the listing from InfoUSA, Axciom, etc.) that just lists the business name - sans keywords.
Do you think G Maps would end up with duplicate listings? Would they conflate the records? As we all know, G Maps isn’t exactly bug free, so who knows what could happen.
Personally, I have stopped including keywords in the business name - instead I focus my efforts on increasing citations. But it is interesting that using keywords in the business names on places like Merchant Circle, Superpages, etc. that those listings come to the top in organic. But for me, I’d rather focus on having my clients’ websites outrank their Merchant Circle profiles page.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the potential complications of using keywords in the business name.
Thanks Don!
Now all we need is a Wiki entry
Will
Barnacle SEO is now my new term for this is as well… it is so much nicer than parasite. So, when I explain this concept it doesn’t sound so bad.
These sites wouldn’t rank without using the listing information from small businesses so I ask; Who is the parasite?
Nice .Very good .Barnacle is a good term than parasite.
Might want to add Matchpoint.com to your list of directories to visit as businesses can get a free profile page as well as a lot of SEO tools to help them drive traffic and ranking.
[...] this post I argue that with a judicious application of Barnacle SEO The Haunting of Molly Hartley [...]
[...] listings, it would seem wise to use them to “leverage advanced image and video tagging, push Barnacle SEO to a new level and leverage the heck out of them” to claim a bigger slice of the local search [...]