You also have to compete with the big websites like Yelp, Tripadvisor, Houzz and many more depending on your niche who rank very well and have large teams of SEO professionals behind them.

These websites are optimized for the very same keywords that are important to your business so they can send traffic to their own profile or search pages to benefit businesses on their site.

They also have large advertising budgets and quite often buy ads that appear at the top of search pages for competitive keywords.

Maybe it is impossible for your business to get on page 1 of Google for these highly competitive keywords, but there is a very good chance your business could get to page one on one of these third-party services.

You will then get traffic when people click through to a third-party search page that you are listed on.

What is Barnacle SEO

Barnacle SEO is a search engine optimization technique where businesses and individuals leverage the authority and traffic of established websites to improve their own online visibility. The name “barnacle” is aptly chosen, as it reflects the idea of attaching oneself to a larger, stationary entity in order to benefit from its position in the online ecosystem.

Instead of relying solely on building and optimizing their own website, Barnacle SEO practitioners identify high-ranking, authoritative websites and platforms in their niche or industry. They then strategically create and optimize content, profiles, or listings on these platforms, effectively “riding” their coattails to gain exposure in search engine results pages (SERPs).

This strategy allows your business to gain exposure on page 1 for very competitive keywords when the searcher clicks through to a search page on one of these websites.

You should then aim to be ranked as highly as possible on these websites so your profile or listing is as high as possible in the search results for each service.

Is Barnacle SEO useful for my business?

Barnacle SEO can be utilized for any business.  You just need to determine which websites are important to your business niche and optimize your presence on these services.

This strategy is particularly effective for local businesses as the search pages typically cover one location. You just need to work on making your profile better than your local competitors on each service.

Barnacle SEO for local businesses

Barnacle SEO can be a very powerful strategy for local businesses like electricians, plumbers, doctors, accountants, lawyers, restaurants, hotels etc.

Each of these niches has its own list of powerful websites designed to help people find and connect with businesses in these industries.

These websites have large advertising and search marketing budgets and quite often have an Advertisement or well-ranked search page for important keywords relevant to your niche.

Barnacle SEO for online businesses

You can also use Barnacle SEO if you are an online business.  There are plenty of services that support the ability to list online businesses.

How to implement Barnacle SEO

Barnacle SEO is easy to implement and the steps involved are things that you should already be doing for your business.

1. Identify your most important keywords

What are the most important search keywords that people use when searching for a business like yours.

Identify a list of at least 20 keywords and use a search tracking tool to determine which are most important.  Use Search Volume to determine which keywords get the most traffic.

Focus on these keywords in order of the ones with the most traffic.

2. Determine which third party sites rank on page 1

For each of your keywords do a search on Google and make a note of any services that allow you to create a listing or profile.

Record which services appear the most and at what position along with the search volume for the keyword.  You can also determine the Domain Authority of each websites as a guide to which websites may rank better.

Once you have made your list you will be able to determine which websites are the most important for your business.

These are the websites you should focus on for your Barnacle SEO strategy.

3. Have a presence on each site

Before you can appear in search results for each site you need to have a presence.

Check each website to see if you have an existing listing, If not add a new listing or profile.

Some sites will be free to list or will require you to pay for a premium listing.  You should decide for each site if you feel a paid listing is worthwhile depending on how much traffic the listing may bring.

There may be other advantages to a paid listing. For example, if a paid listing also includes a dofollow backlink this would be an added bonus.

Creating listings on these niche websites is also valuable as they are additional citations for your business to boost local seo and gives your business another way to be found by people who go directly to these niche services to find businesses.

4. Optimize your presence on each site

Once you are listed you need to optimize the listing as much as possible and generate high quality content so that the service ranks it as high as possible in relevant search result pages.

Each service will have their own ranking algorithm.  Look at the search results page for each service and determine the factors helping each business to rank.

Some common ranking factors include:

• Ratings
• Number of reviews
• Quality of reviews
• Whether the listing is premium or not
• Completeness of listing
• Photos and Videos
• Engagement of the page
• Inclusion of products and services
• Specials and offers

If the service supports ratings and reviews a good strategy is to start getting good reviews on the page.

5. Increase Engagement with your presence

One of the best ways to get your presence or listing on a service to rank well is to get user generated content and engagement on your page.

You can do this by:

• Getting more reviews on your listing
• Improving your rating
• Getting more photos and videos from customers on the listing
• Including questions and answers

You can link to your profile from your website or use review generation tools to get more reviews on your listing.

6. Link back to your website

Whenever possible, include links back (backlinks) to your own website within the content you publish on these platforms. This can help drive traffic from the authoritative platform to your site.

7. Monitor Third Party Rankings

Check how you’re ranking on third party sites every so often to determine if you are improving or holding your rank.

Even when you have made it to position one it is possible that the ranking will change due to changes in ranking factors or your competitors improving.

Keep a list of all the search pages relevant to your business and check each one periodically.  Record your ranking position and the date so you can track changes over time.

Managed Barnacle SEO

Managed Barnacle SEO is not possible with traditional rank tracking services such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Majestic or any other service.

This is because these platforms are not designed to track the information necessary to properly manage and track Barnacle SEO.  These tools only know about your website and have no knowledge of which websites can be used for Barnacle SEO or the ability to help you rank on each of these websites and track your ranking position.

myPresences is the only online marketing tool with specific support for Barnacle SEO.

This is because myPresences is also an online presence management platform . We track all the websites that allow businesses in each niche to have a listing so you know where to list and whether you already have a listing. Once you are listed we help you optimize each listing and get reviews to help the listings rank better on each service so you have a better chance of appearing on page 1.

Coming soon, we will also be able to provide rank tracking for search pages on major third party websites so your rank can be automatically monitored in the same way that you track your google business profile rank.

Try myPresences free for 14 days and start implementing a Barnacle SEO strategy for your business or agency clients.

Building citations is a slow and methodical process. There is a lot that needs to be done around managing your accounts on various services before you even begin.  This can discourage a lot of business owners and agents and results in most businesses not building a strong citation base or consistent NAP.

The other option is to use a service that will automatically update your information online or services that provide manual citation building for you.  The problem with these services is you don’t always get the best results or the results you expect.

There are a number of advantages to taking control of this process yourself such as:

1. You can make sure the information posted to a service is exactly what you expect.
2. You get to know each service where your business has a presence and how best to optimize your presence there.
3. You can be more targeted, any automated service is not going to be able to make those decisions like which is the best category to use, which description should I use to maximise available space, or know that they can list the brands that you sell on some profiles.
4. If you need to make changes in the future you are more able to quickly jump in and make the changes rather than relying on third parties.

But, that is a lot of work right?  Yes, it is, and it is very frustrating, slow and error prone.

That is why we created the myPresences Agent, adding and maintaining your presences online can not be much faster and more accurate.

The myPresences Agent is an extension for your web browser (chrome only right now) that brings all the power of myPresences directly into the browser, where you need it.

So what does it do?

1. Automatically set fields when adding or updating presences based on your ideal profile.
2. Automatically log you into services.
3. Automate creating new accounts by setting your default username (email) and creating a unique password for you and then filling all fields and storing those new credentials for you in myPresences.
4. Show you directly on your profile what can be improved.
5. Show you for the current service you are browsing which of your business locations are listed and allows you to jump to each listing or add missing listings.

Installing the myPresences Agent

To install the myPresences Agent you first need to be using the chrome web browser (download here ).  Once you are using chrome you can install the myPresences Agent from here:

From the chrome webstore click on Add to Chrome to install into your browser.

At myPresences we have created a platform that allows you to keep track of everywhere your business is listed online in one place so that you can easily manage what you are telling the world about your business.

When you first add your business to myPresences we run a process called discovery.  This is based on the initial information you told us about your business and it is this process that initially populates myPresences with some presences for your business.

We use the following information to find your presences across the internet:

• Business Name
• Business Address
• Phone Number
• Geo Location (Map Position)
• Business Type
• Social Profiles

Our ability to find all the presences for your business will be reduced if any of this information is incorrect or missing or your information online is not consistent or correct and  you should take into account the following:

• Different names for the same business.  If your business is referred to using different names then profiles associated with that different name may be missed during discovery. For example, a restaurant called alchemy might be called “alchemy” or “alchemy restaurant”.  A company called “Total Performance Management” might sometimes use the acronym “TPM”.
• Change of business name. If a business has totally changed it’s name then only the name provided will be searched for. myPresences may find presences associated with the new name based on the same address or phone number but this is not guaranteed.
• Change of address.  When a business has the same name but is listed at different addresses we may miss that business when searching on location.
• Change of Phone Number.  When a business has different phone numbers listed we may miss presences associated with other numbers when searching on phone number.

If you do not think myPresences has found all the presences for your business you can manually add them so that you can track every presence online that is relevant to your business (including old presences for different locations or names that you need to either remove or fix).

Please note: before using the following feature to find more presences for your business please go to your base profile and make sure that you have the most relevant values for your Business Name, Locality, Region, Abbreviated Region, City, Country and ZIP/Postcode.  These values are used to perform searches for your business on online services and if they are not accurate we may not find your business.

Its very easy to find untracked Presences

One way to find all the presences for your business is to use the Services List and filter on all the services where you have no presence by clicking on No Presence at the top of the list.  When myPresences says you have No Presence this does not mean you have no presence on the service, it only means we are not aware of a presence for your business on that service.

You can work your way down the list starting at the most important and decide whether you want to have a presence or may already have a presence on each service.

For each service we make it very easy to find your presences and we provide the following options on each service tile when you don’t have a presence that you can use to discover and add presences that myPresences is not currently aware of.

These options are:

Find Me

Find me is a very powerful feature that performs a direct search on the service for a business with your details. This may be your business name, your city or state or a combination of any of these.  If your business has a presence on the service it is likely to appear or you can modify the search if you want to try a slightly different name or location.

For the above example this takes you to a search page on Yahoo Local with the business listed .. you can see that we have specified the business search terms at the top automatically.

If the service does not allow us to search them directly then the Find Me option will take you to the most relevant page on the service so you can begin searching manually, usually this is the homepage.

Search (Google)

Sometimes it is not possible to perform a search on a service and also a google search in many cases can be more effective in finding presences for your business.

If you press the Search button on the service tile myPresences will perform a google search for your business showing results only on that service.  If your business has a presence on the service then it should appear on the first page of results in most cases.

Adding existing presences

If you find a presence that is not already tracked in myPresences then you can easily add it.

The simplest way is to install the myPresences Agent which which will allow you to submit a presence directly from the webpage you are browsing in chrome.

If you do not have the Agent installed you can copy the URL from the address bar of your browser and add it to myPresences by clicking on the + icon in the header and choosing the location icon in the dropdown which will take you to the page where you can add a presence, paste the URL and click Submit Presence to add it to myPresences.

Add Me

If you cannot find you business on a service then use the Add Me button to link to the page on the service where you can add your business.  This will in most cases be the page where you enter your business details but in some cases it will simply take you to the homepage where there may be information on how to add your business.

Using this process you should be able to either identify all of your presences or create new presences on services where you have no current presence.  Now that myPresences is aware of all your presences we will be able to tell you much more about your online presence and alert you to anything you should be aware of and how your online presence compares to your competitors.

Please note: You do not have to create presences everywhere, you may decide that you do not need a twitter account for your business or that it is not worth listing at a particular service.