Third-party, this is one of my favorites as someone who works in local SEO. So we’re always looking for opportunities for our clients to get partnerships because building your like brand, building your community is so important with local SEO. The more partnerships you have with other businesses or other organizations that serve the same community or serve the same type of products or services or related to them, the stronger you are as a member of that industry, it makes you seem more authoritative. It makes you seem more trustworthy of other companies. Other businesses are working with you.
Or if you wanna take this into another level, like if you’re working with influencers and social, you can tie those things together and you can partner with people who are influencers for your customers and get them to help you reach to a new audience or more of your audience.
Barnacle, when I talk about barnacle SEO, I don’t mean what we typically think about. And those are those garbage sites where someone is just putting up affiliate stuff. I’m talking about a tree barnacle SEO, where like if there’s a top 10 list that someone has put together on a trusted site and it is on the first page of search results, you want to be on that list. You wanna figure out what you need to do to be on that list and to be visible, because that just gives you another spot in search results. If someone doesn’t click on your website and they click on this other website that puts you in the top 10 and they see you in a Reddit post too, that’s also showing up in search results. All those things together, it puts you in the mind of the consumer because they’re seeing your brand and your name over and over and over again when they do the search.
Next, we’re gonna talk about, I guess we can talk about directories a little bit. If you’re in local, you know a lot about directories. There are places where your name, address, and phone number are found online. This is more of a like validation factor. So if they can go Google search engines, generative AI, LLMs, if they can go online and find the same information about your business in several different places, it’s a validating thing so that because they know that one, you’re legitimate and that two, they have the right information. So it’s a great way to make sure that you are highly visible online is when they can trust that the information they have about you is correct.