The New (AI) SEO Playbook — Whiteboard Friday

Number two, on a similar vein, is what I’m calling barnacle SEO.

So you might have heard this phrase in the past, when talking about heavily-branded SERPs. So, for example, if you Google search “Moz,” you would expect to see, yes, moz.com, but you would also expect to see our social profiles. You would expect to see our YouTube channel. You might expect to see perhaps a Crunchbase profile or something.

These kinds of other sites, where you can control what appears and you can control that result, are an opportunity here. And it’s not just for very branded SERPs.

It’s also for sort of what I’m calling “soft-branded” SERPs.

So my colleague, Dr. Pete, wrote about this distinction a bit recently. That can be yet another link below. But the idea here is that a lot of prompts are not explicitly branded, but do kind of beg a brand in their response. If I say, “What is the best phone for filming video?” okay, that isn’t a branded prompt, but clearly the response is going to mention a brand.

When you have prompts mentioning a brand or especially a specific product, some of these barnacle sites can be important again.

I think YouTube and Wikipedia are two pretty universal examples. Yes, I know Wikipedia can be difficult to influence in a way that is sort of within the ethical guidelines, and I’m not suggesting you go outside those ethical guidelines. But I am suggesting it would be useful for there to be a Wikipedia page about your brand and your products.

Here, I’m talking about sort of your own branded, controlled YouTube channel. I think it’s more important than ever that there is something there and that you sort of control that presence. But there will also be specific examples in your industry. 

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