Welcome to the Art Storefronts success coaching video series. In this video, we’ll be focusing on the concept of barnacle SEO, specifically for art and photo printing companies, and why you can use this concept of barnacle SEO in many other ways. We’re going to specifically focus on Yelp. In this example, we’re working with Skyline Art Printing, a fine art and photo printing company. First, let’s talk about what barnacle SEO is. If we go to Google and type in “fine art printing Austin,” which is where Skyline Art Printing is located, and scroll down, we can see they’re in the Google Maps results, they are in the SEO results, but then also you see a third listing here from Yelp.

On the first page of Google, they now have three listing and a powerful one here with ratings from Yelp. If you consider Yelp to be the boat, Skyline Art Printing is the barnacle attaching itself to a highly credible website like Yelp, which Google will rank well on its own. As a result, they have another ranking here on the first page of Google for a high traffic keyword search. There would be no reason to waste our time setting up a Yelp listing, and getting reviews, and taking the time to do it if the data didn’t prove that doing so was a good decision.

Again, now we’re going to look at some of the statistics of Skyline Art Prints to look at some data, and again we’re not going to show any date ranges out of respect for the company. As you can see here, Yelp is providing referrals. 32 have come in, and out of that they are clearly converting 3%, pretty much right in line with all of the other sources of traffic. What’s amazing about this is that people will actually go buy this organic listing and go directly to the Yelp because they feel like it’s more trustworthy. These professional artists and photographers will read some of these reviews and see that this is a legitimate company, and then as the data shows, these people will immediately come to the website and buy a fine art print or a photo print.

The concept of registering with Yelp and getting reviews sounds simple, but that’s not what’s going to get Google to rank your Yelp listing higher in the search engines. In order to figure out what that strategy is, we’ve got it right here in our success plan. It’s in Phase 1 if you scroll down. You can see it right here. We’re not going to click on it out of respect of our customers who are able to take advantage of this information, but if you are an existing customer and you’ve already gone through this and you’ve already registered with Yelp, we recommend coming back here, reading the information that’s in here, and making sure that you are following it. That way, you can get a top five or a top ten listing on Google with your Yelp listing.

That’s it. Let’s go over the key takeaways. First, the concept of barnacle SEO is a way to get you more organic search traffic from the search engines. Second, Yelp happens to be a great boat to attach your Barnacle to, because as the data shows, the professional artists and photographers that come to your website as a result of the Yelp listing will immediately buy if you have an upload-to-print tool and are taking orders on the spot. Last, there is a very specific way to make sure that your listing ranks high in the Google search engines, so make sure you follow the information in the success plan in order to make that happen. That’s it. We’ll see you next time.