Marketing a Website Offline Can Improve Local SEO Indirectly
If you have a website it makes sense to do the vast majority of your promotion online. But you shouldn't discount offline marketing. It can bring in very good quality, geo-targeted traffic. That's worthwhile in itself, particularly if you are running a bricks and mortar business and want to get local people looking at your site.
But it can also improve your SEO. Firstly, the more people in your suburb or city who see your URL and check out your site, the greater the chance that you'll get the odd quality local backlink. Remember that just about every man and his dog has a blog now, and a high proportion of bloggers do write about local issues.
Here's an example from my own experience: Back in 2007 I was living in Newtown in Sydney. It's a pretty grungy, alternative kind of a place. There's heaps of grafitti on the walls and quite often I'd see things written in chalk on the pavement. Sometimes these little ads and statements would include URLs.
One that had been repeated numerous times on sidewalks near the train station referred to a music festival that had just been cancelled. and it included a blog post with more information. I found this intriguing and wrote a post about it on one of my old blogs (which is no longer online) with a link to the post. I doubt I was the only one.
So, there's proof that an offline ad can generate a backlink. Think about it, if you got a few such links in a year, that would have to improve your local SEO substantially. Of course you wouldn't have to do anything as unusual as chalking your URL on the pavement. If you advertised in the local paper or put a sign out the front of your store, you'd be sure to draw some links eventually.
As well as having the potential to generate backlinks to your URL, offline advertising will result in more Google searches for it. This is because an increasing percentage of people are checking to see if a site is in that search engine before viewing it. This gives them an idea of its quality as well as whether it's safe to visit, and they can have a look at the little preview Google offers in the results as well.
I know this is what's happening because whenever I do offline campaigns now the resulting traffic often comes from searches for the URL, whereas in years past these were all just direct, type in hits. Needless to say, the more searches that Google records for your URL, the more highly it regards it.
The other way that local advertising helps is this: Google records the location of all viewers looking at your site, as well as how long they view it, which pages they look at, and so on. And this information goes into the calculation of your search engine rankings.
Now if you do lots of local advertising of your URL, and get, say, an extra thirty "type in" viewers from your city every week, there'll be a very clear trend showing up after a while. Google will know that your site definitely has information of value to people in that area. Consequently it must help your local rankings - and quite a bit over time.
The only problem with this is that offline marketing can be quite expensive. But if you do some experimenting and track the results in your stats it's possible to find an affordable method. I have used flyer distribution and know that it works well. However most people wouldn't have the time to do this. Local newspapers could be a good option, since they're usually quite cheap, and some even have free sections. You could also contact them with some sort of story angle, and ask that they include your URL.
But it can also improve your SEO. Firstly, the more people in your suburb or city who see your URL and check out your site, the greater the chance that you'll get the odd quality local backlink. Remember that just about every man and his dog has a blog now, and a high proportion of bloggers do write about local issues.
Here's an example from my own experience: Back in 2007 I was living in Newtown in Sydney. It's a pretty grungy, alternative kind of a place. There's heaps of grafitti on the walls and quite often I'd see things written in chalk on the pavement. Sometimes these little ads and statements would include URLs.
One that had been repeated numerous times on sidewalks near the train station referred to a music festival that had just been cancelled. and it included a blog post with more information. I found this intriguing and wrote a post about it on one of my old blogs (which is no longer online) with a link to the post. I doubt I was the only one.
So, there's proof that an offline ad can generate a backlink. Think about it, if you got a few such links in a year, that would have to improve your local SEO substantially. Of course you wouldn't have to do anything as unusual as chalking your URL on the pavement. If you advertised in the local paper or put a sign out the front of your store, you'd be sure to draw some links eventually.
As well as having the potential to generate backlinks to your URL, offline advertising will result in more Google searches for it. This is because an increasing percentage of people are checking to see if a site is in that search engine before viewing it. This gives them an idea of its quality as well as whether it's safe to visit, and they can have a look at the little preview Google offers in the results as well.
I know this is what's happening because whenever I do offline campaigns now the resulting traffic often comes from searches for the URL, whereas in years past these were all just direct, type in hits. Needless to say, the more searches that Google records for your URL, the more highly it regards it.
The other way that local advertising helps is this: Google records the location of all viewers looking at your site, as well as how long they view it, which pages they look at, and so on. And this information goes into the calculation of your search engine rankings.
Now if you do lots of local advertising of your URL, and get, say, an extra thirty "type in" viewers from your city every week, there'll be a very clear trend showing up after a while. Google will know that your site definitely has information of value to people in that area. Consequently it must help your local rankings - and quite a bit over time.
The only problem with this is that offline marketing can be quite expensive. But if you do some experimenting and track the results in your stats it's possible to find an affordable method. I have used flyer distribution and know that it works well. However most people wouldn't have the time to do this. Local newspapers could be a good option, since they're usually quite cheap, and some even have free sections. You could also contact them with some sort of story angle, and ask that they include your URL.
