Dutch newspapers at a bookstore in Nijmegen (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Newspapers may be a dying breed, but many of the old “rags” are embracing the Internet with open arms. Many of them (not all) have created social media and are utilizing on a daily or at least on a somewhat regular basis. I believe that these sites are frequently still considered to be strong authorities in their given locations. Using that authority for your own online authority building is the idea.
In this article, I will give you some tips for using your local newspapers for your local SEO.
Finding Newspapers
A resource I just found which I love is US Newspaper List site Usnpl, which is much more than a list of newspapers.
At the home page, start by selecting your state, then find your town or nearby towns and the newspapers for each. Next to each newspaper you will find a link to the newspaper website, a link to the newspaper contact info(phone address etc), county info, Facebook fanpage,Twitter, and local weather.There are Google ads and banner adds on the site, but they are pretty clearly defined.
Another resource for finding Newspaper is allyoucanread.com . Allyoucanread has lists of newspapers from all over the world and you can drill down to find newspapers by town as well.
At the home page click into your state, and you get a page that lists the top ten newspapers of the state. To the right, there is a list of many college newspapers. Below the top ten is a list of all the towns in the state. Click on a town, and you will find a list of the newspapers for the town to include church papers, school papers and genral papers. Below that is a list of newspapers from neighboring cities and towns. In addition to newspapers, you can also find local magazines. A word of warning, Allyoucanread is peppered with Google Adsense adds, so be careful what you are clicking on.
Of the two Newspaper lists, I like USPNl.com because it gives you the social media profile links of the papers. However, Uspnl.com did not have my local paper listed, but AllYoucanread.com did.
Three Local SEO Uses of Newspapers
- Go through each list and check out all of the papers for your target geography. For each newspaper, navigate to their Fanpage and like it as your Fanpage and then leave a comment on one of their posts again as your Fanpage.
- Check out each Newspapers website and locate any blogs or articles which accept comments. Many that take comments will require you to login with a Social Media profile. If possible leave your comment as your Fanpage. The best would be if they allow you to leave a comment that lets you put in your name, email and url(Yeah! you get a link to your site yeah!) Please be sure to not spam them with crappy comments. Read the article and leave a valuable contributing comment.
- Some Newspapers don’t let you leave comments with any sort of link. I don’t bother leaving comments on these, unless of course the article is something I am personally interested in. But it gives your website nothing unless you are able to mention your company in the comment.
- An additional purpose of newspaper is well the news. If you are looking for a something to share for your blog or your Fanpage, visit newspapers to find local articles to share. Be sure to include the name of the town in the Title of the post. Mentioning the town name in your title is helping the search engines to associate your site/Fanpage with that town and is essentially making you a resource for that town. Many newspaper sites are now using social bookmarks to make it easy to share their content.
Of course there are a lot of newspaper websites that hold to the old ways of thinking and hide their content behind passwords so only subscribers can view it. I guess it is a method of getting revenue, but are people really willing to pay for an online subscription of news that is probably already online.
Well these are just a few of my suggestions for using Newspapers for your Local Online marketing.
Newspapers are just one source for your local seo. Be sure to check out our other Local SEO posts to get more local seo tips.
Got any local seo tips to share?
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About the author
Adam is the Social Media Director at Baldy Dog Search Strategies, and is also the lead on all local SEO at BaldyDog.
Really. We can do classified using news papar. New paper is daily part of peoples . So its eassy to do seo on paper
Great point about offline marketing for websites. This is a very good idea “Using Newspapers for Local SEO”. We can do surely classified using news paper. Guest posting is the best way for making the promotion of any local business.