How to easily gain local links using digital PR

Local newspapers will link to everything. Seriously.

Have you run the numbers and found that people in their state pay more in taxes over their lifetime than anyone else?

They will take care of this:

Have you noticed that their city has the worst train delays in the country?

Yes, they will take care of it:

Even if your numbers aren’t impressive, like their city ranking 37th best for millennials (what does that even mean?), it seems like they’ll still include it:

In fact, judging by the backlinks to many of these campaigns, local tabloid journalists love to compare how their area stacks up when it comes to… well, almost everything.

Even this piece information about the cities with the longest waiting times for driving tests in the UK gathered links from 58 referring domains, most of which came from local newspapers:

How can you exploit this fact to gain links? Using what I like to call tabloid technique.

Building connections with tabloid technology is a three-step process:

1. Find a newsworthy topic
2. Pull local data on this topic
3. Send this to local journalists

Let’s be candid: this is the hardest part. If the ideas that go to local journalists were so effortless to come by, we’d all be launching hit PR campaign after hit PR campaign…

That said, the themes of the most successful ideas I’ve seen seem to fit into one of two segments:

• Evergreen topics. Taxes, holes in the roads – local issues Always they care about it, it may also make them a little irate.
• Popular topics. Local elections, seasonal events – things that people are currently interested in and local journalists are desperately trying to write about.

Here are some additional ideas for timeless topics, courtesy of ChatGPT:

You can also exploit the Content Explorer to find and get inspired by effective campaigns on evergreen topics.

For example, if you search for pages about “taxes” and filter pages with links from over 100 referring domains, you will see a list of countries where you have to pay tourist tax:

My guess is that if you mapped the countries with the lowest and most high-priced “tourist taxes” and contacted journalists in each country, you would get some coverage.

If you’re looking for trending topics, Google Trends and Google News are good sources.

We exploit a variety of techniques, from monitoring news sources in real time to conducting research on Google News, to understand the types of topics covered previously at certain times of the year.

You can also exploit the Growth indicator in Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to find trending topics.

For example, let’s search for a monotonous topic like “food” in the UK, set the growth period to the last three months, and sort from highest to lowest. A popular topic immediately stands out: searches related to Christmas food in various supermarkets in the UK:

It doesn’t take a genius to start coming up with potential local campaigns:

• Compare how much the average family will spend on Christmas food in different parts of the UK
• Compare the most popular Christmas foods in different parts of the UK.
• Compare how many families will exploit food banks for Christmas dinners in different parts of the UK. (I know, grim topic, but highlighting social issues like this is kind of the point of journalism!)

And before you think “but Josh… I’m not that artistic!”… the truth is that ChatGPT came up with all of these ideas:

My advice is to brainstorm as many ideas as possible and involve the entire team. Even if the idea sounds terrible, write it down. The more ideas you have, the more likely you are to come across one or two!

Having an idea is great, but what unique data can you extract from it? And where from?

Matt Diggity recently shared some good sources with me:

For government databases, you have usa.gov for states. Data.gov is another alternative. The UK Data Service is the UK equivalent. Eurostat is great for other countries in the EU. And Statistics Canada is for… yes, Canada. Internationally, the World Bank’s open data and United Nations data are a treasure trove. The Pew Research Center excels at social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends. FBI Crime Data Explorer is great for crime statistics. The CDC is great for health data.

To take this campaign from people DigitaloftFor example. They pulled data from the UK’s Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) to find out which areas of the UK have the shortest waiting times for driving tests and which have the highest pass rates:

This campaign obtained backlinks from 59 websites…

…including many local newspapers:

You can even combine data from multiple sources…

This is exactly what Darren Kingman created this campaign mapping of lifetime tax paid in each US state (check the methodology section for its sources):

As part of this campaign, we obtained links from 188 websites:

However, relying on existing data is not always possible. Sometimes you have to go out and get your own data.

This may sound scary, but it doesn’t have to be…

For example, Amanda Walls, Director of SEO and Digital PR Digital cedar woodused straightforward freedom of information requests to compile data for this article illegal vape hotspots in the UK: :

This campaign obtained links from 72 referring domains and was published in a number of online newspapers:

And if you’re not sure where (and how) to get data for your campaign, try asking ChatGPT:

Just remember to post everything you find on a journalist-friendly site, along with all the data, sources, methodology and, ideally, visual resources they can exploit.

Here are some examples:

Now that you’ve downloaded the data and have something fascinating to share, it’s time to do it.

The best people to contact will depend on the nature of your campaign and your data. For example, the Driving Test Index campaign I mentioned earlier found that these are the areas where you can best pass your driving test:

Journalists representing these areas are of course the people worth contacting regarding this campaign…

Looking at Backlinks report this campaign on Ahrefs, it’s clear that’s exactly what the people behind this campaign did, because one of the first links I see is this one from the Northumberland Gazette:

(Just for anyone unfamiliar with UK geography, Blyth – one of the best places to take your driving test according to data – is in Northumberland.)

How do you find these publications and journalists? It’s as straightforward as searching [place name] newspaper…

…then we look for the names of journalists who can be contacted:

If you click on their profile, it will show their email address (or at least their social media profiles), so it’s usually effortless to contact them:

If that doesn’t work, try entering their name and website into an email search tool like Hunter. (It doesn’t always work, but it’s worth a try!)

You can also connect any newspaper’s website to Content Explorer to see which journalists are currently most lively. Simply sort the “Authors” tab by the number of pages published by the author in the last 30 days.

This can speed up discovery and stop you wasting time contacting journalists who no longer work for the publication or rarely write for it.

As a courtesy, here’s an example of the type of email you should send Darren Kingman (Digital root):

And one more of Amanda Walls (Digital cedar wood):

Did it work?

Let me know. I’d love to share more examples of this technique in action.

If this didn’t work, let me know! No technique works every time (it definitely takes some luck), which is why I’m interested in sharing flops.

Do you have any questions? Ping me X Or LinkedIn.