Local news may cover your business and link to your site
One SEO says small town stations are short on stories, and a link from their website is worth chasing.
One SEO, The SEO Guy, says small town news stations have almost nothing to report on, and a business that hands them a story has a good chance of getting on TV.
His post is short and blunt. Local stations "make up stories all the time", he says, so if you build some kind of story around your business you will be surprised how easy it is to get covered. The part that matters for your website is what comes after the segment airs. Stations publish their stories online, and those stories often link back to the business. That link is a backlink, meaning a link from another website to yours, and The SEO Guy says backlinks from local news stations make your SEO "go nuclear".
backlinks from local news stations make your seo go nuclear
Why a news link is different
Google treats links as a signal of whether other people think your site is worth pointing at. A local TV station is a real organisation with a real audience, and it chose to write about you. That is the opposite of the kind of link you buy in bulk, which we covered earlier, where a pile of cheap links from sites nobody reads can quietly drag a site down. One good link earned from actual coverage is not the same thing as a hundred bought ones.
Be clear about what this is. It is one person's advice posted on X, not a statement from Google and not a study. Nobody has put numbers to how much a local news link moves rankings, and The SEO Guy does not either. "Go nuclear" is his phrasing, not a measurement.
What to do
Think of one thing happening at your business that a stranger would find interesting. A milestone, something you are giving away, a local problem you are helping with, a change that affects other people in town. Write it in three sentences, find the news tip email or contact form on your local station's website, and send it. If they run it, check whether the online version of the story links to your site, and ask politely if it does not.
This costs nothing but an email. Worst case you get ignored. Best case you get coverage your competitors did not think to ask for, plus a link from a site your town actually reads.
One caution worth keeping. Pitch something true. A made up story that gets picked apart is worse for a small business than no coverage at all.