Do Billboards Affect Google Rankings?

[Andrew Shotland]

Did a short post on the always fun debate about how offline marketing may or may not affect Google rankings. Do Billboards Improve Google Rankings? | Local SEO Guide

 

[Joey Abna]

This is always a fun debate. Traditional drives awareness which can increase brand name search and for a local business could mean more organic website traffic. Does brand search factor into the algo? Maybe, maybe not reminds me of debate in high school, you could argue either side and win the debate but still be wrong.

 

[Andrew Shotland]

We are pretty sure it factors in with national brands. We have seen a lot of evidence that as brand search demand increases non-brand rankings follow. It's a bit trickier with smaller local businesses, but we have seen a fair amount of anecdotal data that it works the same way. For example, an attorney we work with saw his Local Pack rankings improve quickly. The only thing that had happened in the previous week was he put a help-wanted ad on Indeed and got a ton of local traffic from job-seekers. Correlation or causation? Hard to say, but we'll take it!

 

[brentnau]

Always love the conversation with clients (after the fact) that they just spent marketing dollars on a new billboard campaign. I then ask are you using a dedicated URL or call tracking number only found on the billboard... crickets.

 

[Joey Abna]

@brentnau And sometimes when you have that set up the client ends up using that url and phone number on all kinds of things totally messing up the attribution.