Keywords for local coupon site

Hi everyone,

I am developing a new site, http://www.portlandcouponfinder.com, which as you can probably tell is for coupons in the Portland, Oregon area.

I've been using WordTracker.com to come up with good keyword phrases that are popular and have a high KEI but they aren't local.

For instance "printable coupons".

How do I draw in local traffic? Do I just hope that searchers will look for "portland printable coupons" or is there any good methods to bring in local traffic?

Also, is there anyway to tell the popularity of local searches? WordTracker doesn't do a good job of displaying local traffic counts for local heywords.

Any help greatly appreciated!

Steve

 

Hey Steve, for this type of geographically specific targeted visitors I would recommend optimizing for whatever keyword phrase you want to rank on, regardless of whether it is local or not. By successfully optimizing your website and acquiring quality inbound links your site has the potential of ranking as good or better than your competitors, even if they are not specifically doing 'portland' coupons. By having several instances of the word Portland on your page (as well as in your meta) you will be optimizing for both the 'printable coupons' as well as the 'portland printable coupons.'

I also recommend signing up for adwords and setting the geographic targeting to target just users in portland that search for your targeted keyword phrases.

Good luck!

 

Thanks for the suggestions! Your answer is what I was hoping to hear. But I didn't know you could adjust Google Adwords geographically so that is nice to know!


Thanks!

 

If you have a physical location you can also submit that location and listing to the yahoo directory

 

I thought that was only for actual businesses with actual addresses in the location.

Can you submit a site if it's not a business (at least not yet)?

 

Technically yes, as long as you have a physical address & number for it; this could be the business address to 'portland coupons' or whatever your business will be called. I'm assuming you are going to monetize the site and that means your site will being doing 'business' with physical merchants, correct?

 

Eventually I want to monetize the site once I get enough traffic, but until then it's not a true business.

 

Yeah, I suppose; but your 'business' is helping people find coupons, right?

Here are the latest top 100 day results for keyword phrase variations to 'coupons' to get an idea about what people are searching for.

 

yes, I guess in sense my business is getting people to print coupons and redeem them at local merchants.

My keyword list is almost identical to yours! What software\website do you use to get your info?

I have a 7-day trial account with WordTracker.com. I love the data it provides but it's overpriced I think.

 

I use nichebot.com's word tracker and deep digging tools, it's a little pricey but really worth it.

 

Cool, I'll have to check that one out after my WordTracker.com free trial expires.

 

So is there a manual way to find good keywords based on KEI without purchasing someone else's software?