HN Explorer

Ask HN: Tinmanoilchange.com needs a tune-up

4 points by elboheme ↗ HN
This post is for the SEO or SEM pros of HN because I'm in desperate need of some sound advice.

I created Tinmanoilchange.com about 10 months ago to be a hub for oil change coupons but my traffic is on life support and the site, and I, could use your help.

What is Tin Man's value proposition? For small shops, that would be free exposure as they (or anyone really) can upload their best oil change coupon to the site and, thereby, compete with the larger chains. For the consumer, the value lies in having one place where shops of all size compete for their business - lowering the price and increasing the quality of service in the process.

The vision is for the Tin Man brand to be the trusted leader for the very best and latest auto service and repair coupons.

So what have I done to promote it?

- guest posts on a few major coupon sites - social bookmarking submissions - article marketing - press (or media) release distributions (one professionally written and distributed through PRnewswire; this led to a phone interview from a freelance writer hired by Greensheet and the Service Executive) - the blog was accepted into the Best Of The Web directory

Despite these efforts, my numbers are and have been dwindling on a monthly basis - except for the first month when traffic spiked. Since then, however, my numbers have been on a steady downtrend.

What am I doing wrong? How can I fix it? And what can I do for users, and Google, to get excited about what I'm doing again?

One last thing worth mentioning is that this is the one project that I've stuck with the longest because it's the one I believe in the most. This is an accomplishment for me, in and of itself, and another reason why I really want to make it work.

Thanks for reading.

13 comments

[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 32.3 ms ] thread
jstanley
I'm not sure what an oil change coupon is. I presume it is something that gets a garage to change the oil in your car?

You also haven't mentioned actually speaking to garages. If you can get a few garages on board, they might be willing to put a flyer or something in their office. It might also be attractive for the cheapest garage in any given town to advertise themselves as such.

Disclaimer: I know nothing about business.

elboheme
Yes, an oil change coupon is a voucher that allows for a discounted price on an engine oil change for cars mostly.

I have contacted a number of these garages, or shops, offering the site as a free channel for exposure. Some shops have submitted coupons.

orangethirty
For a coupon service the site is not structure correctly. Its too busy and has too many options. Ideally, you only have what people need to search for coupons on the landing page and then add in content on the results pages.

How do you plan to make money with this?

elboheme
Thank you - I will clean up the homepage.

As far as monetization, I've considered offering daily deals on oil changes (and other services).

dgunn
Looking at Google's keyword tool shows that the search volume is 1.) low (~3600/mo) and 2.) highly competitive. I'm not sure how well this is going to work out. To most shops, coupons are probably more about loyalty than new business. They compete for these keywords just because it's easy for them to do so. But most places give you coupons at check out as an incentive to come back next time.

I'm not saying this is impossible but I don't see a very lucrative angle here. Are you trying to make money or is this a hobby? I saw an ad spot on the site, so I assume this is your current biz plan but with this kind of search volume, even if you got all the traffic, it probably wouldn't be attractive enough to demand good rates from advertisers.

This could possibly work with the small shops but you would have to be able to show them you have high volume locally as they would only care about ads being shows to people close enough to patronize their store.

elboheme
I wouldn't consider search volume to be low. Using Google's Traffic Estimator tool, I see that the broad search for the keyword phrase 'oil change coupons' is expected to generate about 37k impressions and over 1,100 clicks on a daily basis.

And with an average cost per click of $20, I think ranking for keywords related to oil change coupons could be quite lucrative.

The problem is I'm not ranking and I have no idea why.

dgunn
I think the issue is that most people won't search for the exact phrase [oil change coupons] which has a US search volume of about 3600/mo. Your 'broad' level search shows anything related to 'oil change coupons'. The issue is that the other ~160000 searches per month are searches like "firestone oil change coupon" or "goodyear oil change coupons" which you will never beat Firestone or Goodyear on. Furthermore, those companies will never allow you to beat them even if you partner with them in some way. Currently, if they win the traffic for "[brand name] oil change coupons", they show the visitor their coupon ONLY but if they give that traffic to you, you will show them competitors coupons as well.

Consider Hipmunk. They do something similar to you. They wrap many disparate airlines and allow you to search them all at once easily. They ultimately send that purchase to that airline (or another third party like Orbitz) so it seems like it's in the airline's best interest to play nice but they originally didn't want to. Hipmunk eventually owned enough flight search traffic that they could get some good partners but that's hard to do and it's probably even harder with oil changes since getting a great deal on an oil change could mean dollars while getting the best deal on a flight could save thousands.

It's good to point out that Hipmunk (if I recall correctly) was more interested in the hotel search space and just used flight search as an easier way in. Meaning even with all the money in the commercial flight space, it apparently wasn't lucrative enough to focus on entirely.

I'm not trying to be negative and I'm certainly no expert in this arena. I just think these are valid concerns.

WillyF
The .edu blog comment spamming isn't going to help. I just did a quick look on Open Site Explorer, and your link profile looks super shady. You're setting yourself up to get Penguined if you aren't already.
elboheme
Thank you for pointing this out. Maybe this is what's hurting my site. I'll use the link disavow tool and see if that helps. Thanks again for your input.
WillyF
Don't forget to do a reconsideration request after you use the disavow tool. You'd be better off getting rid of the links, but that might be difficult.
pikewood
1. Is there any reason why you're focused specifically on "coupon"? Have you thought about using other, more popular terms such as "cheap oil change" (16k/mo) or "oil change prices" (40k/mo)?

2. Your search seems broken. I search on "Raleigh", and the first result is your sitemap. The second result is for a coupon in Anchorage, AK, which seems to have link-farm-like references to a bunch of other cities. I wouldn't bother looking through your site after that.

3. Discount sites such as Groupon attract and retain people when they have deals that are better than anywhere else. They get these deals by having a large sales force that work on the businesses to get these deals in place. Your site has mostly coupons for $20 oil changes--something I would be able to get in my latest Valpak mailer or a quick search on slickdeals. I don't feel like you'll get much word of mouth by offering something that you can easily get elsewhere.