Idea for profiting off local SEO. Is this doable?

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unrealalex

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Feb 7, 2010
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www.motivational5.com
I was thinking about creating a newspaper/listings type website for my local suburban type area. It's kind of small so I'm not sure if it will be worth it. I was thinking of putting free classifieds kind of like craigslist but localized to the small area, and writing a few articles, while selling ad space to local businesses and also featuring a few house listings for a fee because real estate is pretty hot in this area. Since I live in the area I can probably put up fliers around to help get traffic too.

Monthly local searches for "city, state": ~20,000-40,000
Competition: weak. Top 3 results for primary and secondary keywords is the wikipedia page for the city, a broken down chamber of commerce website and weather.

I figure with a good domain, I should be ranked #1 within a couple of months.
The question is, you think this would be profitable and worth doing? Has anyone else done something like this? Tips/advice?
 


There's a few local threads floating around that are active right now. Read through those, read the 200k thread, there's even one called starting a local newspaper site.

Search for local, local seo in the forum. Read allllll day. Then make a plan and build it out. The hardest part will be approaching businesses and getting people to use your classifieds. It's a chicken and the egg problem. You need traffic for it to be worth it for users to contribute, you need contributers to get traffic. Build links aggressively to get up to the top, if those traffic numbers are really what you say they are, you'll get the traffic you need.

Give away a bunch of free spots to entice businesses to start advertising on your site. Eat your profits for a few months until you fill the site, then transition over to paid listings as things become more valuable to the businesses.

Good luck
 
Since its a unique idea and you hardly have a competition - It might be good. Once you get regular traffic, you can even charge for real estate listings. Most of the local classified sites are doing the same.
 
Since it's local in nature, you can get easier ranking for your site using Local search through Google Maps. Getting listed and ranked is pretty fast compared to normal organic search.
 
The problem with local advertising and promotion comes if the city you're working is too small. Everyone already knows everyone and everything in the town. And the businesses are usually geared towards a very local clientelle or drive-thru town traffic.

But then it depends on what you mean by small....
 
It's always worth trying. At worst, you'll learn a ton about every step of the process, and most people don't do offline stuff.
 
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