Ask HN: Tinmanoilchange.com needs a tune-up

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.