How to Succeed With Local Printable Coupons

Small businesses are looking for cheap advertising, and the Internet has seen nearly a 1000% increase in searches for "printable coupons" over the last three years. Consumer searches for "printable coupons" have by far outpaced previously popular searches like "online deals", creating unprecedented opportunity for local businesses to take back a large fraction of the consumer market share that has been lost to online shopping (source: dealyp.com).

To stay competitive, small businesses need to be found when potential customers begin their search for local deals online. To take advantage of this trend toward online local bargain hunting, brick & mortar shops can keep their edge by utilizing freely available online local printable coupon publishers.

There are a few key differences between printable coupon sites and traditional coupon mailers that the small business will need to consider before getting started:

1. Online coupon publishers tend to focus on coupon quality. They rank the best deals and put the most popular ones more visibly in front of the local consumer. Thus, as a small business owner, it's often in your interest more so than ever before to create an outstanding coupon, which will be given more exposure based on its merit.

2. Keywords matter a lot more for printable coupons. more on keyword usage will be explained below.

3. Printable coupons won't be delivered directly to consumers. This is a con since you can no longer blast consumers with any deal, but a pro since you have the opportunity for free merit-based exposure. Since your business does not have to subsidize the cost of printing tens of thousands of coupons to reach the local market, it can achieve reach through quality and relevance.

As a coupon publisher, the small business's main objective is to attract new customers. When your business creates an printable online coupon, the title and keywords are crucial not only toward ranking well on the coupon search engine, but on general search engines as well. While some of your traffic will come directly from the local coupon publisher on which you list your coupon, potentially a majority of traffic will originate from the major search engines like Google and Yahoo. To ensure a successful printable local coupon across all these search engines, choose keywords relevant to your coupon, but also try to anticipate your target audience's search query. If your potential customers don't know your brand, then you would have much more success by targeting their searches for printable local coupons by category. So, for example, if you are an auto repair shop called "Wreckin Bob's", and are offering printable coupons, then your title might include the phrase "Auto Repair" instead of your name, since searches won't be relevant to your name unless the consumer already knows of your existence.

Finally, regularity and frequency still hold weight in the online coupon world as much as they did offline. If your businesses regularly issues online printable coupons, then local consumers should begin to anticipate your next round of printable coupons and come back for more.

Brian Bien is a co-founder of SaveNextDoor.com, a local printable coupons search site for small businesses looking for free local coupon advertising. Brian can be reached at brian@savenextdoor.com.