Thread: I found an opportunity for a local portal, but dont know how to proceed

I was searching around google and found a few local search terms around rental apartments in a nearby city. There is very little competition - less than 5,000 pages for each word, but 1500, 12,000 searches per month.

How could I make a local portal for this and make it profitable. The adsense clicks are less than a dollar, so that isnt what I want to go for. Would you target local business or something?

Anyone with any experience with this?

I'm doing something similar for my home town, there is a lot of competition in the travel niche, but virtually none on the ground for a local portal, but the problem I'm facing in the search engines is that the really big travel portals outrank me for the town name.

Locally my site is well known and is getting regular repeat visitors, but earning an income from people who just want local information isn't easy. I've tried to get paid ads from local business but so far no luck.

fortunately, the site is one I plan to keep for the long term so I'm hoping hotel bookings and AdSense will give me a good return in the future.

I think you two have totally different challenges, because one of you lives in a tourist town. In a tourist town, you will have lots of competition on the web. In a non-tourist town, the problems may be more related to low search volumes than to competition.

Overall though, geo-targeting techniques aside, this is a lot like building any other web site:

1. Write down the town name, the county name, the names of each suburb, and any "nicknames" that people use for those places. I would add the names of local schools, colleges, sports teams, malls, and any other well-known local attractions.
2. Put each of those words through WordTracker to make up a list of "hot topics" to write about.
3. Build and optimize one page for one keyphrase.
4. Monitor your results to determine which keyphrases are working for you.

With local websites, you can do cool mashups with Google maps, although people are pretty used to those by now.

To my mind, "a buck a click" with AdSense is pretty good. AdSense lets you focus on building content and promoting your site, instead of spending your time selling ads. When your traffic numbers are good, then you can sell ads much more easily.