Real Life SEO Problems – For SEO’s Working With Small-Medium Size Companies

Let’s face it, the majority of us SEO’s and agencies do not work with fortune 500 companies. We mainly work with small to medium size businesses that have minimal to no in-house marketing team to work with. Many of the more popular SEO blogs give great recommendations on how to form detailed SEO strategies. However a lot of these strategies are only realistic for the larger corporations who have the money and the resources to implement such strategies.

The Dilemma that SEO companies and consultants face with the smaller clients is that they simply don’t have the time to create tons of content or the money to redesign a new website. Sure it would be nice to roll out that elaborate SEO strategy that everyone talks about, but is it feasible? Is your client able to spend money designing and developing landing pages for a multivariate test? Can they spend the time to create a social media profile and build relationships? Can they take the time to write blog posts and maintain it? In a perfect world, it would be great to have clients who had time to do these things.

So what about the smaller companies with 5-50 employees?

Realistically if you are working with a small-medium size company, your SEO strategy cannot be as complete as you would have liked, simply because of budget and resource constraints. From an SEO’s perspective there is only so much we can do to optimize a site. At some point the client has to provide some of their time, energy, and knowledge towards creating a content-rich, engaging website experience.

Basic Solutions

I have come up with a few basic tips on how to lay the SEO foundation for a company with a limited budget.

• Basic SEO Checkup – Discovery Phase
  
  • Make sure they are properly being indexed in the major search engines.
    
  • Perform an initial checkup on their site to check for any major SEO issues. Check out this great video by Scott Willoughby – SEOmoz Whiteboard Friday: SEO Site Reviews Step-by-Step he talks about all of the things you should be looking at when you SEO a site.
    
  • Perform keyword research to see what keywords/phrases people are searching for to find their products, services, and competitors.
    
    • SEO Book: Keyword Research and Suggestions Tips is a great resource for performing keyword research.
      
  • Perform a competitive analysis to see what they are ranking for, who is linking to them, how deep their sites are.
    
  • See where they rank for competitive keywords in their industry. Find out what it will take for their website to start ranking well organically.
    
  • Look for any blackhat SEO tactics that may be on the site.
    
  • Install Google Analytics to build a user profile and learn about their actions within your site.
    
• Basic SEO Implementation
  
  • Create descriptive Title, Meta, Alt tags.
  • Create a good internal linking structure within their site, using good anchor text.
  • Create keyword rich urls
  • Make sure the content is keyword rich, easy to read, and engages the reader.
  • Make the site user friendly and easily navigable.
  • Use better offers and calls to actions.
  • Identify the KPI’s and set up action goals.
    • Check out Clickz: Build a Solid Foundation with Key Performance Indicators
    • Also see Enquiro: Online Key Performance Indicators in 2007
• Local Business Listing:
  
  • Create a Local Business Listing on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
  • Optimize their website for local searches (if applicable)
    • Andrew Shotland’s blog, Local SEO Guide is a great resource
    • Natural Search Blog wrote a great post on Extreme Local Search Optimization Tactics, emphasis on the work extreme!
    • How To Optimize Local Business Profiles for Free Local Directories, is another great article on how to optimize your listing.
  • Create listings on Yelp, Insider Pages, and other local directories.
• Optimize Your Contact Form:
  
  • I wrote a post a few months ago on how to optimize your contact form for better conversions.

These are just the basics that every SEO strategy should contain. These are relatively easy things to check for and implement, with a limited budget.

So What’s The Problem?

Creating blogs, social media strategies, PR strategies, extensive link building campaigns, podcasts, videos, whitepapers, surveys, tools, testing etc… is where the bulk of the work takes place. Unfortunately a lot of those strategies take expert knowledge, design, development time, and client resources to fulfill.

I would love to hear some ideas and get some feedback from other SEO companies and consultants who have run into these similar problems.

What do you do to execute an in-depth SEO strategy with limited money and resources? What do you do to motivate your client?