As I have often stated, I work with many small clients, especially in the medical field. There are few problems associated with this market, none of them unique, but they're a pain to deal with for the revenue that you make on taking on small clients.

1. Explaining SEO – It’s hard enough to explain SEO processes to CEOs and corporate managers who understand the purpose and benefits of SEO, but to explain to a niche market the benefit of good SEO and the ROI attached to it is time consuming

2. Creating a strategy that the client can understand  – The website is, after all, the property of your client, so how you treat it is important. It's equally important to explain any or all modifications that you are making, the timescale taken to do so, and the benefits of such enhancements.

3. Fielding questions – usually after an introduction to SEO, clients take it upon themselves to research the subject matter – after all, these are educated people and specialists in their own field. The problem is, there is much misinformation on the web, especially since most people will end up using Google to research.

4. Working on a shoe string budget – many of my clients pay under $300 a year for their SEO services – and to work on such budgets, your strategy has to be focused and targeted.  

The topic of this post is the problem from number 4. The most effective way of dealing with budget clients is often to have a set process that has some, but not much room to maneuver. Don’t promise them the world – show them what your processes will be and what the possible deliverables would be.   

The key success of my small business strategy is its Keyword Development Strategy. The whole process begins with not an explanation of SEO, but the use of keywords and researching profitable keywords. I run a very simple exercise.

I ask the client to explain first, in one word, the service they provide:

One word: Widget

Photo Credit http://flickr.com/photos/dunechaser/

Then I ask them to specify the service in two words:

Two words: Widget widgetisation

Photo Credits http://flickr.com/photos/gadgetgirl70/

I repeat till we have run up to a 5 word combination, after which I switch the rules and ask:

If you had to look for another person apart from yourself, using Google, without using any of the words above, what would you look for?

As a rule of thumb, answers usually include:

1. Common synonyms
2. Similar (but not exact) or complementary services
3. Layman definitions
4. Other brands / providers / businesses

If you are quick to the hilt here, you will see the process taking shape.

Photo Credits http://flickr.com/photos/gadgetgirl70/

In the first instance I covered the most common and generic keyword and longtail variations based on definitions. In the second, I covered alternative keywords, complementary keywords, brand keywords, and competitor name / competitor brand keywords.

The third round of the Keyword Discovery Process (KDP) includes ascertaining the catchment area. Does the client serve universally, countrywide, regionally or locally? This then allows me to expand every one of the keyword sets above with location combinations of a potential catchment area.

The next step is to plug these into a common keyword discovery tool. Often with small clients I tend to use the Google Keyword Suggestion tool, which provides visual search data. Exporting the results after filtering allows the client to scan the list, which often covers most of the keywords we have collated via the first few steps of the process.

This has a double reward – first, the client is impressed with the data you have already accumulated by a few simple questions, and secondly, it allows us to identify any keywords that may have slipped the net.

Photo Credit Gayle Laakmann McDowell

This half hour process has now enabled us to identify a fair list of target keywords, while at the same time inspired confidence in a client who knows less about your specialty, but knows his / her own field well.

The next step would be to identify the difficulty of optimisation in order of hierarchy, and develop a strategy that would target the most cost effective keywords at the lowest possible cost. And that, my friends is for another day.

But, I would highly recommend reading another YOUmoz post written fairly recently: Gaining a Competive Edge By Optimising for Colloquialisms, which needs no more introduction than the title.

If you would like to know other processes that I use, please feel free to read my take on SEO Swot Analysis and the Boston Consulting Matrix.

If you enjoyed my writing, I invite you to catchup on my previous posts.