Ok, so here be my first YouMoz blog post! I’d really appreciate any feedback you might have but please be gentle!

I imagine I’m in the position of many people who work in SEO, especially those who are new to it. Anyone who finds themselves self employed in any industry will know from experience that big money clients and projects don’t just turn up on your doorstep.

So what do you do while you establish you’re business? Well sadly you’re new, you’re on the bottom rung of the ladder and as a result most of the work you find will probably be low-cost and local. The challenge here is to make enough money from the smaller clients to sustain your business, and this can be extremely tricky at times. I’m sure many of you out there can emphasise with this position.

Having worked on smaller clients for a while now I’ve learned that it’s not a bad thing at all, you’re providing a genuinely useful service. After all, if a client has only paid £500 for their website, why would they want to pay you £5,000 to do their SEO?!

I’ve tried to organise some things that I’ve picked up, often through learning the hard way! Hopefully you’ll find this useful.

1.    Suss Out Exactly What The Client Needs

If the budget is tight, you’ll need to work out exactly what the client wants and needs for their website. Any time spent on anything else could potentially be losing you money. For example, spending hours and hours researching great new content ideas (badges/wiki’s/games etc) is a waste of time if the client will never have the cash to put towards developing your ideas. You’d be much better off spending time looking at local ranking factors if that’s all they really need/want. Keep it tight, keep it tidy!

2.    Be Upfront

So you go into a sales meeting knowing full well that their budget is extremely small. However, before you enter the meeting you have a brief look through their site and you spot some SEO disasters...the kind that look like big brick walls on Google Street. You HAVE to tell them! There’s no point in taking money and being held back by massive technical issues, you’ll only end up as the one to blame. Make sure they are aware of any issues that really do need addressing, try to encourage them into spending a little bit more to fix these sooner rather than later. After all, more search engine traffic means more business.

3.    Prioritise

No one on a tight budget will be able to pay for a complete site overhaul. So it’s your job to identify the things that need doing now, verses the issues that could be resolved later. If your client is really keen to gain local rankings (for a lot of small businesses this can be no.1 priority) then only focus on those factors for now and try to pick up on some bigger searches further down the line. Again, it’s back to the point of only doing what you need to do on limited time and money.

4.    Spread the Load

You may have the best link building strategy in the world for your new client, but how the heck do you squeeze all of that amazing PR, blogging and other link building power into 1 day a month?! Well, the likely hood is that you can’t...so don’t. How about for the first month you do local directories, the second month you concentrate on guest blogs and so on and so forth. That way you can provide a varied link graph and a nice low cost. Bingo!

5.   There’s Always Something You Can Do

Working for small clients requires a certain degree of flexibility and there’s usually something you can do to help improve someone’s SERPS. It’s probably best that you don’t box up your services, try to adapt to each client. If you take the flexible approach there could be money to be made whereby you’d never have the chance if you stormed in with a one price fixes all option. Take advantage of the fact that your business is still growing and enjoy the flexibility whilst you still can!

I set up Go Search Marketing in 2009 having previously worked on various online marketing efforts. Most of my work comes via web designers such as Wise Sites and many other friends I’ve made along the way!

Go forth and comment....