I work with mostly small independent sites with little or next to nothing budgets, and I help them turn things around (if possible). My biggest success story was a client who had 1 or 2 patients a week through word of mouth, and then grew to an average of 50 referrals through monthly online marketing, as well as a huge established practice.

I can't take all the credit – he worked hard at building what he did and was good at what he did; all he needed was a decent platform to launch a starter kit.

So, how do you help such small sized businesses that operate in direct competition with the “big boys”?

Sometimes you need to get back to the basics and carry out a simple overview strategy of where the client is in the market place, and where they would like to be. In my experience, a simple SWOT analysis is a great starting point. It creates a grid for you to work from, and is simple enough for even the most unaware SEO/M clients.

For those of you who don’t have a marketing background, I will quickly outline what the SWOT acronym stands for:

• Strength
• Weaknesses
• Opportunities
• Threats

Usually Strengths and Weaknesses stem from internal (onsite, business operational, business resource) sources, while Opportunities and Threats are from external sources.

Where does SEO/M fit in here?

Take, for example, Business X. They have a website that was built on Wordpress, they make use of category tagging, add at least one page of content every two days, and have excellent knowledge of their industry. Their domain name isn’t ideal, but it's businessnameandkeyword.com.

But they do not get much traffic from search engines, while their rivals, Business Z, do because their domain name is set on theperfectkeyphrase.com. On the other hand, Business Z doesn’t have any SEO and relies on their main page to bring in all traffic, based on the strengths of the domain name.

There aren’t a lot of competing SERPs; in fact, they are below 50,000 for the core set of keywords. Business X's site ranks on the second page of Google results for the top 10 results, while Business Z is on the top 3 positions, with Wikipedia and About.com taking up the top positions. Neither business does PPC, and the niche doesn’t have much room for other entrants (there may be 10 – 15 competitors). Both sites have similar links in terms of strengths and numbers. The businesses deal in emotional sales – the products can or may have emotions attached to them.

This is how I envision their SWOT to look like:

The above straight away suggests quick wins that the client can make, and where the priority would be. It also forms a great starting point for a long term strategy and tactical maneuvers.

I have kept this very simple and basic, but a decent SWOT picks up much more than the above, and it does require you to have analysed your client's site, their main competitor/s, and the SERPs  vs keywords. This means the bigger the site, the bigger this exercise would be. This is why it’s ideal for small businesses, as the results are smaller and directly actionable / observable, with fewer affecting variables.