Content optimisation or Link Building first? Small clients & small budgets

[Laurie-Tomahawk]

Hi there. Apologies in advance for this long message!

I have come from a large client-side SEO position where I had a small team of online marketers to assist in our SEO efforts. The effect was that we were able to work on link building and onsite optimisation at the same time and obviously give it 100% of our attention (and the website had very high DA and Trust).

I have recently moved to a small agency where I am the sole SEO-Guy and my clients are small. I typically have no more than 8 hours to spend per month on all aspects of SEO (analysis, reporting, link building and content optimisation) per client and I have to strictly adhere to this. To make matters more difficult, these clients typically have weak back-link profiles (low in number and quality and all pointing to the home page) and poorly optimised content (which contributes to low DA & PR).

I went through my first 'monthly process' for a particular client in September and focused my 8 hours on optimising the site content for a particular section of the website. This involved optimising meta titles & descriptions, body content and images for our chosen keywords. I didn't focus on links at all. I published the changes to the site on 23rd September.

When I look at my rankings as of 6th October, one keyword in particular has dropped by 28 places (from 11 to 39) which seems excessive to me. In my mind, the changes I made were small, so this drop concerns me.

The particular URL was ranking in position 11 for a keyword that I subsequently targeted to another (more relevant) page in the site. Both pages have the same MR, PA and links etc. I think I may have effectively cannibalised the keyword and to make matters worse, the new page isn't even in the top 50! Both pages are in the Google Index.

So, this is my longwinded way of asking for your opinion on whether other SEOs in my position would recommend spending time on building the back link profile to strengthen DA and PR of deeper pages before you start making content optimisations (given I am unable to do them at the same time). It's tricky with small clients as they don't necessarily understand how long these things can take.

Cheers!

Laurie

[LynnPatchett]

Hi Laurie,

8 hours per month is going to limit your options a lot! Personally I think it is virtually impossible to do a proper job in that small amount of time, so perhaps client education on the benefits of what you are proposing is in order first? If you can bump it up to 16 hours a month that would give you the option of doing 4 hours a week which will allow you time to plan things better and to reflect on the previous week's actions and possible results. 8 hours a month all on one day is like month 1: analysis, month 2 - content, month 3 - more content, month 4 - more content, a few links maybe... with that kind of timescale both you and your clients are likely to get discouraged long before real results start appearing!

That being said I would definitely look at making sure the content is decent (and optimised) before actively looking for linking opportunities. This will usually involve content creation in addition to on page optimisation (so another 8 hours...or more!). Be realistic about the keywords you are trying to target and go after longer tail and/or local combinations. Only then would I really start looking at links, but be careful! Deep links to these kind of small scale sites to me usually means seo directories and pr releases and they are not going to do you much good. Concentrate on easy wins in term of local business directories, potential links from cooperating businesses and the like.

Hope it helps!