SEO Strategy for a Small Budget

[MLTGroup]

Hi Everyone,

I have a considerable amount of clients that have a relatively small budget for SEO and was formulating a new strategy for them. Generally their sites are small < 10 pages, so to get them ranking I was thinking of doing the following:

• work with the client to choose up to 3 key phrases to target
• check the competition level of those phrases
• if they are fairly easy to rank for, pound those phrases to get them ranked.

I would still include some variations of the text to get the long-tail phrases or plurals of words, but I was wondering if this would harm their overall rankings.

Thanks

Eric

[myclicks-163603]

Hi Eric, I do really think that it really depend how are you going to do the link building for them. If you hit the major 3 keywords with the links you will pretty much achieve your goal. The long-tail doesn't deliver as much traffic as the major 3 phrases.

[MLTGroup]

Thanks Ivaylo,

That would be my strategy attacking the 3 keywords they are wanting to rank for. If additional traffic and ranking comes along its a bonus but at least I can show them measurable results for their money.

[AlanMosley]

The long tails will give about 70% of your hits

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/illustrating-the-long-tail

For a small budget, be carful of the keyword competition; make sure you can deliver, before the budget runs out.
I find that if you make sure a small site is technical sound, free from violations, you can rank well with “keyword location” with a limited amount of links. Local directories and the like put it on the owner to ask for business contacts for links and your home. To rank with out the location in the phrase is asking a bit much for most industries

[MLTGroup]

Thanks Alan,

I would be focusing on local searches such as "Buying a Home Rochester MN" etc. I have been working with my clients to get their business pages created on the various business directory sites like Google Places, YellowBook etc.