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this is a good idea 

Even during your first contact with the potential client you can find out the industry (and geographic area) where they will be competing.  That can help you be prepared for your first meeting.

If you are helping someone promote an auto glass repair business in Scranton, Pennsylvania or a plumber in a small town in Georgia the competition is much easier than going after a nationwide competitive area such as insurance sales.

With local businesses you have organic options, PPC options and local search options.  Also, if you can get clients located in your own town you will become familair with the local websites where links and advertising can be obtained.

Some people make a living doing SEO for small local businesses in lower competition niches.

One of the most important jobs of the SEO is to have a feel for the amount of resources that will be needed to be competitive in a business niche.

Some SEO projects require $100,000 (or a lot more) in resources while other can be accomplished with a few days of intelligent work.  The amount of time required to accomplish a goal (achieve rankings) can also be highly variable.

I have been working in a few specific niches for many years and am still surprised when I overestimate or underestimate the difficulty of a SERP.  I can also be surprised by the success or failure of content.

Without specific experience you can use the tools at SEOMoz to get some feel for the difficulty of a keyword or the power of a competitor.  If I was in your shoes I would get some direct experience with a few projects and then use the SEOMoz tool data to benchmark and project into unknown areas.

It is probably best to take easy projects in light competition at first and then accept more difficult work.   The last thing that you want to do is take on a tough job and not be able to advance a client's rankings into potentially profitable rankings.  That can happen when the SEO has a budget of $1000 per month but a budget of $10,000 per month  is needed for success.  You not only have to gain backlinks but you have to gain them at a much faster rate than the competition if you expect to advance above them.

Good luck, keep asking questions here while you progress in experience.

I was just being a wise guy.  

Someone should register the domain... BeforeYouHireAnSEO.com and fill it full of warning content for small business owners.... or even companies like JCP who might outsource their work.

I would keep them on the same URLs and explain the dupe content risk to client.  Then client can decide to upgrade them himself, have you source new content or allow them to run "as is".

I know of a lot of sites that have pages like this that are working well and make nice money.

If you are considering the use of his services call him up on the phone and start talking with him about a specific SEO problem or two.  If you do that either his pants will fall or your BS meter will redline.

We are working on a site that has 50+ pages that all have duplicate content (1 for each state, pretty much).

There are a lot of sites that make a lot of money by having one page for each state (or county or country or city or whatever).  Although it is labor intensive to develop content for fifty different pages it can be done eloquently.

There are also a lot of successful sites that get away with fifty pages of cookie cutter content (Replace Alabama with Alaska, etc. on every page).

I would see what kind of traffic the site is currently getting on those pages, how many sales they are making, what visitors are doing on them, do they have any links?

These pages could be highly successful and if that is the case, II would work to improve them instead of removing them.... and if they have an inbound links at present I might improve them on the same URL rather than removing them to build on new URLs.

Hey.... what's wrong with body-building for the elderly?

I agree that in the long term a big kickass site will defeat a flock of hotdog stand websites.

I know where my links might come from before I build content.

In the past when I did traditional linkbuilding I would find sites that ALREADY link out to content on other domains.  I would study what they link to and then build either superior or complimentary content and then let them know what I have, hoping that I would get the link.

Today I do passive linkbuilding.  I decide what might succeed on sites like stumbleupon, reddit and slashdot.... or on the blogs and news sites that cover my niche.  Then just post the content on my site and visitors submit for me.

I have my blog set up so that I can easily get traffic data and revenue on categories, recent posts, and permalink pages.

All decisions on what to index, what to promote and where to place my effort are based upon that data.

Low CTR is OK here... nobody looks at ads when they are in email.

Use profitability as your metric.

I like that.... "Decide what success looks like."  Nice.

Thumbs up!

On a brand new site?  Kickass content is needed before you can optimize or do effective linkbuilding.

But... before you create kickass content it is best to do some keyword research.

But... even before that it is important to determine if you have the resources needed to compete in that niche and a method of monetization.

Just from my own sites...

Most profitable can be one of three things....

A) Highest sales volume

B) Best profit margin

C) Items that are easy to obtain, inventory and deliver (low labor)

If I had a client, I would talk to her and ask what she can sell a lot of and what she enjoys moving.

Where you can get SERP position based upon competition levels is also a part of this.

Kickass content that is aligned with the new mission and that is highly linkable.

I vote for the one big site.

Which will rank better?  One big site with 300 links or three little sites with 100 links each?  My money is on the big site.

Which will be more linkable?  One big site with a cluster of products or three hotdog stands with one product each?

Which will give you the opportunity of cross-selling and larger, more profitable sales?  A big site with multiple products or three tiny sites with one product each?

Which will be more work and expense to run?

I used to have a cluster of little sites and then combined them into one big site... and that big site beat all of the smaller sites and all of their competitors.

It is possible that the same content is appearing at several locations on your site.  That can lead to duplicate content problems or some of your linkjuice being wasted in the promotion of very similar pages.  For example your category pages and tag pages might be almost identical.

If you have a very strong site you might get away with it.... or if you have a blog that gets a few posts per day the constant shuffle of content might be fast enough that google will not realize the amount of duplicate items that you have.

I would run analytics on the pages and see where the traffic is being pulled in before I make a decision.  It is possible that some of your pages pull very little search traffic and there will be very little loss from blocking them from being indexed or cutting off links to them.

For many sites the homepage brings in more traffic than any other page.  Also the homepage is usually the strongest page on a site and that gives it the ability to attack the most difficult (and often most profitable) keywords.  Not using the homepage would be like not using your best sword.

Maybe there is a way that you can include flash elements on the page and still have space left for optimized text?

Or, better, have a homepage that has a number of enticing links that will pull the visitor deeper into the site and engage them with more information.

When we were building links we would go straight to websites that are ALREADY linking out to great content in our niche and ask them to consider our content for a link.  When we found sites like that we would build better content than they were already linking to.

We no longer do linkbuilding.  Instead we spend all of our time on content creation and our visitors on their own submit our content to sites like stumbleupon, slashdot and reddit and that exposure creates links with no effort from us.

IF you can create linkable content you can eliminate the work of linkbuilding.  Progress that way is slow at first but after your traffic starts growing it works exceptionally well.

If you have great content items then you have a good chance at success.

Instead of doing an overall backlink assessment of competitor's domains I would to an assessment of individual content pages  that are similar to what is on my own site.

If you can get other webmasters to link to your content on its merits you can then set a goal of spending zero time on linkbuilding and 100% of your time on developing linkworthy content that increases the keyword reach of your website.