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Congratulations, and glad Q&A has been a part of the journey! In both the start-up I helped build and my own consulting business, that first retainer client in the $1,500+/month category is when the momentum really started. I predict an exciting couple of years for you.

Matthew, I wrote a piece here a while back about what to make sure you do when relaunching/revamping a website to avoid ranking disaster. You may find it gives you some answers. I would also say, dont panic yet. A website redesign is a huge code change and flux can be expected initially.

awesome! thanks alot

How about Tarot websites? Animated gifs still rock on those ones.

That's my 2 cents though, only work with clients you wouldn't be ashamed to tell others about. - excellent advice. I'm not ashamed of what he is doing and would happy to show off his results. Thanks!

I have design and development people on the payroll. The rest would be done mostly by help I have here in my office when they aren't busy with client work if what I was thinking. I ran the idea by my wife (who helps run the office) and she told me that's a great idea once I get caught up with potential new clients and the work load from the ones we already have which is her way of saying never! Thanks for the response! Matthew

I am meeting w them tomorrow afternoon and that is a GREAT idea. I will propose a link at the bottom of the home page to 'site credits' and that page will have information about my business and what we do and how we were honored to be a part of the event, etc. Excellent idea! thanks Davinia Thank you for the other 2 great responses. Wasn't sure if I was missing anything but it doesn't seem like it.

Yes Devinia. .i would also like to go with you DA, and the any Page can earn their authority time by time in the market through how well that particular page is created for users !

My clients sites aren't dominant (they ARE on the first page) and the market they are competing for isn't terribly competitive either. There is only a few competitors and none of them have ANY real internet presence. Local search is huge for this client. I just didn't want to water down my efforts at video marketing, social media, building links, etc. Thank you VERY much for responding! Matthew

This is the way we bill for our time: (1) Have a face to face or phone meeting with the potential client. You really need to have a long conversation about what the client’s wants / needs and what their expectation is. Without this, you’re most likely not going to achieve what the client's looking for and will cause major problems down the road. Go over how the company had been doing the past (x) years. Look into their Google analytics if they have it set up so you can get a sense of traffic / conversion rate. Talk to the client about their customers and find out what "drives" the customers to your clients business. This will help with getting some keywords down. Pro Tip: From my experience, 80% of the business owners are great at just that, overseeing their business but have a false idea of what SEO is and how it works. Make sure if they are telling you to rank for X keyword, you’re not just taking their word for it and instead actually researching what the client’s NEEDS to be targeting. Also talk in the terms of ROI and not "ranking", owners understand this alot better. (2) From that initial meeting, I will give the client a proposal that goes over (in broad range) what needs to be done along with a "recommended" monthly retainer that is broke up in hours. Once the client is on board with us, we will create a detailed timeline (we use Bacecamp for this) that shows what we are doing to the website onsite and offsite. Yes we do the actual work Example: If I recommend to a client that we spend 20 hours per month at $60 an hour than their monthly retainer would be $1200. I also let them know that if they want to see faster results, we can add more hours per month but this is the minimum recommendation for this particular client.

Thanks Kyle, I may have gotten a little defensive last night, it was late and the last thing i want to do is anything that lumps me in with the idiots selling seo that dont know the first thing about it. when I ask for help I should listen to whoever is willing to give it! Matthew

That is a AWESOME post you sent me - thanks a LOT! Matthew

Some details on infographic promotion.... http://www.seomoz.org/pages/search_results?q=how+to+promote+an+infographic In my mind the article that will accompany the infographic will have all of the kickass details.  With results like you are showing, everybody everywhere will want to learn as much as possible about the nitty gritty details.  That is what will earn traffic and links.  The infographic is promotion for the article IMO.

Personally I own Market samurai and have been using it for years for keyword research and competition analysis. Great thing is that they are now using Majestic SEO API to do backlinks analysis. It's a good companion to OSE here. I believe around 150 bucks (less with coupons) is worth your money for such a tool, and it's a one-time payment with free updates. Tried the free version of wordtracker but always came back to market samurai and OSE. HTH.

Hi EGOL, great job... you have completed a very important step!  Try the following process to move forward (I know this is an old post, but it may help if you have missed any steps). Prioritize a portion of your keywords based on high search volume, high relevance to your product/service, and low competition (pick out the best words from your list). Create Keyword groups from your priority list (you want to go after 10-15 keywords per landing page.  This can be done through effective keyword grouping). Create a landing page / content strategy to accomodate your keyword groups. Build the pages (or modify existing pages) accordingly, ensuring that you take in to account all of the onsite optimization techniques (H!/H2 structure, URL structure, interlinking, content relevance, keyword frequency, etc). Once you have the pages up, perform some research to determine the best places to get inbound links (I use Open Site Explorer on competitor sites to see where they get links, to start, and PageRank (google chrome plugin) to find a nice list of viable inbound link opportunities. Work with the inbound link opportunities and use a SERP tracker to monitor your progress, making modifications to the landing pages or link building campaigns as you go. Don't forget conversion optimization!  Test those landing pages out and make sure they are converting for you, if not then try things out like clearer messaging/calls to action, trust factors, etc. Hope this helps! Brice

Sorry Matthew, Just got this.  Make sure each attorney has his/her own listing in Places, Bing Business Portal, Yahoo Local. You can also set them up individually in major/local directories or review sites.

Hi Matthew I thought I would share some advice about some of the existing blog posts on your site. http://sawwebmarketing.com/web-equity-owning-local-web-presence This blog post doesn't have any textual content for Google and other search engines to make use of, so I would suggest adding a paragraph or two describing what the image is about, making sure to bold any relevant keywords you wish to use in the article. http://sawwebmarketing.com/whats-the-real-deal-with-ranking-high-on-google-and-the-other-search-engines This article is better in terms of there being more text to work with, but there are no headings at all within the article. Google will expect to see the page or post title in a tag, so within the article I would suggest you use and tags where appropriate and bold keywords such as "SEO" or "Web Marketing" http://sawwebmarketing.com/good-advice-reserve-your-name-and-childrens-names-as-domain-names-today This article is good and I can see you've tried to add headings using strong/bold tags for things like, "Why is this is a good idea?" but for this I would suggest using a heading like Is buying a domain using your children's names a good idea? This allows you to have "domain" and "buying" as 2 potential keywords that Google will attribute to the blog post when indexing the post. It might be a good idea to also create a blogger or wordpress.com domain and post content on there as well. If nothing else this would allow you to have a backlink to your main site from a more authoritative site. I know that wordpress.com blogs allow you to auto post a tweet and facebook post when you add an article. For self-hosted WordPress blogs this functionality isn't available natively but there are plugins that will post a tweet or facebook post when you add new content. I hope I've been of some help or given you a few ideas for you to try. Ben

Yes, they will be branded SEOmoz for the pro plan. With the pro plus plan they wont be. If you do however copy their .PDF reports into Photoshop its pretty easy to just cut/paste your logo. But it takes a bit of manual labor.