SEO without a budget and Cheating Competitors

[underdogmike]

I have law clients in the atlanta ga area. I have worked with one client http://bestdefensega.com for the past 4 months trying to get him to the top. We blog 3 times a week, have manually built citations and legal directory profiles. My client doesn't have a large budget to purchase profiles on some of the larger legal directories like findlaw, lexus nexus etc..

With that said,
Using Open Site Explorer I have discovered that his competition all have multiple business websites pointed back to their main websites.. So each law office has several really generic websites in addition to their main site. Other's appear to be receiving links from some type of link farm and really generic directory sites. 
The domains of these guy's are older and more established. Where as, my client has a new practice and a new domain.

How do I compete in the local market without a budget for the premium legal directories?

So after 4 months my client appears in the local pack search results for only select keywords. Criminal defense attorney woodstock ga. His competition appears in the results for all variations, where my client only shows for this one term.

How do I get me client in the local pack for all variations of Criminal Defense in my area?

According to Moz, my site has a couple spam score issues and the explanations are not clear enough for me to make some types of changes.
**How do I make these changes to reduce the spam score?

My site has more back links than Moz is reporting why?**

All of the other sites that I manage perform well and my clients are realizing their ROI with relative ease. But criminal defense is a different beaat and it is starting to frustrate me. RAR!

Thanks in advance!

[MiriamEllis]

Hmm, $200 a month is a pretty small budget. In your client's market, it is a really small budget! His competitors are almost certainly spending 5, 7 or 10 x more than than that a month. Look at a respected service like LocalSpark (https://www.whitespark.ca/localspark-local-seo-service) Average budget for them is about $1500 a month, with a proviso that they may need to charge more if warranted.

What can you do for $200 a month? Perhaps offer him a couple of consulting hours once a month to give him ideas for things he should then undertake himself? From personal experience, I wouldn't even begin to offer implementation at that price point, unless it was writing maybe one blog post a month for him, which just isn't going to get him far in that market. So, maybe you can be his ideas man for that budget ... or maybe he'd better go on EGOL's diet and save up some money to be able to take a better approach in future.

[underdogmike]

Thanks for your insight!

The reality of the situation is that while my clients know the value of a healthy seo program and the ROI that it can provide, they don't want to spend more than 200/month on the service. So what they get out of me is blogging,citation building, on page optimization and that about sums it up!

Thanks for the insight!

Cheers

[EGOL]

This is how it is probably going to work.  When you go cheap, you might see a bit of progress at the start.  However, if you are shoveling coal into the engine at 1/4 tons per hour but your competition is shoveling coal at 4 tons per hour, you are not going to catch them.  Never. Your rankings are going to fall over time even if you get a foothold at the start.  You are simply outgunned.  In addition, if your attorney just started his website then he arrived at the fight at least ten years late.

If someone who owns a business came to me and said.... I only got $500/month, and they are attacking something quite expensive and difficult, I would let them know that they really don't have the resources to compete.  I would recommend getting a part time McJob, selling the Jaguar, getting a home equity loan, and giving up cigarettes, booze, and eat beans every night.  Then spend that money on their SEO.

Good SEO can fund itself, but if you don't put up at least enough resources to be competitive don't expect to make genuine progress.  I know a few SEOs who do not take jobs where the client does not want to invest what is needed.  Why?  The client will never achieve satisfaction.

Someone in my family does roofing and if the client there is not willing to pay enough money to do a good job, it is better for him to decline the job than to put on a roof that is going to leak or make no profit on dangerous work.

[MiriamEllis]

Hi Mike,

Unfortunately - being under-funded in a highly competitive market is not a recipe for success. I understand the difficulty here, from past work with very small businesses. You can do a ton for a small business in a small market, but you may not be able to do much for them in larger markets, and it's really important to set correct expectations about this if such clients are determined to hire you. If your client's competitors have more to invest in their efforts, they do have the upper hand, and it isn't reasonable for any client who can't compete financially with his competitors to expect their SEO to work magic that will somehow make up for this budget problem.

But, there are some grace notes here, because SEO isn't 100% about money. It's also about creativity. Here are some suggestions:

1. Presumably, your client is paying you for X amount of hours of work a month. If, in that time, you have a staff member who can come up with something outside-the-box (perhaps a video or social campaign) that can generate a new, fresh burst of interest, this could make some phones ring and could perhaps move the client up a bit ranking-wise due to an increase in human activity on the site, links, social mentions, etc.

2. If the client is finding it impossible to budget to complete for head terms, consider going after long tail terms instead. In the legal industry, all terms are likely to be very tough to compete for in most cities, but the longer tail ones may be slightly less competitive.

3. Consider hyperlocal optimization. If your client's city has distinct neighborhoods or districts, create new content to focus on his services in these hyperlocal areas. They will, perforce, be less full of competitors than the entire city will be. For further reading, see: https://moz.com/blog/mastering-serving-the-user-as-centroid

4. You ask how the client can appear for all his desired terms in the local packs of results. There are several hundred factors involved. Audit your client using these 2 resources:

https://moz.com/local-search-ranking-factors

https://moz.com/blog/ultimate-local-seo-audit

Then, audit their competitors to the best of your ability to see if there are any weak points. If you can make these weak points your client's strong ones, this could help, if the budget is there for you to do the work involved.

5. Finally, you mention some spam score and back link issues. I'm no expert here, but if you could explain, in detail, what issues are being reported, I'll make sure you receive a clear explanation of this, either from me, or from a team mate. Hopefully the community will provide feedback, too

6. If competitors are genuinely spamming Google, it might be worthwhile to report them: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-report-spam-to-us-15187.html There may be more recent posts about this elsewhere, but I remember the above video.

Hope this helps!