Low Hanging Fruit

When a client comes to you with a new website project, it’s easy to get excited by the prospect of all the little and large SEO 1.0 and SEO 2.0 changes you can make with regard to making a website more search engine friendly. Better branding, better web design, more aesthetic appeal, new copy…where to begin? This brainstorm is a necessary part of the process. You have to have blue sky sessions where all possibilities are explored uncritically in order to prioritize your project for maximum ROI, but are all these ideas relevant today? How do you choose?

Low Hanging Fruit

Time and again I find the most important and appreciated service we offer our clients is website prioritization. From among the hundreds of changes you can make to boost natural rankings, it’s a good SEO’s job to tell you which ones will give you the most bang for the buck. This is what entrepreneurs often refer to as low hanging fruit:

Targets or goals which are easily achievable and which do not require a lot of effort.
~UrbanDictionary.com

Evaluating Your Client’s Priorities

Since each business, organization or individual’s website is at a different point in its life cycle, in order to prioritize, remember general top level priorities for all sites online. Most websites should be:

1. Easy to maintain
2. Easy to extend
3. Easy to scale
4. Easy to navigate
5. In line with best webmaster practices
6. Memorable
7. Visually appealing
8. Easy to use
9. Regularly updated (1 update/month min.)
10. Relevant and info/media rich
11. In the spirit of the website’s community
12. Easily accessible by the visually impaired

~ List adapted from w2mw.com’s website priorities

What is going to give your client the greatest benefit for the least cost/effort? What are the sweetest fruits within easy reach? This is how you prioritize a website.
0. Adaptable
1. Functional
2. Unique
3. Accessible
4. Usable
5. Useful
6. Intuitive
7. Entertaining
8. Persuasive
The exploration process for a good consulting firm can take a week to a month or more, depending upon the state of the company and the website in question. Do your research on your client’s full website, their ecommerce system / back end, their competitors, their keywords, their demographics, and their business model. As well as understanding what they would like the website to be, understand what role the site currently plays in their overall business model and workflow cycle before making recommendations. A discrete list of the top 5 to-do’s that will help most for a given area of SEO, web design, web development, or internet marketing is often the best place to begin. Overall, accurate prioritization is the most important service you can offer as a web consultant.