Landed a dream client. Would love some advice... (Will keep this updated)

I've been running a small web design company for the past few years and have had reasonable success in my local area. I'm a qualified Graphic Designer so it's great to do something that I enjoy for a job. I always looked at it as a way to pay the bills, and never got too focused/excited on creating a sustainable business. I took a bit of time off (about 8 months) and have definitely come out with a new outlook towards running a business. Let's just say I'm focused, engaged and moving in the right direction.

In less than a month I have successfully rebranded the company and am building a reputation around the local area once again. An old client of mine, whose site I continued to maintain whilst I was taking time off from work, has requested my skills for what I consider to be a dream project.

Together, with a local business partner, they have started a new local community group and want to outrank a much disliked competitor in the area. The competitor has the domain locationaccommodation.com.au and has very much captured the market and Google rankings. They are disliked in the community as they have capitalised on this and charge obscene amounts of money to list on their website.

My initial thoughts was that it would be a lot of work and effort to achieve this with a new domain and starting from scratch, however I set up a meeting to discuss a plan of attack and to see if it was a viable project to work on. To my surprise, I was informed that they currently own the domain location.com.au and has a Domain Age of 6.

I have been given permission to set up the site 100% as I feel is necessary and can charge my clients what I want so long as it's self sustainable in it's early months. In other words, it needs to make money to cover my costs. Paid advertising is no doubt the most obvious of paths to go down seeing as it's a local community web site, however I was wondering if anyone on here has created a similar site or if anyone would like to jump in with their two cents (no pun intended), be that positive or negative.

I'd love to keep this thread updated as it's my first serious project with my new company, and will put to test my skills in Design, Development and SEO.

The keyword "[location]" currently gets 12,000 broad searches with medium competition and 1,600 exact searches with low competition.

The keyword "[location] accommodation" currently gets 1,900 broad searches with high competition and 8,800 exact searches with high competition. I already have my clients first web site ranking on the first page of Google for this search term with only on-site SEO completed at this stage.

From experience the accommodation/housing online market is completely F$*@&%*&@ in Australia. I swear even the big players are all straight up scammers. You try looking for a place to rent and you end up a bunch of ads for places completely out of your area and price range. And these guys charge stupid massive fees, which means they can drop it all on paid ads and SEO.

Judging by the competition, you want to make sure it's easy enough and your charging the client enough. Worse case scenario is that you undercharge and don't meet the goal of ranking them.

If these clients are willing to put forward enough moola so you can definetly rank it, then by all means go for it. Paid advertising will also have a bunch of idiots paying ludicrous amount for a single click ($3-4+), so your PPC budget could end up costing a truckload.

If thats the case you could go more aggressive with SEO.

But just remember, the online property market is a warzone compared to NZ.

OP - good luck with the road ahead. If you want someone local to bounce ideas off feel free to hit me up on Skype (nsit.biz)

I'd be happy to throw in some PR3+ blog posts on some of my Tumblr blogs to assist in your ranking efforts. I'm currently re-engineering my own SEO strategies which I haven't updated for 2 years.

matsta - Thanks for such an insightful reply. I get what you mean about everyone seeming like a scammer. You're also exactly right about them charging ridiculous amounts of money for their "services".

It's hard to know what to charge for this project, same as web design, as it seems to go two ways. You have the bigger companies that charge extortionate amounts of money and as you said, drop every cent on destroying the competition. And then the smaller businesses whose quality of work is terrible yet they drive a large amount of clients due to charging next to nothing for their services.

The positive from this project is that I've been given full control of the site, how it will be structured and what we will achieve. The clients have a fair idea of the internet and somewhat of an understanding of the importance of ranking well on Google, however I can pretty much list what I think is achievable and go for it. There appears no immediate risk of underwhelming them, so long as they start to see results and the site pays for itself.

When I was referring to paid advertising, I was meaning maybe I could drive revenue for the site via a paid advertising model on the site. I agree that a PPC model for the site couldn't be justified due to the high amount that would be spent on a single click.

I think an aggressive SEO strategy with additional Social Media implementation would be the way to go in regards exposure for the site and competing against the current competition.

mrankin - Thanks! Will definitely add you on Skype, would love to bounce some ideas off of you. Will send you a PM when I've added you.