Proper Local SEO?

Most fiverr gigs are a bad idea for real businesses. Low quality garbage backlinks are fine for your own little MFA site. Once you start taking responsibility for someone else's business, you need to be careful and fully understand what you are doing. I would probably stay out of the WSO section too. I cannot remember the last time I saw a decent SEO gig offered in the WSO section.

Best thing I can recommend is to find someone that is already doing this for clients to outsource your work to if you do not know what you are doing. Having done SEO for local clients for awhile now, I can tell you it is down right scary what some people who refer to themselves as an SEO are doing to the websites of some companies.

If you are set on doing it yourself, you could try to find someone to outsource the work to that will teach you as you they do it. Kind of like a mentor or apprenticeship.

Just do not screw around trying to learn SEO on someone else's website. You can ruin a business that way.

And if you are going to ignore all that and are set on doing it yourself anyhow, then just be sure to focus on quality linkbuilding. No WSOs promising first page rankings. No fiverr gigs. All most of those will do is bounce the site all over the place.

See my reply on -> here <- on another thread. For more details buy my damn course already!

I'm going to make some people

There are some basics that you need to cover for SEO - most of which can be handled using the free tools at grader[dot]com, and of course the excellent but controversial "Local Search Ranking Factors"

The rest - its an art.

Local SEO/Marketing for a photographer is different than a wedding planner. For a dentist different than a financial planner. Once you get past the plumbing, I think you really need to be creative. On my local work, I immediately try to get the client to forget about 'placement' and to think about conversions. Sure, there are some tricks - like which citation site ranks photos quicker than anything on your own site, even with image site maps. But without a good sales funnel or two - some measurable on-page goals - all the SEO in the world won't help. A car wash can get a heck of a lot of traffic by putting their URL on the sign outside with the word "COUPON" underneath (and with specials through Yelp and Foursquare) than ranking #1 on a keyword that gets 100 spins a month.

But the truth is, you need to look at spyfu keyword reports, site webmaster tool reports, do link network reviews on the local competition, etc.

And even get more creative - I have a photographer client who has the same name as someone famous. So rather than name the studio after her, we created a separate brand for her business.

Local SEO requires a lot of creativity - even more of a challenge since they rarely have decent budgets or the understanding of what needs to be done. I've had to break the news to business owners that the Google ban they got by using some BlueFart kiddos SEO-R-US is going to last awhile and we need to get them a new domain. I've had to explain to small business people that they never actually owned their domain name, the designer did, so that Chinese Monkey Porn will probably remain on their former domain for the foreseeable future.

Just a rant. I'm done now. Its raining, and my soapbox is getting wet and the ink on my cardboard sign is running.

There are a lot of useful stuff on seomoz.org. SEO is a field based on logic and executed with creative strategies.