In a pickle. SEO for Personal Brand, Book or Keywords?

[WhiteboardCreations]

I'm getting ready to take on a new client for SEO, but she is having a hard time understanding I'd like to rank her for "Her" and her new book, rather than keywords for her ambiguous keywords which show very little to no search volume from Keyword Planner data.

• Her website and domain name are only 4 months old
• Her book launches sometime in December (most likely January 2016)
• Her services (she's a consultant) provide little keyword volume
• She is persuaded she needs to rank for her service keywords
• I feel strongly we need to get her name, her method/approach and her book optimized
• She is seemingly difficult to work with, but once I build trust in SEO for her, so will be a great, long client
• Her consulting services are based on Change and Transition for wealthy individuals going through career change, divorce, pay increase, pay decrease, depression, children, etc... targeting Executives, C-Level Execs

In this situation, what would you all do? How would this website or person even be optimized? Blog articles? Press releases? Guest blogging? Video blogs? Podcasts? It's a tricky one and hoping the Moz community can lend some ideas as this type of SEO would be new for me, yet I'm up for the challenge!

Thank you in advance and look forward to your replies! - Patrick

[WhiteboardCreations]

Thanks so much for the response, Kane.

She is very particular in the content placed on her website. I didn't work with her on her website or her existing pages, navigation, and content, so I'm coming in fresh and from what I know, she was tough to deal with on the content portions.

Adding more pages about her services probably isn't realistic as she doesn't dive into her "services" on the website nor does she want to. She has this false sense that her clients KNOW what she does and will search for her "method". Yet, when you Google her "method", nothing shows.

This led me to talk with her about and be very honest with her, that her name, her method and her book need to be the focal point. So, when people do hear about her, and then Google her, they will get the bigger picture vs just searching for a service keyword and her showing up.

Another challenge is, her budget is low. It will increase, but have to prove it works. I explained this is a limiting factor, but will see where it goes.

We will focus on blog articles, a few press releases, a couple SlideShare presentations about her method and book outline and wish we could do videos, but she will never do a video, but she enjoys and does do speaking engagements.

We also discussed getting her to do more podcast type interviews and try to get her in front of bloggers or podcasters as she speaks very well and would be comfortable doing that.

This will make for an interesting case study if it all works out the way I want it to. One thing I won't allow is for it to ruin or soil my reputation or our mutual brand consultant's image.

Thanks again, Kane! I do appreciate your input. - Patrick

[KaneJamison]

Without knowing the keywords themselves, my guess is that if there's no search volume then they're probably not very hard to rank for, so you should tackle all of the above.

Convince her to focus on name + book on the appropriate pages, and create dedicated service pages for any of the other keywords if she wants to pursue those as well. She's going to need to create those service pages anyways to explain exactly what she does, and she'll be pleased to see those service pages ranking soon enough.

At a high level - sounds like stuff around "executive career coaching" and "executive career development". There's definitely some search volume around those types of phrases, so perhaps convince her to go after the bigger ones instead.

Show her the list of keywords she's suggesting and that you're suggesting, in order of difficulty and where they would fit into a content map of the website, and try to agree on a prioritized list to work on, and get her to contribute 300-600 words of copy for those service pages.