Where to spend my budget?

[solohelp]

Hi all-
Here's a little backstory. I'm ranked #1 at all the major SEs for 15 out 16 of my keywords. The last one I hover around #5. I get 1-2 new clients a day from SEs, mainly google. But a litttle MSN and a few yahoo calls. So the yellow pages just called yesterday. To date we have paid them $2000 for about 1 year worth of ads. Its time for renewal now. Our yellow pages ads (which are in 5 computer related categories) have netted a total of 4 clients in 6 months. So I have convinced my partner to reduce the yellow pages ad and give me some of the difference as an Internet advertising budget. Right now I do NO PPC or any other paid inclusions to directories. My SERPs are from link exchanges and content. My content is constantly changeing. Also I'm in DMOZ which was a huge leap in Google.

I am really not very interested in PPC or adwords etc. I'm more thinking about uping my Local Google ranking by getting into some of the online yellow pages. It seems google likes to scrape those for its local listings. Any ideas on that?

Basically I'm wondering what should I spend my $75 a month on?

Things like Linkmarket.net. The paid service is much nicer because you dont get link trade requests from every scammer, just out of categories you choose. Maybe paying WEBCEO for the Hitlens service to track hits etc. I've been really slack on looking at my logs.

Any other ideas on tools to make my seo work easier or sites to subscibe to etc...

thanks

[brian.mark]

Personally, I'd come up with some more keywords and use the budget to play with some google local AdWords campaigns to see if they would be worthwhile in striving for higher SERPs.

I personally have a set monthly budget for keyword discovery and I watch those terms very closely. I've discovered 100's of terms this way that have created a whole lot of business for us. I usually pick one area (Atlanta is a popular choice for me, as is Chicago) to focus on when testing words for our site, but you could try whatever. With a $75 / month budget, you could potentially find 3 - 5 terms that could amount in a lot more business for you.

My "discovery" budget is currently limited to $10/day, which allows me to test quite a few things. However, many of those phrases have moved over into our standard PPC campaign while we work on our organic optimization. I think I'm managing somewhere around 40,000 keywords now on our PPC programs, many just being a nickel.

Brian.