25 Questions You Must Ask New SEO Clients

  Accounts You Need to Access - a) Google Search Console

           b) Google Analytics

           c) Google AdWords

           d) Additional Analytics Accounts     (If your client uses a tool like                  Omniture, again having access there will be valuable)

           e) Company Email

           f)  Access to CMS

           g) Access to Log Files

Questions You Need to Ask - 

   1. Which actions on the site are most important to you?

        Is it webinar sign ups, white paper downloads, free trials, newsletter sign-ups, form submits, or something else?

2. Are there any specific dollar values or relative levels of importance you assign to activities on the site?

For instance, does the client place an estimated value on white paper sign-ups based on historical conversion rates and the value of a lead/opportunity?

3. Are there sections of the site that are more valuable/higher priority than others?

If so, what are they?

4. Who is your target audience or ideal customer? 

Encourage your client to overshare here — ask them to send specific persona materials, information about how specific buyers use their products, etc.

5. Can you list out any specific industries or sectors you want to target?

If this applicable to your client.

6. What are your company’s unfair advantages?

For instance:

Why do your best customers choose you?

What problems do you solve for them?

What’s different about you than your competitors?

7. What are some key reasons your best prospects don’t choose you?

What does their largest competitor do well that they struggle with?

8. What does success for the engagement look like?

Is it:

Specific traffic numbers?

Lead or sales volume?

Rankings?

Hopefully, your client won’t just say rankings! If they do, ask for some additional success metrics, and provide some suggestions if needed.

9. Is there something you suspect “isn’t quite right” in your data?

For example, were there instances when analytics code wasn’t installed or firing properly on part of the site? Does your client have older Google Analytics goals that likely aren’t representative of the actual actions you value on your site?

You, as an SEO, should be able to help fix these issues. At the very least, knowing about these issues gives you the knowledge that some of the data you’re analyzing may not be reliable.

10. Are there other domains you own?

If your client has a community micro-site or a dedicated site for a specific event they run (or even used to run), it would be helpful for you to know about it.

11. Are there “copies” of your site that may live elsewhere on the web?

For instance:

Do you have a staging server?

Does the .net version of your domain show all of your content?

Do you have translated international versions of your site’s content?

12. Has the site been penalized (to your knowledge)? If there’s been a significant traffic drop in the past, do you know or suspect why that may have occurred?

Even if your client didn’t get an explicit notification within Google Search Console and they just have suspicions about why their site has been penalized, you’re going to want to know.

Your client may be way off base about why their traffic dropped, but if that’s the case, you should be able to recognize that what they’ve suspected isn’t likely to be the actual issue, and what they share may point you in the right direction.

13. What link building have you or any vendor done in the past?

Encourage your client to be as specific as possible — if they have lists of links and/or descriptions of activity from previous vendors, ask them to share them. If their old marketing manager used to oversee this and your client knows they built some links but aren’t sure where they came from, ask them to try to obtain a list or get a general sense of what types of links they were.

14. Share your perspective on possible keyword targets. Are there certain terms you think would work particularly well?

Ask your client if there is anything they think may seem relevant but that they’re sure wouldn’t drive quality traffic/leads. You may need to push back or determine that the client’s ideal keywords are too competitive for their site’s age and authority, but at least you’ll have a better understanding of their expectations and your client will better understand your reasoning for targeting specific terms.

15. Are there any technical issues or sections of the site you’d like us to pay particular attention to?

If your client thinks everything about their documentation is working fine but that’s a key area of the site for them, you need to know. If the client recently moved any section of their site to new URLs or to/off a subdomain, even if they think everything went great and there are no issues, again, you need to know.

16. Do you have any reporting, keyword research, and audit information from previous SEOs you’ve worked with?

If they did a great job, that information will be helpful. Even if they weren’t happy with their work, knowing precisely what activities the client wasn’t happy with and having access to the reporting and updates the client received from other SEO vendors is vital information. This will help you understand what that last company was working on, why the client was dissatisfied, and how you can better deliver for them.

17. Who will be responsible for and available to make technical updates to the site (such as implementing redirects, making on-page enhancements to increase page load times, etc.)?

If your client has a backlog of development projects and has limited development resources, you want to know upfront that there may be bandwidth or turnaround issues with resources.

This can help you prioritize tasks or maybe offer a recommendation for development help – or, perhaps you even have that capacity in-house.

18. What is your planned content schedule (if you have one)? Who will be creating content for your site and how much content do they plan to create (a blog post a day, an in-depth article once a month, nothing consistently, etc.)?

You may want to help with topic ideation here, and the volume of content your client is planning on creating may impact the topics that you tackle for SEO as well as potentially impacting your recommendations around site organization and information architecture.

19. How do you plan to promote new content?

Find out what your client’s content promotion process looks like and who is involved (social media specialists, their PR firm, etc.) so you can best understand how to maximize new and existing content on the site and build a plan that will fit with your client’s current promotion strategies.

20. Are there sites you’d label as your biggest “competitors”?

This could mean sites competing with your client in search results for terms they want to rank highly on, and/or companies in their niche who they think are doing a great job with branding and/or online marketing.

Your client’s competitors can often be a good starting point for content ideation, so this is an important question to ask.

21. Are there any publications/websites that are frequently read by your target audience?

This is particularly helpful for topic ideation. Ask them who their team is reading and who the go-to publications in their niche are.

Similarly, find out if any specific articles and/or topics resonated particularly well with the client’s target audience (gone somewhat “viral” within their niche, been frequently linked to and cited by popular writers and influencers, etc.).

22. What would you identify as the conferences that your prospects would be most likely to attend (if any)?

Can your client identify any tracks/talks their prospects would be particularly interested in. Conference organizers are looking to put together an agenda that’s interesting to their prospects. If there’s a conference that your client generates a lot of great prospects from, the tracks and keynote speakers there could be great fodder for topic ideation and may lead to some interesting potential keyword targets.

23. What are some subreddits and/or forums that people in your industry (and/or inside your company) read frequently?

24. Who would you identify as “thought leaders” in your space?

These are speakers and writers who your prospects are especially likely to trust and look to for information.

All of this information will help you better understand your client’s niche and their prospects, as well as help yield better keyword and topic recommendations.

25. Is there anything else we should know or that you’d like us to focus on?

Again: Encourage your clients to leave their shyness at the door!