When onboarding a new SEO client, gathering comprehensive information is crucial for aligning strategies with business goals and ensuring successful campaign delivery. The data indicates a need to understand the current state of a client’s website, their marketing history, and their specific challenges. This article outlines key questions to ask potential SEO clients, categorized for clarity, based on available resources.
Understanding the Client’s Business and Goals
Initial questioning should focus on the client’s overall business objectives and target audience. The source materials emphasize the importance of understanding a client’s vision and ensuring SEO efforts align with it. Questions regarding the current state of the website – when it was last updated or redesigned – are essential. Determining the geographic areas the client targets (countries, states, cities) is also a foundational step.
Further inquiry should delve into the client’s ideal customer. Specifically, asking about the top five psychographic traits of their ideal customer can provide valuable insights. Understanding the percentage of repeat customers can also inform SEO strategy, as it indicates existing brand loyalty and potential for targeted campaigns. Identifying main competitors, and the reasons for considering them as such, is vital for benchmarking and tracking progress. Clients should be asked if they have specific industry leaders they wish to track against.
Defining specific keyword phrases the client wants to rank for is a critical component of the initial assessment. Inquiring about previous keyword reports, if any, can reveal past strategies and their effectiveness. Understanding past goals and metrics measured allows for establishing a baseline and tracking future performance.
Assessing Existing Marketing Efforts
A thorough understanding of a client’s previous marketing activities is essential to avoid duplication of effort and learn from past successes and failures. The source materials highlight the need to determine who the client has worked with previously – agencies or freelancers – and the type of work that was performed (on-page optimization, off-page optimization, content marketing). If the client has not previously engaged external agencies, information about their in-house marketing team should be gathered.
Questions regarding access to client assets are also crucial. Access to platforms like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Google Ads is necessary for a comprehensive assessment of historical data and ongoing performance. Requesting keyword research reports, audit reports, and other relevant documentation can further inform the SEO strategy. Knowing if a client has been penalized by Google is also a critical question to ask.
Identifying Website Challenges
Understanding the client’s perceived challenges with their website is paramount. The source materials suggest probing for specific areas of underperformance and the reasons behind those perceptions. Questions should address potential issues with page speed, bounce rate, mobile-friendliness, image optimization, and content quality. Assessing the performance of key web pages or landing pages can reveal specific areas needing improvement.
Clients should be asked to articulate the challenges they are experiencing with their website in general. Open-ended questions like “What information do we need to better understand your challenges and business context?” can elicit valuable insights. Inquiring about recent developments in the client’s industry that may have created challenges can also provide context. Finally, asking “Why do you believe your website isn’t performing as it should?” can uncover underlying issues.
Technical SEO Considerations
Technical SEO is a critical aspect of improving a website’s ranking potential. The source materials identify several key technical SEO areas to address. These include understanding what technical SEO is – optimizing the backend of a website for search engine crawlers. Determining a good page speed is also important; ideally, a website should load in under two seconds and achieve a score of 90 or above using Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
Understanding a client’s domain authority (DA), a metric developed by Moz, can provide insight into their website’s overall ranking potential. A sitemap, both HTML and XML versions, is essential for helping search engines index a website’s pages. Finally, understanding the use of meta data is crucial for optimizing page titles and descriptions.
Conversion Rate Optimization
The source materials indicate that even with improved rankings, a website may not be converting visitors into customers. Potential reasons for this include ineffective landing pages, difficult navigation, unappealing web design, unclear product or service explanations, and a lack of direct calls to action (CTAs). SEO efforts can contribute to improving these issues over time.
Google’s Algorithm and Penalties
The source materials state that Google’s algorithm considers numerous factors to determine website relevance, including query keywords, page relevance, source expertise, and searcher location. While the algorithm itself is not public information, SEO experts have studied its behavior to identify strategies for improving rankings. A Google penalty, or manual action, is a negative consequence imposed on a website that violates Google’s standards, negatively impacting rankings.
Link Building Strategy
Understanding a client’s existing link building strategy is important. Questions should focus on whether any link building campaigns have been previously implemented, and if so, by whom. This helps avoid duplicating efforts and provides insight into past successes or failures.
Conclusion
Gathering comprehensive information from new SEO clients is essential for developing effective strategies and achieving measurable results. The questions outlined in this article, categorized by business goals, marketing efforts, website challenges, and technical SEO considerations, provide a framework for a thorough onboarding process. By understanding a client’s unique circumstances and challenges, SEO professionals can tailor their approach to maximize impact and deliver long-term value.