SEO Success: Asking Your Client the Right Questions

SEO: It takes more than pretty graphs

As a consulting firm in the SEO market, we frequently find that extracting detailed information from potential clients can be quite a challenge. In general, these prospective clients tend to be predominately concerned with getting the most bang for their buck and often end up conveying their needs in an over-simplified manner. In some cases, they’re not even sure what their needs are – just that they have them!

For these clients, we’ve prepared a quick survey to help focus the campaign planning process on achieving the actual goals of a company instead of just increasing site traffic.

What is the overall objective of the campaign?

Are you looking to gain more website sales, find additional leads, or perhaps increase brand awareness? A successful SEO campaign needs more than just a general increase in site traffic to improve conversions and revenue. Therefore, it’s important to define your objectives and continually refocus them as the campaign progresses.

A well-formulated campaign can lead to increased profits, better customers and higher conversions, while an unfocused campaign can often lead to a false sense of success. This can happen, for example, when site traffic increases through the use of very general keywords. These generic keywords might attract a high number and broad range of visitors, but only a handful of those people are actually in the company’s target demographic.

Similarly, if someone finds your site with the term “furniture,” they’re more likely to be “window shopping” than somebody who found your site with the term, “amish solid wood furniture”. So, while a general increase in traffic can be the desired objective in some cases, most clients require a more specific business goal to justify the cost of a continued SEO campaign.

Who is your target audience?

Do you need to target tech savvy 20 year olds or 60+ baby boomers? Understanding your target market is crucial to being an effective internet marketer.  If you want to attract the younger generation, social media websites such as Digg, Youtube and Facebook might be targeted. If baby boomers are the focus, then organizational sites and niche forums might be more ideal.

What action do you want visitors to take?

Should visitors come to your site to purchase a product, download a document, or fill out your contact form? Each goal may require a slightly different approach and should be looked at accordingly. Additionally, encouraging users to engage in the desired action generally requires a combined effort of onsite and offsite optimization.

Fortunately, there are a number ways to track and monitor these conversion goals. These tools can help to give you a real sense of how visitors are following, or diverging, from the directed path laid out for them.  A free and simple way to accomplish this conversion tracking is by setting up a funnel with Google Analytics.

Have you considered adding a blog to your site?

Why would I want to add a blog? Who really cares about what type of grass our golf course uses? Many companies have difficulty comprehending the vast utility of a blog, and more so, what it is that they should be blogging about. For SEO, blogs add the potential to increase direct traffic to your website and encourage inbound linking to your articles.

In terms of content, the possibilities are endless – you can blog about your industry, help explain a common misconception your customers have, or talk about a new product in development. While there are plenty of great resources available to help you dream up your viral masterpieces, here are a few good ones to start with:

101 Great Posting Ideas that Will Make Your Blog Sizzle

50 Blog Post Ideas for Business Blogging

Ultimately, good content is king and the more quality content that you can produce, the more inbound links you’re likely to acquire.

Who are your main competitors?

Understanding who your online competitors are can help us to assess their strengths online. If your competitors are successful, it’s possible to learn from what they’re doing right. If they are not, then you’ve got the opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by doing better.

Do you currently use any traffic analytics software?

Analytical software can be very helpful in analyzing and monitoring the progress of your campaign.  Not only can you see what keywords people are using to find your site, but you can also see what your most popular pages are, and how long people tend to stay on your site.

If you do not already have some analytical software installed you might want to consider Google Analytics. This software is free and very easy to setup on your website. It gives you access to a colorful and informative set of tools that you can use to understand the value and progress of your SEO campaign.

Your mileage may vary…

These are just a few of the key questions that you should consider asking your clients before beginning any extensive SEO campaign. Of course, every client will have their own special needs and will require your skills as an SEO consultant, and good listener, to determine the appropriate way to expand on these foundational questions.

How do you determine the scope of your SEO campaigns? Or if you are the client, what questions do you have when looking for an SEO consultant to work with?

Download our SEO Client Questionnaire PDF

Here for free download is the PDF version of our SEO Client Questionnaire. Feel free to adapt these concepts to your own needs and let us know how it worked out or what we missed!