Hugo Guzman wrote an interesting post the other day about questions you should as a potential SEO agency (they could easily be translated to questions for an in-house hire or the like). It’s a good read so I suggest checking it out.
It got me thinking about the questions we ask of the people who contact us for SEO services, and some of the questions we ask in order to properly qualify a project.
After all, how much good can an SEO provide you if they don’t know what they are getting into?
Have you identified specific goals for your website, and if so, what are they? Tell us more about your target audience.
Obviously, we need to know the goals of any marketing campaign before we can achieve them. And the specifics of a goal help to determine what actions we take.
There are no right answers; as a goal can be brand awareness, increased traffic/rankings, to make a sale, etc.
More importantly though, this question also gives us some insight as to the current mindset of the business owner. It would be easy to say that about 40% of the people that contact us don’t actually have a concrete goal just yet.
This is ok, as we can usually help a business owner understand the different types of online marketing methods we can implement and what their returns look like.
What differentiates you from your competitors?
This can sometimes be difficult to answer, especially for “common” businesses. We are looking for anything at all that can spark a future conversation.
This can be as simple as “better customer service” or as complex as “we work closely with XYZ vendor to ensure 100% compliance to the ABC protocol all while managing your PDQ needs.”
Give us just a little bit of clay and we can mold an online marketing masterpiece. The more clay, the nicer the piece.
Have you identified any problems to which you are looking for a solution?
Similar to goals, are you having any specific problems online? Did rankings/traffic drop? Did your site disappear all together. We simply need to know this stuff in case we need to initiate a “fix-it” plan.
Have you been tracking online performance thus far? To what capacity?
In this question we are looking for what metrics you have been monitoring. This helps us to know of your perception of your site’s performance and the current state of said performance.
Sometimes, it even helps us to understand where we need to educate you as there are a million tools out there, some of which give inaccurate data.
Are you looking for a long-term strategy or short term gains?
It’s very important for us to know what sort of campaign you desire. If someone is looking for quick returns, we are likely to move the conversation into PPC management. If you’re looking for a long-term, lasting strategy, then SEO is the obvious pick.
This also ensures that we are on the same page as the business owner with regard to turn-around time.
Are you looking for a national online marketing campaign, or one that targets a specific region?
Local search has been big business for us over the last few years, and it seems that it will only grow. As such, the answer to this question helps us determine a strategy to meet your needs as marketing for your local crowd and selling products to the nation via your online store are mutually exclusive.
Have you had any previous SEO efforts implemented on the site? Details please.
This one is very important. We learned early on to get an understanding of past SEO efforts and the details on them. Though decreasing in number, we still get a few sites that have been taken on by poor SEO firms. We need to know this so we can know what we will have to clean up.
More recently though, we are seeing legitimately “good” SEO efforts. We still need to know about this because there may be something we can build on or we can put our efforts elsewhere depending on what has been done.
We also want to know why that effort has been stopped. Was there a disagreement in achievement/methods? This certainly wouldn’t stop us from moving forward, but it does help us to understand the desires of the business owner and ensure that we are setting the right expectations.
Do you have someone on your staff to make changes on the site, or will we be doing that?
This is way more important than it sounds. Whether there have been past efforts or not, we haven’t had a site yet that didn’t warrant a few changes here or there. Also, it’s nice to know if someone else is in the kitchen; at which point we will request communications with said person(s).
This is usually a designer, and it’s important that we have an amicable working relationship. We need to know if it’s possible someone could undo or modify our work and do our best to prevent stepping on each others’ toes.
What level of involvement do you wish to have in your online marketing efforts?
We’ve heard every answer from “tell me every time you change a single character” to “just do what you do and tell me when it’s done.” Though we can accommodate both of these and most situations in between, it’s important to understand what it is you want to know.
This also helps us to determine if a Do-it-for-me SEO service is a possible solution, or should we consider providing an SEO consultation plan.
Even if someone wants to be as ‘hands-off’ as possible, we try to come up with at least a minimum schedule to report and evaluate progress.
The answers to these questions usually lead to further conversations, but these give us quite a bit to work with. Sometimes the questions you are asked will differ, but that’s ok. Every SEO firm is different.