Potential SEO clients have questions for your SEO agency, mostly about your capabilities and the technicalities of your executions. But remember that communication is a two-way street. As the party who will do most of the SEO heavy lifting, you should ask your potential SEO clients questions as well. This way, you have a better idea of what they need and want, and you can tailor your SEO strategies and executions appropriately.
Here are the biggest questions your SEO agency should ask potential clients.
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- What are your business goals?
- Who is your target audience and market?
- Have you executed SEO strategies in the past?
- What other marketing channels are you currently using?
- How do you perceive your competitive position?
- Are there specific timelines or deadlines for your SEO goals?
- What is your budget?
- Can you provide access to your online channels and their analytics?
- What is your preferred mode of communication?
- Are there specific tools you prefer?
1. What are your business goals?
Understanding your potential SEO client’s business goals ensures that your SEO efforts are aligned with their business objectives. After all, different business goals require different SEO approaches. For example, if your potential SEO client wants to increase brand awareness, you may focus your SEO approaches on content creation and social media optimization. But if your potential SEO client wants an increase in online sales, content creation and social media optimization may not be the focus. You may focus on e-commerce optimization instead.
If you know their business goals, you may also determine the best key performance indicators that are crucial to the success of your SEO efforts. When you have data for website traffic, conversion rates, search rankings, and other metrics, you can measure the success of your SEO efforts. This can also help in identifying areas of failure and improvement.
Knowing their business goals just fosters a long-term partnership. And this can be monetarily beneficial for your SEO agency, both directly and indirectly. It’s directly beneficial because the long-term relationship can bring consistent cash flow and indirectly beneficial because it can build your reputation and help you get more SEO leads.
2. Who is your target audience and market?
If you know your potential SEO client’s target audience and market, you can craft and optimize SEO strategies and executions not just for search engines but also for the people who are most likely to become your client’s customers. This targeted approach is the difference between generic SEO and specialized SEO, which tends to give better results for your potential SEO clients.
There are just so many advantages in knowing who you are marketing to. If you know your audience and market, you can create content that resonates with them, ensuring the content is both relevant and discoverable – and maybe even emotional for the people. This is particularly useful in demographic and geographic targeting.
For example, if your potential SEO client’s customers are young people on social media, you may want to focus more on social media content for TikTok over Facebook since TikTok has a younger demographic. And if your potential SEO client’s customers are from a particular location, you can create location-specific content, which is big for local SEO approaches.
Knowing their target audience and market allows you to personalize your SEO efforts. This is not just more effective as it is also more cost-efficient for your potential SEO clients.
3. Have you executed SEO strategies in the past?
Knowing whether your potential SEO client has experience with SEO or not is important. It provides insights into your lead’s experience, expectations, and the current state of their online presence.
If your potential SEO client has experience with SEO, especially if it is negative, it’s crucial to address concerns, clarify misconceptions, and set realistic expectations. For example, if your potential SEO client thinks that going viral overnight is easy and to be expected of an SEO agency, they may become disappointed if you don’t pull that off. This may look bad on you. It’s important to align with your potential SEO client, and understanding their knowledge and experience with SEO is a vital part of that.
If your potential SEO client already has past SEO efforts, you can also build from there. You can evaluate their strategies and executions, identify winning and losing key performance indicators, look at challenges and pain points, and more. These things can help you succeed with your SEO efforts.
If they don’t have experience at all, you can ease them through SEO concepts. In time, they may make more informed SEO decisions with you.
Get a deeper understanding of your potential SEO client’s competencies by asking such a question.
4. What other marketing channels are you currently using?
If your potential SEO client is looking for an SEO agency, it’s possible that they are already committing to other marketing channels, such as email, paid advertising, and social media. It helps to know the marketing channels they are currently using, so you can integrate your SEO efforts with those channels, avoid duplicates, and identify gaps and new opportunities.
For example, if your potential SEO client already has a comprehensive social media strategy, you can align your SEO strategy there for a synergistic marketing approach. You can also identify gaps by looking at their target audience and market and see what segments they are not reaching because they are focusing on social media. Your SEO efforts can fill these gaps. New opportunities can also arise from there.
Knowledge of existing marketing channels can also improve budget allocation for your potential SEO client. You can weigh in between channels and prioritize one over the other, ensuring that your potential SEO client’s resources will have the best bang for their buck. They will thank you for it.
5. How do you perceive your competitive position?
Most businesses are aware of their position in the competitive market. If your potential SEO client is a newbie in the industry, they may have no brand recognition or authority. And if they are more established, they may have tight competition eating their market share. It’s important to ask about their competitive position because it can help identify strengths and weaknesses, benchmark against competitors, and control expectations and goals.
Analyze the market and the competition to find opportunities you can exploit and gaps you can fix. This is how you find strengths and weaknesses and benchmark against competitors. Look for the potential SEO client’s unique value proposition to differentiate them from competitors, and then align that with your SEO efforts.
Their awareness of their competitive position is particularly important for controlling expectations and goals. If you don’t control their expectations, they may have delusions of grandeur, especially if they don’t know much about SEO. And if you don’t control their goals, they may have unachievable and unrealistic objectives that you are likely to fail to fulfill, making you look bad.
6. Are there specific timelines or deadlines for your SEO goals?
Knowing the desired timelines and deadlines of your potential SEO client’s goals helps in establishing expectations. Some clients may be looking for quick results and others may be looking for a more long-term relationship. You can tailor your SEO efforts according to what they want. However, take note as well that quick results may be unrealistic, and that’s why it’s also important to know their competitive position for establishing expectations as well. After all, it may be easier to rank and pull off virality if the potential SEO client is more established.
But not all “quick results” come from unrealistic expectations. Sometimes, product launches and other time-sensitive campaigns happen and increase the urgency of your SEO efforts.
Knowing timelines and deadlines also helps in developing and navigating a roadmap for your SEO campaigns. You can customize your roadmap to meet specific timelines, deadlines, and milestones. And you can even collaborate with your potential SEO client in navigating through the roadmap to strengthen your relationship.
7. What is your budget?
Your potential SEO client’s budget is one of the most crucial things you need to ask. Their budget plays a vital role in shaping the scope, strategy, and execution of the SEO job.
By understanding their financial limitations, you can tailor your SEO products and services to align with what is feasible for their budget. This can even open you up to upselling, especially when their budget allows for more or better quality SEO offerings.
By knowing their financial capabilities, you can also customize your SEO strategy. After all, different strategies require different budgets. More comprehensive SEO strategies require more money and time, and simpler ones may require a more focused and targeted approach.
If you have established a budget with your potential SEO client, you can also avoid misunderstandings and surprises in the future. This ensures you are on the same page and establishes a transparent relationship.
8. Can you provide access to your online channels and their analytics?
This is an important question to ask because access to online channels like websites and social media profiles and their analytics is crucial to understanding the potential SEO client’s digital presence.
There is so much you can know when you have access to data. You can identify strengths and weaknesses by examining metrics like conversion rates, user engagement, and website traffic. You can leverage this knowledge to improve your SEO approaches. And you can also understand user behavior more clearly, so you know how users navigate through their online channels. This is crucial for optimizing SEO approaches, especially your content strategy and user experience.
Data can seriously help in many SEO tasks too, such as audience segmentation, competitor analysis, keyword research, performance analysis, reporting, ROI measurement, targeting, and technical SEO audits. And direct access to the online channels makes it easier to navigate through them, including writing and scheduling posts and looking at relevant data immediately when you need to.
9. What is your preferred mode of communication?
One way to ensure seamless collaboration with your SEO clients is by establishing a communication method. Different clients have different preferences. Some may prefer a more active communication method, like phone calls and video calls. Some may prefer a more passive method, like emails and direct messages. Their preferred mode of communication may depend on a variety of factors, such as the client’s personality and time availability and the scope of the SEO projects.
By knowing their preferred mode of communication, you can also ensure that important insights, updates, and reports are delivered in a manner that is convenient to your client. And it’s not just about convenience. It can also be about efficiency and timeliness. For example, if they like to use automated tools for reports, it can be advantageous to both the SEO agency and the client because automation makes everything smoother and scalable.
Great communication between you and your client avoids misunderstandings, builds a collaborative relationship, controls expectations and goals, and enhances responsiveness. Don’t forget to ask their preferred mode of communication from time to time because it can change over time.
10. Are there specific tools you prefer?
Your potential SEO clients may prefer specific tools, especially when they already have experience with SEO and are already accustomed to certain platforms. Asking about their tool preferences shows your commitment to their operational preferences, fostering a positive client experience and building a collaborative relationship.
It’s not just about comfort and familiarity. It’s also about compatibility, compliance with regulations, and data consistency. Your potential SEO client may prefer specific tools because they are compatible with their existing ecosystems, avoiding conflicts and integration issues. They may prefer specific tools because they need to comply with regulations in their industry, particularly when it comes to data security. And lastly, they may prefer specific tools because different tools may show different data. If their analytics is already established by specific tools, you need to use these tools to ensure uniformity in data.
Ask these questions to understand your potential SEO clients
For a successful SEO agency and client relationship, you need to have a clear understanding of your client’s business landscape, align with their objectives, and communicate with them clearly and regularly. Asking the right questions to your potential SEO clients helps you accomplish these things.
That’s not to say that the SEO agency has to do everything. Clients can help their SEO agency as well by providing clear business objectives and expectations, providing materials the agency needs to succeed like data, and communicating properly.
If both parties do these right, they increase the success of their SEO journey and foster a positive and long-term relationship.
