To have a clear vision of the future project and make sure you’re on the same page with your client, you should ask proper questions. It will help you get a touch of the project, a potential client, products, services, and prepare for work before everything is set in stone.

1. Information about the Client

From the outset, specify:

1.1. Details about Company’s Activity

After researching the general information, get down to more specific questions. Some of them could make the client raise the eyebrows, but insists on your right to understand what’s going on with their current setup.

Investigate these questions:

1.2. Competitive Edge

Do a little digging into your client’s USP (unique selling proposition), their bright sides, competitive edge over other market players, which makes them outstanding in your customers’ eyes.

Such upsides may be:

1.3. Project Goals

Knowing the company’s main goals and KPIs will give you insights into what you need to get to bring them where they want to be

Better yet, you can get a holistic picture of how doable these goals are for the current setup.

So these are the informational goals the company may want to achieve:

Here are some commercial goals:

1.4. Competitors in the Given Field

To develop a nitty-gritty SEO strategy, you’ll need to get to know the industry in general. Make your clients talk about competitors on their radar, their strengths, and their weaknesses.

It’s better seen when given in the table.

1.5. Partners in the Given Field

Does your client have any relationships with other businesses and entities? Find it out since it’s a lucrative link-building opportunity that could have gone missing for years.

It may look like this:

1.6. Achievements: Certificates, Awards, etc.

If the client doesn’t have a developed USP yet or can’t clearly articulate the business strengths, you may want to ask about existing certificates and awards. Make it clear that all this information can contribute to trust and authority rates.

1.7. Targeting Countries

Make sure you’re on the same page with the client’s goals on targeting geolocation. If needed, specify that targeting exact locations will help come up with a more effective SEO strategy.

If the client’s goal is to reach a broader audience, specify whether the website is designed for multilingual SEO.

1.8. SEO Background

Ask if any SEO operations had been conducted on the website before. If so, get more details on:

2. Website Description

To know the real numbers and state of affairs, ask the following:

3. Website Content

Get access to the website ‘brand book’ and media assets (images, videos, audios, texts, etc). The information given to these questions may be handy from SEO bent when you get started working on the project:

If needed, explain: for your website to rank in search engines, it should contain unique content. If you want to borrow a text from another website, it should be rewritten (rewrite helps to increase the uniqueness of the text).

Find out about what content on other websites seems fetching to your client. The things like narrative style, tone of voice, the subjects they touch upon, how the content is displayed on the page, the type of content that prevails on the website – images, videos, graphs, plain text, etc.

Getting that kind of information, you’ll be able to visualize the desired end goal even if the client’s vision is vague at this stage.

4. Keyword Research

Knowing the search queries that are supposed to run the project could give you some insights into their current priority.

So ask your client what keywords are supposed to promote the website.

If your client hadn’t gotten his hands dirty with SEO before, follow up with further specifications:

Write all the keywords into the table and ask a client to sort them out according to priority, taking into account the company’s hallmarks. Mark with:

5. Other Marketing Verticals

Ask if a company is committing to display ads and social media advertising. Ideally, you also ask how much they invest in it just to know if other marketing vertices work well and bring tangible results.

And to crown it all, grab this ready-made template, tailor it to your needs, and send directly to your clients.

The Bottom Line

As an aspiring SEO specialist, you can face different reactions to your initial research of the company. Sadly enough, not nearly every company can provide clear answers to your questions. To clear up the mess, don’t shy away from asking as much as you can, follow up, ask for more details to see what is an undercurrent. Fishing for information that will alleviate your work – this should be your priority.