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7 must ask questions for new SEO clients

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Onboarding a new client is always a sense of joy and excitement. As an SEO agency owner or a freelancer, you always wish for a long-term relationship with your client to create a win-win situation. To retain a customer for a long time, you need to ask the right questions so that you can create a custom SEO plan and serve your clients in a much better manner.

By asking the right questions, you get to know more about their business and their ultimate goals regarding SEO. Apart from asking the basic details about their website and target audience, the questionnaire goes beyond it.

Even if you have just started offering SEO packages, we have got you covered. In this post, we will have a look at the topmost important and must-ask questions to your customers that will bring you more insights for effective SEO planning.

1. Resources

The first thing you need to ask your client is do they have enough resources to handle the content or technical changes on their website? While optimizing the website, there will be several scenarios where the website owner needs to make the suggested changes from their end. If they don’t have any internal team to handle all these changes then you can tell customers that you can handle this thing as well.

By asking this question, the overall optimization speed of the website will improve significantly. It is because now you have the clarity that your team will be handling all the changes in the client’s website.

2. Mode of communication

Communication is very important in SEO projects as the results and the implementation of SEO tactics are dynamic and the clients need to know about every vital update. While completing the contract, you need to ask the client about exact modes of communication and how frequently you will give the website’s status to them.

It is an extremely important thing that you need to keep clear and transparent right from the beginning. It’s important to make the entire communication seamless and more interactive. On whatever communication mode you pick, ensure to give timely updates to your customers.

3. Access from customers

Getting access to the website, Google Analytics, Webmasters tools, and other vital things are important for making the needful changes. You should clearly define what kind of access you will need to implement the SEO changes. Always ask clients if they have any kind of issues in giving access through the main account and do they want to create separate accounts for the same.

If you need content calendar access from the client, ask them if they can share it with you or not. Educate your clients about why getting complete access is important to generate SEO reports, creating further strategies, and more.

4. Goal clarity

When it comes to SEO services, most people are not crystal clear about their core objectives of opting for SEO for their business. To make this thing clear, you can have a quick brainstorm session with them to understand their business goals and you can then suggest the best for them. It’s important to know how realistic the clients’ expectations are from the SEO results.

Right consulting helps you establish a long-term relationship with your customers and you help them reach the business goals much faster using the right SEO strategies. Whether they want to drive more revenue, more traffic, create more brand presence — the goal must be clear

5. Mutual keywords selection

Being an SEO agency, you will gather a lot of keywords to rank throughout the span of six months to one year. However, it’s always better to discuss the keywords with the client and ask them what keywords they want their website to rank for. Once you have this clarity, you can strategize the SEO plan accordingly and give a realistic timeline for the keywords rankings.

Selecting the keywords mutually helps you establish clear strategic planning and your customers will have a realistic timeline that will ensure a smoother SEO execution.

6. Top competitors

It’s important to ask who are the top competitors that the customer wants to outperform or compete with online. Business owners understand their industry inside out and they can guide you better compared to performing solo competitor research. Ask your customer to name the top five competitors for their business as it will help you perform the competitor analysis accordingly.

7. Ask about biggest challenges

Before starting the SEO services, you need to ask your customers what challenges they faced with their previous SEO agency so that you can have a better perspective of giving them suggestions or SEO strategies. Asking about their challenges will help you understand their pain points and can offer a much better solution to them.

These are the top questions that you need to ask your client before starting the SEO practices on their websites. Bring in more clarity, transparency, and build a long-term relationship with your client by helping their businesses to grow with SEO.

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