A good SEO needs to know a heck of a lot more than just web marketing if they want to be able to be able to market your business effectively. While you’ll be hard pressed to find an SEO who is an expert in your particular field, there are some things they need to know about you before they even begin marketing your site.

Pole Position Marketing has a standard web marketing questionnaire we send to all new prospects and/or clients. The questions we ask are designed to help us provide the client with the highest quality of service possible.

The answers to these questions help us:

• Better understand the business, core values and and (potential) customers.
• More quickly uncover any issues or possible issues that can hinder the performance of the search optimization campaign.
• Establish the foundation for which improvements and successes will be measured.

While we’ll never be able to know everything there is to know about a client, the questions below provide a nice launch point for getting things moving in the right direction while providing us insights in which to begin measuring the progress of the campaign.

If your web marketer isn’t asking these questions, they should be. You want to make sure that your web marketer has as much information as possible to run a successful campaign.

Company and Marketing Data Questions

These questions ensure that we move in the right direction with keywords, content and–most important–site messaging. It ensures that we develop the highest quality content that is a match for visitor intent and expectations.

1. Describe your target audience.
2. What are your corporate core values, and how do you express them to your customers?
3. What common objections do people have when they buy from you?
4. How do you address those objections and convert prospects into satisfied buyers?
5. What “hot points” help your customers take action?
6. What information do your customers need in order to make an informed buying decision?
7. What problems does your product or service solve?
8. What sales approaches have worked in the past?
9. What hasn’t worked?
10. What are your other online and offline marketing efforts?
11. What tone and feel best resonates with your customers?
12. Who are your major competitors, and what do you feel are their stronger points over yours?
13. Of the following metrics, which three are you most interested in improving?
    • Visits
    • Conversions (i.e. sales or leads)
    • Revenue
    • Return on ad spend
    • Cost per conversion
    • Conversion rate
    • Followers
    • Subscribers
    • Engagement rate

Historical Website Data Questions

These questions help us understand their current status and history with the search engines. Our knowledge of each of the issues below helps ensure we are able to provide an optimal, forward-moving optimization campaign.

1. Does your website utilize content provided by other sources (such as product descriptions or free-use content), or is the content unique to your site alone?
2. Is your website of original design, or does it use a template available to others, including your competitors?
3. Do you own or operate any other websites that are targeting a similar or the same audience as the website we are marketing? If so, please list.
4. Do you own any other domain names that are currently redirecting to the URL we are optimizing or any other location? If so, please list.
5. Have you worked with any other SEO companies and/or services in the past? If so, please provide company name, time frame of service and services provided.
6. Do you currently use or have on your site server any stand-alone landing pages designed solely to get top rankings on search engines with little or no user benefit?
7. Is your site now, or has it ever been banned by Google or any other search engine? If so, please provide specifics.

Sales &Conversion Data Questions

These questions help us establish the benchmarks for sales, traffic and conversion improvements in the months to come. This will help us measure monthly success as the optimization process progresses.

1. Please provide the (approximate) average numbers for the following as it relates to your monthly website traffic:
   • Page Views
   • Unique Visitors
   • Returning Visitors
   • Total Visitors
   • Hits
   • Other (specify)
2. Do you have any peak months or seasons? If so, please tell us what they are.
3. If yes above, please provide your highest and lowest number of visitors over the past twelve months and notate the month of occurrence.
4. How much do you spend on advertising each year outside of search engine optimization?
   • TV
   • Radio
   • PPC
   • Billboards
   • Magazines
   • Misc. Internet
5. Of the above, which do you feel provides the best ROI (Return on Investment)?
6. Are you performing any kind of tracking specific to each of the investments above for true ROI? If so, please explain details and methods of ROI tracking.
7. How many orders did you average per month over the last 12 months?
8. What were your highest/lowest number of orders within the past 12 months?
9. What was your average order amount over the past 12 months?
10. What was your highest/lowest order amount within the past 12 months?
11. What was your average monthly revenue over the past 12 months?
12. What was your highest/lowest monthly revenue over the past 12 months?

Technical Questions

This section ensures that we have the access we need in order to do the job we are hired for. Whether we are making edits and implementing all SEO ourselves or working with someone on their end (or any combination), we need to start with the relevant information so we can hit the ground running.

1. Your site’s FTP information:
   • Host Name
   • User Name
   • Password
2. CMS (Content Management System) Access:
   1. Login URL
   2. User Name
   3. Password
3. Web host control panel login:
   • User Name
   • Password
4. Web master or whoever is responsible for implementing our recommendations:
   • Name
   • Email address
   • Phone number

Of course, these questions are just the beginning. Good web marketers never stop learning about the client, their customers and how best to create messaging that makes an impact. A lot of that knowledge comes from the ongoing web marketing work, but the client is often the best resource for information that isn’t readily available online.

But as a starting point, I would worry about any SEO that wasn’t asking these–or similar–questions. When a web marketer fails to learn about their clients, that leads to a campaign that is headed in the wrong direction. While it may not kill your business, it will often kill the value of the marketing efforts overall.