Comments on: 10 Questions You Should be Asking Your Client But Aren't

By: Bring The Fresh

Bring The Fresh — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 18:49:37 +0000

Great list, it’ll definitely be helpful in the future. Thanks

By: Mark Kennedy

Mark Kennedy — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 17:08:08 +0000

Good list. 1, 3, and 7 are the first things we ask a new client. However, 10 is a really, really good one. Going to make that a standard. Thanks!

@Jordan That’s another important one we ask, too. Nice.

By: leon

leon — Fri, 11 Sep 2009 16:40:01 +0000

or maybe create a webform for them to filled up

By: Dave

Dave — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 13:30:59 +0000

Nice, i think something in a nice little pdf document to hand over, please tick the boxes that are relevant… very good summary

Web Analytics & SEO Agency

By: Paul Lee

Paul Lee — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 21:06:13 +0000

This is an excellent list. Thanks for sharing some of your mistakes and client pains. Very useful.

By: Jordan Glogau

Jordan Glogau — Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:48:38 +0000

I have two more totally brain dead questions:

Did your designer put up your robots.txt file and lock all the spiders out? Which is why you haven’t any traffic from the search engines.

Are you pointing your www and root domain to the same place. Not every ISP does this. If not you have a duplicate content problem.

By: Dev Basu

Dev Basu — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:47:48 +0000

@IrishWonder – Funny thing really, I just pitched to a client that has the exact same problem – multiple domains which are mirrors of the same site.

@ Adam – I think the background research and being proactive about asking the right questions go hand in hand. Asking questions for enterprise SEO simply cannot be managed in one, two, or three meetings. You’re bang on about researching as much as you can and coming up with supplementary questions to clarify the situation with the client.

@ Christian – That’s a great idea. I just got off a call with a client that exclusively carries a brand name product in their market. Had I not asked a question regarding which product lines they consider special, I’d never have known about their product related marketing goals.

By: Internet Marketing Joy

Internet Marketing Joy — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 20:29:59 +0000

knowing what your client wants is very important..so you can decide which way to go and what steps to take..

By: Christian Vuong

Christian Vuong — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 19:54:34 +0000

These are wonderful tips, thanks for sharing Dev. I think these questions are paricularly important to address in conversations with the client.
I’d also ask content related question such as:
Are there specific terms or brands you don’t want us to write about?

By: Adam Lefever

Adam Lefever — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:56:37 +0000

Oh I can think of a LOT more than 10 “obscure” questions that should be asked.

Asking the questions is necessary but can only be useful if you can find someone who can answer them. Not one organization I’ve worked with in 6+ years has been able to answer all of my questions or can tell me where all of their online resources are. This is especially true with large organizations who have had multiple employees churn and marketing online for 10+ years.

When researching a new project, I’ll ask questions but still do a LOT of data research in search indexes, link popularity, duplicate content, related articles, company members’ names, etc. to be sure that I’m getting the whole picture and finding all of the “Golden Eggs” we can leverage for SEO benefit.

Cheers, and good post!
Adam