In digital marketing, it’s important to know up front certain aspects of your client’s business. You can actually ask these questions up front.
There is a period during SEO client acquisition where you ask questions about the client’s business, their expectations, and other things that will help you assess the client.
These questions are similar to an attorney’s process of discovery, and that is the process of SEO discovery.
With SEO discovery, it’s possible to find out what’s currently working on a client’s site, what they have done up to this point, and what they could still do.
It’s possible to identify exactly what your marketing strategy is doing right, and what your marketing strategy is doing wrong.
A thorough SEO discovery can dive into all aspects of a marketing campaign, in order to assess and determine exactly how all the moving parts affect the SEO currently on-site.
SEO discovery can act as a barometer for the SEO improvements that a company needs to make to their site, as well as an indication of where they are at in terms of existing improvements (if any).
Also, it helps to be able to gauge exactly the kind of SEO services they need, along with whether your SEO services will be a good fit for them.
The proper SEO discovery process can help uncover any major issues that your digital marketing company can address before you finish the project.
By uncovering these issues in the beginning, you can avoid a world of hurt later in the process.
As SEOs, we need to ask similar questions to make sure that we are taking on a client who is sane, is somewhat knowledgeable about SEO, and isn’t in it for quick riches overnight.
Of course, sometimes, some of these clients can get through no matter what questions you ask. That’s just a fact of life in SEO.
But, that’s beyond the scope of this article.
For now, let’s discuss the questions you should ask during SEO discovery.
General Company-Related Questions
For an effective SEO discovery process, you want to ask general company-related questions. These include the following:
- What does your company do?
- What is the name of your company?
- Do you interact with local customers?
- Who is your target audience?
All of these SEO discovery questions will help establish who your client is, what they do, and how they plan on using SEO to market their services/products.
Getting a client who has these clear objectives in mind will only serve to benefit you, the SEO.
What Experience Does the Client Have With SEO?
Are they just getting started in SEO? Do they know who the leading search engines actually are?
If they are just getting started, now would be the time to set expectations early. Explain things like why Google owns 90% of the search engine market, and why other leading search engines may not make sense for their business.
Although some arguments can be made for optimizing for Yahoo and Bing, for most search purposes, Google is the big cheese here. So, it makes sense to target the majority of your online marketing budget towards becoming found on Google.
Additionally, check if they are currently using their optimization efforts on Bing, and if so, where are SEO efforts currently being spent in terms of Bing?
Even the leading search engines have different algorithms in play that can have a major impact on your results.
Is Your Business Online Only?
This is important because if your client has brick and mortar local stores, your SEO will be different than if your client is strictly online only.
By the same token, small businesses will have a different SEO strategy than larger businesses, and so on. Different types of niches will also have different SEO strategies.
For example, for a service-based business: lead generation will need to be in place for both aspects of the business, especially if it is lacking online.
For another example: contact information will need to be more prominent, and you will need more obvious contact methods.
Don’t assume that local traffic will always have the same needs as general organic traffic.
Does Your Company Engage in Social Media Marketing?
If your client’s company is not engaging in social media marketing, you may be losing out. Every day, more than 3.78 billion people
Furthermore, social media marketing adds an advantage to putting your business in front of many consumers, in addition to organic traffic on Google.
This makes sense for a number of reasons, including the possibility of getting your articles in front of influential people for influencer amplification. Social media is a critical part of ensuring an organic online presence that’s backed up by a real audience who is sharing and vetting your articles on a consistent basis.
Does the company have a Facebook page? At the time of this writing, Facebook is considered the number one social network, with 2,910 million monthly active users. It still makes sense to put your client’s businesses in front of active consumers on Facebook with its own business Facebook page.
Does the company have an Instagram account? Instagram, also owned by Facebook, has 1,287 million monthly active users.
Other social networks that may make sense, depending on the business, include Twitter, What’s App, TikTok, and Telegram.
If a company does not have their social media marketing ironed out, then they need to take further advantage of these platforms in order to do so.
By uncovering details about the company’s existing social media presence during SEO discovery, you can also potentially upsell your client on more money-making services.
Does The Business Have a Negative Online Reputation?
Having a negative online reputation is not a good thing. It is said that “all publicity is good publicity.” While this may be true in some cases, in more cases than not, having a massive online reputation hit can have disastrous consequences for your business.
People don’t want to do business with companies they cannot trust.
If you are a jerk to people, while you may have headlines, you won’t get the business, as Decor My Eyes found out the hard way.
As of this writing, ResellerRatings.com shows a 1-star rating for Decor My Eyes, with 72 reviews warning potential consumers about the business.
Clearly, many consumers will go elsewhere if you refuse to follow the basic rules of human decency.
Another example: several big businesses cut ties with hatWRKS in Nashville for selling ‘Not Vaccinated’ Star of David patches, being sold by one of the far-right extremists who were pushing the false narratives that vaccine mandates could be compared to the holocaust. Which were spread by far-right wing extremist Senator Marjorie Taylor Greene.
If you have a negative online reputation, making sure that your business engages in positive online reputation management could be one of the only things that can save it.
Has Your Site Been Penalized by Google in the Past?
This is an important question. If other SEO efforts have resulted in an existing penalty, you need to know this, if for nothing else than your own efforts of self-preservation.
With the right SEO discovery process, finding out about any existing penalties should be a top priority because these will affect how you begin your SEO strategy.
If you don’t know about any existing penalties, you could be setting yourself up for failure.
It is harder to get out of a penalty than to get into one in the first place, but don’t get discouraged if you find you have one.
All of us go through it. I have had more than one occasion where a site is hit by a manual penalty. And, I’ve spent close to a year cleaning up a link profile that had more than 200,000 links.
I feel your pain. But, yes, this is a very important question that you should determine in the beginning, for obvious reasons.
Do You Have an In-House Developer or Designer (Or Both)?
Knowing that the company you signed has the capability for design and/or development is important.
If you don’t know that the company has designers and developers on staff that are ready, willing, and able to produce per branding guidelines, you won’t have any idea how to approach SEO implementation when the audit is complete.
It will also help to know who you are going to be speaking to at the end of the day, and who is responsible for helping to implement the final changes.
You wouldn’t build a house without having a contractor with experience and practice to back it up, right?
Likewise, you should never embark on a serious SEO project without similar foundations.
Do You Have Access to Google Analytics, Google Search Console, and Are You Willing to Share That Access?
There is critical data in web analytics tools that SEOs love to obsess over. Even if your client doesn’t use exactly these tools, there should be some web analytics platform in place in order to accurately track your SEO performance.
Everything from organic traffic, to clicks and impressions, and overall data that show how your website is doing over a period of time.
The company you sign should have SEO reporting already in place, along with dashboards that present the information in a clear and concise manner.
If none of this has been done, you will need to sift through the information manually or otherwise compile this reporting.
These are critical points that need to be addressed because they will mean the difference between your audit’s success and failure: the information can be wrong if not properly interpreted.
Don’t sign a company that expects you to put in all that extra work for free.
And, if a company does not want to share any access to their web analytics data, then you should not do an audit for them at all.
You will never know if your data and conclusions are accurate, and you will be flying blind.
What Website Would You like to Promote, and Do You Own Other Domain Names?
Knowing the main domain is critical and necessary for the success of any SEO efforts.
In addition, determine if there are any other domain names the client owns that were being used for SEO in the past.
All of this information is needed because, if something shady was being done by someone else within the company that resulted in a penalty, you will need to know this.
Plus, if you don’t know of any other domain names that the company is using to facilitate their SEO efforts, any SEO plans you put together can conflict with those SEO efforts. And then these can also cause you to get in trouble later.
Have You Done Any Link Building on Your Domain Prior to Us Working on It?
This is an extremely important discovery question.
Right up there with knowing which website you are working on.
If someone has done link building on the domain, what kind of efforts were implemented?
Did they go after shady links? Did they go after good links? Did they go after outright black hat level links?
All of these questions are very important pieces of information to know, so that you can assess whether or not you need to move forward with traffic-generating efforts or link risk mitigation efforts, or both.
Just like how our house builder is going to need to know what kind of materials were previously used in the construction of the house, before they can move forward with the new house building efforts.
What Keywords Do You Want to Target? Do You Have Any Money, Brand, Local, or Specific Keywords We Should Keep an Eye On?
This is especially critical because you need to know if SEO work is being done on existing keywords already.
Once again, if you don’t know this, you are setting yourself up for failure.
You must have a standard baseline before you can tell exactly how your efforts are progressing.
If you don’t have this baseline, you can’t chart an accurate trajectory. And if you can’t chart an accurate trajectory, you’re again flying blind.
This is why it’s so important to ask these critical questions during the discovery process, so you can figure out any issues as they come up, before they impact your SEO campaign.
Content and Editorial Capabilities
Any content capabilities of the company should be assessed at the outset, and that is what these questions are meant to discover.
You need to know what the company is capable of, and if they have the resources to get them where they need to be.
If the company does not have resources or is reluctant to pursue any content marketing efforts, you will need to consider other options.
You may also want to reconsider working with them, because they are putting you in a difficult position by not having this in place.
While content is not the only form of SEO that can help you rank and get noticed by potential consumers, it is one of the most effective – without the penalties coming with it.
Do You Have Any Existing Content On-Site and Does It Adequately Reflect Your Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness?
This is a loaded question, and you will likely come away from asking this question with more questions.
If the company does not have existing content, why?
If the company doesn’t feel current content adequately reflects their expertise, authority, and trustworthiness, why do they feel this way?
What can you do to further expand on and create amazing content for their SEO efforts?
All of these questions can be important when it comes to determining whether or not their current efforts are working, and what must be done to change current efforts (if any).
Once you know the answer to these questions, you will be glad you did.
I don’t know about you, but every time I look at a new potential client website, I am always imagining the content creation possibilities and how it can enhance their SEO.
Sometimes, I go way beyond. And this isn’t good for the client.
That’s why discovery questions like these should be asked because they help you nail down a target, with guidelines you should stay within at all times.
Find Out How Existing Content Is Optimized and If There Are Any SEO Weaknesses
You need to know what content has currently been optimized for SEO. The reason for this is because you could cause conflicting efforts if you don’t know the history.
If the content is so terrible that it needs to be completely overhauled, then this is mostly a non-issue, but you should at least know whether or not it has been optimized at any time in the past.
Maybe your pages are suffering from keyword cannibalization.
Maybe your pages are suffering from bad links.
Perhaps low-quantity content is the problem?
Maybe your on-page optimization is causing issues?
Does the site actually have personalized content? In this scenario, personalized content means that the content isn’t generic and is customized to the business. Generic content is content like lorem ipsum text, it’s just readable. Personalized content can, on the surface, appear high quality. But in reality, it has been duplicated from many other sites.
You must know these things if you are going to pursue any effective SEO strategy.
Is a Particular Writing Style Desired?
In order to create the most effective content for your audience, you must write a certain way, so you need a particular writing style.
Different styles can create results other than you may have anticipated, depending on your audience.
So, it is important to get this part right.
Content writing, or should I say, content creation, is such a big part of SEO that some SEOs oftentimes forget that style goes hand-in-hand with the text itself.
This is a dangerous oversight.
You must create content that’s compelling for your audience. And to do that requires style, in combination with the actual words.
How the content is created is just as important as the content creation itself.
Have You Used Other Agencies In the Past? If So, Who Were They?
It’s helpful to know if your client used other agencies in the past, because this can tell you if you are inheriting a dumpster fire, or a unicorn.
If you inherit a dumpster fire, you will know exactly what needs to be done in order to repair the site.
On the flip side, so will a unicorn.
By finding out how your client utilized another agency in the past, you can also root out any red flags through this discussion.
Are There Any Branding Guidelines Currently in Place?
An important part of any discovery is finding out whether or not the company has any branding guidelines in place.
It’s crucial that the company has branding guidelines that are consistent with the company’s overall communication and dealings with the public.
This consistency must be expressed across many online business ventures, including SEO.
Does branding have a big impact on rankings?
No, but it is still a big consideration for anyone (agency or otherwise) who plans on taking on a client.
The client’s overall online presence must be well-represented by the SEO, since you are after all, in charge of implementing this.
Their Overall Expectations of SEO
It’s always a random crap shoot when you find a client. You don’t always know about their expectations and what they plan on getting out of the efforts that you do for SEO.
Thankfully, it doesn’t always have to be that way.
You should ask a few questions in the beginning so that you understand better where they are coming from, and where they want to go.
Plus, when you have an idea of what they expect, you can tailor your SEO strategy to meet that when you have the opportunity.
What Do You Know About SEO?
Of course, this one is a biggie.
As an agency, you may be dealing with a certain type of client.
If you are a boutique SEO firm, you may be dealing with a client that is of a certain caliber and has a distinct level of understanding about SEO.
But, this may not always be the case.
If you are targeting people like real estate agents, for example, they may not know about SEO in the slightest and may need a lot of hand-holding.
Other people like attorneys may have some marketing knowledge already, and some may be well-versed in SEO.
That’s why it’s important to ask this question.
If you take an experienced person, and you give them haphazard SEO deliverables and results, they will begin to question their decision.
If you take a person who knows nothing, and deliver them 1,000 brand-new visitors every month, they may think you are walking on water.
This question will help you avoid the awkward conversation that will happen when they realize that you may have gone under target for the last month, or if you turn in deliverables one month that seem sub-par.
While explanations always help, it’s best to nip this feeling in the bud immediately before it ever gets to that place.
Do You Have Any Desired SEO Results?
Again, this goes into the entire discussion about expectations. But, it’s another important question to be mindful of.
If your client is expecting 1,500 unique visitors a month, and you can only deliver on average 500 because of your industry and its competition, then your client will not be pleased when that is all that happens.
This is why you must set realistic expectations from the outset.
I know. You need this sale this month. But, wouldn’t you rather pass on a client that you can’t deliver for, instead of having your reputation ruined by lying to get the sale?
I have always been a fan of ethical salesmanship and SEO. And I think that when both of those are combined, you have a winning combination for clients.
I am not a fan of sleezy, lying salesmen and SEO. All they do is put a black mark on our profession, and they need to do better.
We need to do better.
Do You Have Any Defined SEO KPIs?
KPIs, or key performance indicators, should be defined from the outset, and the discovery call is the perfect place to do so.
What is the overall key performance indicator the client is going to use?
Do they have any set KPIs already?
If they do, do they have any analytics dashboards set up?
Do they have any ongoing spreadsheet data that should have been put together as part of their reporting?
Do they have any YoY (year-over-year) data for the past 5 years of SEO?
If not, that’s not a bad sign, but it’s not a good one, either.
You don’t want to find out 2 months in that they never set up any SEO reporting in the first place, or that their previous SEO is holding their data hostage because they don’t want anyone else having access to that data.
I am sure that if you’re an experienced SEO, you have been there once or twice.
This is why these discovery questions are so important. They help establish these facts and give you a guideline on what you will be doing next in the overall SEO picture.
Don’t just take an account and start link building or throwing up pages and seeing what happens.
And then not report for 3 months.
That never helps anybody. SEO without reporting is like trying to farm without a tractor. You don’t want to have such a critical part of your SEO missing during the first couple of months!
How Many More Sales Do You Want?
More sales means more of an ROI (return on investment) for your business.
When it comes to generating potential sales, you want to know these metrics because it can help you pinpoint a trajectory for your business.
You can’t expect to really hit stride in a business until your sales continue to grow on a more consistent basis.
While you don’t necessarily have to have sales all the time, managing your company spending while making sure you bring in more sales revenue can help create a positive ROI from your SEO efforts.
The name of the game in SEO is final conversions and sales of your product or service.
What Do You Think Is a Reasonable Time-Frame for SEO Results?
This question establishes whether or not the client has realistic expectations in terms of when they will get the results they are looking for.
You never want to arrive at the end of the contract and find they were expecting results that were 15 times greater than what you can realistically provide.
When you perform discovery questions in the beginning – there is one goal: to determine whether or not this client is a waste of your time and money.
You don’t want to get 6 months in and find out that in the client’s mind, you are way under target.
Oftentimes, you may think that you are the one who is very close or right on target, but in the client’s mind, they have unrealistic time-frames and expect that their results will be way beyond what you would expect.
This question helps you and the client get on the same page, and if they decide they want to go elsewhere for an SEO provider, no harm, no foul. At least you found out early on rather than deep into the contract, right?
These discussions should be fundamental towards establishing the type of clients you want to work with, and making sure that the client you sign is indeed that kind of person.
We have all been there: we have signed a client only to find out that they were a nightmare to work with.
They provided no information. No analytics access. No Google Search Console access. And when it came time to begin an audit, they may have been nowhere to be found, even when you had critical tasks to accomplish and questions to ask.
Three weeks in, they decided they wanted to go with another provider because you didn’t give them the results they wanted after three weeks.
And in those three weeks, you haven’t even started the SEO work. Instead, you have likely been following up on phone calls and trying to get login information for WordPress. And you may have been getting login information for any tools that you need.
When you perform your discovery, you are mitigating your risk against these types of clients and other disasters.
Do You Have Any Requirements in Place for Reporting?
Another one that no company who is serious about creating a better online presence should be without.
These requirements, again, will help you to assess where you are now, so you know where you want to be in the future.
You wouldn’t go on a cruise without having any sort of compass, or other data to support your destinations right?
In the same way, you wouldn’t begin an SEO project without looking over YoY, or previous reporting to assess your current, desired goals.
If no requirements are in place for reporting, now is a great time to set these requirements.
They are essential, and can make or break any future strategic SEO decisions.
Do You Have a Budget in Mind for SEO and Any Potential Website Redesigns?
Defining a budget at the outset is an important consideration that not only brings you critical insight into the kind of company you’re dealing with, but also gives you insight into what they expect to pay for SEO.
Without coming right out and saying “we think you guys are a bunch of idiots for what you think you’re paying for.”
SEO goes without saying: you get what you pay for. You simply can’t expect to get premium results on a bronze payment plan.
The same goes with website design: you also get what you pay for.
Free themes and other site designs are great when they are a fit for your company.
But, more often than not, free themes are a waste of money and they seldom fit the company who chose them.
This is why custom designs are far superior and you can feel secure in that your company’s website is never going to appear on someone else’s (unless they steal it, but that’s another topic beyond the scope of this article).
What Other Advertising Do You Have Happening?
Search engine optimization efforts can be enhanced by other advertising campaigns working in tandem with each other.
There are several digital marketing services that are enhanced by other types of advertising, including search engine optimization.
For example, if you are an attorney, and you have billboards around town, you may want to include your website and phone number on every billboard.
If you have a new service that you are offering, advertising it with a cross-channel approach is sure to maximize the possibilities of your launch.
By the same token, you can also introduce conflicts with other advertising.
For paid ads under pay-per-click advertising, if you include the wrong link, or you tag links with the wrong UTM parameters, this can result in a misattribution of your marketing spend, which could be disastrous on many levels.
Through SEO discovery, it’s possible to discover these weaknesses and many others, especially if your client is a less-than-savvy client who is new to search engine optimization.
They may not be aware exactly how and why these digital marketing services can and do conflict with each other.
Has The Company Enlisted the Aid of a Web Development Agency for Any Reason?
During SEO discovery, you want to find out whether your client’s company has enlisted the aid of a web development agency – be it for SEO or web development purposes.
You don’t want to run the risk of someone else doing duplicate work on the site – that you don’t know about.
And you also don’t want to be in competition with someone else who may, for no good reason, work to invalidate your ideas and SEO strategy.
If you must work with another web development agency for any reason, you must make sure that everyone is on the same page regarding this, including the client.
No one should be working against each other. Everyone should be respectful. And above all else, play nice.
A great way to achieve great results is by making sure that the team meshes well with one another, and that they are not constantly attempting to undermine or otherwise leap-frog other members on the team in the name of competition.
Discover Opportunities to Obtain Valuable Traffic
Throughout SEO discovery, you may also find valuable traffic opportunities- ways to obtain organic traffic as well as traffic from other types of sources.
The more traffic sources you have, the better!
This comes from a thorough understanding of your client’s market, along with figuring out where they typically gain followers and their audience online.
Your competitor analysis will also help you reverse-engineer your competition’s online presence, which will give you better knowledge about how to execute certain SEO strategies that otherwise would not be done.
Don’t miss valuable traffic opportunities by having a lax SEO discovery process!
When Was The Last Time Your Site Was Redesigned?
Web design is a complex endeavor. And it can also result in significant gains in your site’s performance in the search results.
Quality work is important, and if you skimp on the quality in your next web design, it can cause issues.
While improvement in the search results won’t come directly, it can affect your performance in other ways.
If you have a web design that is causing you grief in terms of low Core Web Vitals scores, this needs to be improved. And sometimes, you may need an overhaul from the ground up.
Quality work is what will help improve your Core Web Vitals.
For example, making sure that your target audience takes precedence over flashy animations is critical.
This is why making sure that quality work goes into every aspect of your web design is vital.
Also, if you don’t pay attention to things like alternative text, this can impact accessibility negatively. And could cost you in the form of accessibility lawsuits.
Where quality work comes in is when a quality web design takes into consideration all of these factors, and much more.
This is why sometimes, getting rid of your existing eye sore of a web design could result in better performance – especially if your company also specializes in SEO friendly web design.
Finding out through SEO discovery when the last time a company’s last web design was is something that can give you low hanging fruit opportunities to improve a site’s SEO significantly overall.
Ask About Their Competitors
With a comprehensive competitor analysis, it’s possible to identify a company’s organic competitors as well as – some – of what they are doing successfully to SEO their own sites.
Through an SEO discovery process, you can figure out things about who your client thinks their competitors are, along with who their actual organic competitors are.
Who your client thinks your competitors are is oftentimes entirely different, when compared to who their actual organic competitors are.
Depending on your industry, clients may be in competition with themselves, thinking that Joe Blow down the street is an actual competitor.
This is often not the case. By going through the SEO discovery process and asking these questions, it is possible to differentiate between who is a real competitor and who is not.
SEO Discovery Can Help You Uncover Potential Customers
During the SEO discovery process, you may end up asking your client all about their potential customers.
Learning more about their potential customers’ buying habits and habits online can help you determine where to focus your SEO efforts so you can obtain better results for your client.
Whether it’s increased traffic, working to increase revenue through your client’s site, or helping your client’s customers stay connected, SEO discovery can help you unearth traffic opportunities that can help pay dividends to your client’s results.
Does Your Client Have an SEO Team?
This happens. A client may bring you in to figure out how to improve their processes, SEO results for their clients, whatever.
Through SEO discovery, you can figure out exactly who you will be working with if the client has an SEO team.
You want to find out the following:
- How much control the team has over the project
- Do they have an SEO Manager in charge of that SEO team?
- What kind of results the team has achieved over the past month, 2 months, 6 months, etc.
- What specific talents the team is good at, and where they need help.
- Who is on the team.
- When does the team usually work on the site?
- Why does the team do things they currently do?
Working with any internal teams that are on the client side, you will be able to move forward with the knowledge that you will be able to help them improve on everything they are doing.
If that is your goal.
Uncover Ranking Opportunities in SEO Discovery
Although traffic is not always equal to rankings, and rankings are not always equal to traffic in every situation – more often than not they usually are.
This is why the following equation is usually correct: rankings + traffic = leads.
But through SEO discovery, it’s possible to uncover things that your client may have been doing in the past, that they can do better as they move forward.
They may also have not noticed these ranking opportunities on their own.
Making sure that your client takes advantage of everything that you can possibly offer in order to increase their ranking should help go a long way towards increasing the trust they have in you as an SEO professional as well.
One of these is keyword discovery and improving their keyword research.
If they have only performed rudimentary keyword research before, you should be able to help them improve their keyword choices so they can create better traffic-driving keywords in the future.
By the same token, you may also be able to help them find better ranking opportunities.
These ranking opportunities then lead to increases in leads, and these leads in turn should also be converting customers, which leads to a positive increase in the client’s ROI (return on investment).
It’s important to make sure that, through SEO discovery, your client is well aware of the potential implications of getting leads in this fashion.
If they are an attorney, then they need to make sure that their intake process is air tight, and that no leads slip through the cracks of inferior intake professionals.
During this process, it’s important to make sure that supporting processes also take into consideration these factors.
By working on improving their site, along with many of the issues that you uncovered during your SEO discovery process, you should be able to help them improve their rankings as a result of these efforts.
SEO discovery should, in the end, result in a clear picture of all the things that need to be improved on a site that can result in significantly higher rankings, regardless of the total number of ranking pages and potential leads the client has now.
A Great Discovery Process Is Always about Asking the Right Questions
When you ask your client the right questions during discovery, you create better situations for yourself down the road.
If you don’t ask the right questions, you risk running into a situation where the client feels even less trust towards you than they did before.
This is the result we never want.
Instead, we always want to be a great solutions provider to all of our clients, who depend on us to drive rankings, increase traffic, and provide great results at the day’s end.
You never want to be the guy that the client is asking the questions to, because they are upset that their results are not where they should be.
- Why aren’t my leads increasing?
- Why isn’t my ranking increasing?
- Why isn’t my traffic increasing?
- Why aren’t my leads, ranking, and traffic increasing all at once?
- Why isn’t this service meeting my expectations?
Or they are unhappy with the site’s overall performance.
In the end, we must also take responsibility for everything that happens from the time of signing to the completion of the contract.
We never want to play the blame game – this just makes us look unprofessional.
It’s better to say you’re sorry and that you’ll look into it, and take the time to find an answer for the client, rather than saying that their developer is the one who did something wrong (because they will check).
Unless, of course, the developer really did do (or didn’t do) something that landed them in hot water.
Asking the right questions is the first step towards getting there and building your client’s trust into a positive relationship.
When do you plan on implementing your own SEO discovery process?
