SEO Tips by Steve

There are many ways to go about contacting potential SEO clients. Internet marketing services are in great demand, but the business has a bad rap from all of the people who promise high rankings and don't deliver. This causes website owners to be very skeptical when choosing a firm to manage their internet marketing and search engine optimization campaigns. When contacting sites to ask if they would be interested in your services you must be prepared to ask the proper questions and you must have reasonable answers to the prospects questions. There are a few general guidelines for gathering useful information from potential SEO clients. Some questions need to be answered before an analysis of their website can be completed so you know what your getting yourself into. If you can find a client who already has metrics tracking code installed (Google Analytics, Omniture, etc.) you are way ahead of the game. Being able to view and analyze a potential clients current rankings, number of visits, pageviews and other data will give you great insight when preparing a proposal. Some questions to ask:

• Introductions
• Is this your business?
• Can you explain exactly how your business works?
• Have you ever worked with a marketing or SEO company before? What was your experience?
  • We work on approval systems – you approve everything before it ever goes live
• Do you have a webmaster? Someone to take care of the HTML?
• Do you have someone managing pay per click? Negative keywords? Exact matches? Geo-targeting, etc..? Do they understand quality score?
• Landing pages – do they have any? Do they understand why they need them? For PPC
• What are 3 things someone would type in to find their business on the search engines?
• Name 3 competitors
• Explain the way spiders work, from coming to your site, how often, seeing the url, title and meta data, then h1’s, content, navigation etc… looking for a common theme
• Are you tracking visits? What are you using to track visits?
• Explain the way our system works
  • We will provide you with a project plan and proposal all in one shot…
    

Make sure to plug in custom questions about their site, CMS, programming, purpose of site, goals of site, etc.... into this template.