In an ideal world, you as the consulting company would know all the right questions to ask. I’ve outlined a series of questions you as the SEO vendor likely want to get answered, the information you’ll want the client to share, and accounts you’ll need access to.
Accounts You Need to Access
Getting access to important data is a crucial first step in the SEO process. If you’re doing regular reporting, a technical SEO audit, and/or content promotion and link outreach, you’ll likely need access to a combination of the following:
Google Search Console: These accounts provide a ton of useful SEO information (e.g., detailed search analytics data) that can be crucial in diagnosing indexation issues or errors with XML sitemaps.
Google Analytics: Similarly, you’ll also obviously want to monitor and measure traffic fluctuations.
Google AdWords: This process has a few steps and can be a bit annoying for the client, but getting granular pay-per-click search query data can be useful for an SEO (you should probably know your way around your own AdWords account as well).
Additional Analytics Accounts: If your client uses a tool like Omniture, again having access there will be valuable.
Company Email: If you’ll be doing link outreach/content promotion on your client’s behalf, getting an email from the company (e.g. your.name@example.com) can help with response rates.
Access to CMS: If you’ll be making updates on your client’s site, getting early CMS access can also be helpful (just make sure you clearly communicate what you’ll be updating and when).
Access to Log Files: If you’re performing a technical SEO audit, you may want access to the log files for your client’s site.
Questions You Need to Ask
Can you list out any specific industries or sectors you want to target? If this applicable to your client.
Who is your target audience or ideal customer? Encourage your client to over share here ask them to send specific persona materials, information about how specific buyers use their products, etc.
Are there “copies” of your site that may live elsewhere on the web?
Do you have a staging server?
Does the .net version of your domain show all of your content?
Do you have translated international versions of your site’s content?
Encourage them to include any additional information they think may be helpful such as goals, internal expectations beyond their team for the project, areas of concern, things they perceive as strengths about their site’s SEO that they want to make sure they don’t lose traction on, additional questions they hope to get answers to as a result of an initial audit.
The better you communicate with your clients from the start, the better your results are likely to be.
Referenced by: https://www.searchenginejournal.com