What I need to understand about your business before starting SEO
The questions behind a useful SEO plan: services, customers, capacity and what happens after an inquiry.
A website can have plenty of pages and still leave a prospective customer with important questions. Before recommending content or technical changes, I want to understand the business behind it.
These are the questions I use to start an SEO conversation. You can use them to prepare for ours or to organize priorities with your own team.
Which service would you like to sell more of?
The service attracting the most visits may be different from the one you want to develop. I want to know which services have a useful margin, which you can deliver and which you enjoy offering. Attracting inquiries for a service you cannot currently support can make operations harder.
You do not need to arrive with a complete financial model. A list of your services and an explanation of your priorities is a useful starting point.
Who hires you, and what do they ask first?
Existing customer conversations provide context. What do people need to understand? What information do you keep explaining? What makes someone postpone a decision?
Examples of common questions are useful, without the customer’s personal information. I then compare those questions with search and competitor research. That helps us decide what belongs on a service page and what deserves a supporting article.
What online presence do you already have?
We collect the website, social profiles and Google Business Profile, if one exists. We also check whether you have access to Search Console and Analytics. You do not need to send passwords through a form: permissions are arranged once we agree on the work.
If you do not have a website yet, the conversation changes. We first need to plan and build its foundations. Website development is a separate project from ongoing monthly SEO.
What happens when someone gets in touch?
I want to know who responds, what they ask and how they recognize an inquiry that fits. A visit and a sale are different moments. Understanding that path means discussing what happens beyond the website.
In ongoing work, I propose reviewing inquiry quality every two weeks. Simple categories can help: the requested service, the service area and whether the conversation progressed. This gives the numbers context without collecting unnecessary personal information.
What will we review together?
The first delivery should make the direction visible: an initial diagnosis, priorities and the first agreed improvements. We then review the work and its progress in a monthly meeting.
Rankings do not follow a timetable we can guarantee. Google explains that changes can take days or months to show an effect. It helps to distinguish work delivered, search signals and business outcomes. Source: Google Search Central.
To prepare for our conversation, bring your website if you have one, your priority services and a few questions your customers regularly ask. That is enough to make a useful start.
