SEO Client Involvement

Hi All,

I wonder if anyone could drop a list of things we need from client before we start there project.

couple of things i have in my mind like:
Keyword Preference
There Website Statastics
Previous SEO History.

Thanks in Advance,

oh boy!

that exactly what you don't want to hear from someone doing you search engine optimization

LOL! Oh boy! I recommend you read some blogs and buy some books.

First create a checklist on the procedures that you will be doing for their websites optimization. From then you can list everything you need before the optimization project begins.

Why would you ask your client their keyword preferences? That's what they're hiring you for. You're the SEO, they don't know what keywords they need to target to hit the right audience

This is actually not true

When we took over some web sites from other web design company, clients were pretty well informed what their keywords were, how to manage Google AdWords campaign and so on. Probably because they depend on their web sites to make sales

We usually consider it's a good practice to assume client knows what he's doing, unless he says otherwise. Besides - he knows his competitors better, and his niche better as well, so it's a good idea to consult client, even if he doesn't know what SEO stands for

Some clients will have more knowledge than others and will be able to do some SEO themselves. The reason they seek out SEO people is because with their best efforts they have failed to boost rankings and so employ someone to analyse the site with the aim to boost rankings in serps and sales as a result. Also reducing advertising costs due to better serps returns then the SEO will have done their job.

The main thing I would ask from a client is:

Who are your main competitors?

Why - if you dont know their competitors then you cannot perform SEO to out perform their competitors unless you get lucky. Their competitors may have employed an SEO who has brought their serps to top rankings - narrowed keywords, restructured keywords/phrases, edited page content and such like.

The list of the main competitors will give you some basis for comparison without ripping the exact same information from their competitor sites - as there could also be many offpage factors that determine the competitors better serps results.

For keyword preference - some clients will be adamant that they want some words included - the list will always be incomplete - SEO will refine the list and improve it.

It would be good to have an SEO history plus advertising history... what advertising means did they employ... did they or are they getting penalised from any current advertising methods / tricks to artificially boost rankings.

If you know every advertising provider they approached you can do the research on those companies and check for any adverse ratings.

I am not an SEO, I wish I was as I find the basic SEO a very interesting topic - I just lack the finances & programming skills to develop my own analytics tools or hire someone to create the tools .