30 SEO Questions to Ask New Clients (+ Free Questionnaire Template)

In this article, you’ll get a battle-tested list of 30 questions to ask every new SEO client—organized into seven sections that cover everything from platform access to AI search readiness. You’ll also learn why each question matters and what to do with each answer so you can build a sharper strategy from day one. And at the end, you’ll find a free questionnaire template you can copy and customize for your agency or freelance practice.

Grab the free SEO client questionnaire template

Before we dive in, you can make a copy of our questionnaire template and start customizing it right now.

The template mirrors the seven sections in this article:

1. Platform access and existing documentation

2. Questions about their business

3. Questions about their website

4. Questions about their goals and KPIs

5. Questions about previous marketing efforts

6. Questions about link building and digital PR

7. Questions about AI search readiness

A few notes before we start.

First, you should brand the template. Add your logo, swap in your brand colors, and include your agency name in the header. Small details signal professionalism.

Second, not every question will apply to every client. An e-commerce brand will need questions about product feeds and faceted navigation that a local services business won’t. A SaaS company may need deeper questions about documentation and developer content. Adjust accordingly.

Third, consider creating separate templates for different client types. One for e-commerce, one for local SEO, one for B2B SaaS. This saves time and shows the client you understand their world before the first strategy call.

With that, let’s go through each section.

Section 1. Getting access to platforms and documentation

Access to your client’s existing data isn’t optional—it’s the foundation of every recommendation you’ll make. Without it, you’re guessing. And guessing is expensive.

Question 1: Do you have Google Analytics set up? If so, can you grant us access?

Why it matters: Google Analytics is the single most important data source for understanding what’s actually happening on the site. You need it to benchmark current performance, identify top-performing pages, analyze user behavior, and measure the impact of your SEO work over time.

What to do with the answer: If they have GA4 set up, ask for Editor or Analyst access. If they’re still on an older setup or don’t have Analytics at all, flag this as a priority task in your first sprint. No analytics means no baseline, and no baseline means you can’t prove ROI.

Question 2: Do you have Google Search Console set up? Can you share access?

Why it matters: Search Console shows you what Google actually sees—crawl errors, indexing issues, keyword rankings, and click-through rates. It’s your diagnostic tool for technical SEO and organic search performance.

What to do with the answer: Request Owner or Full User access. Check the property type: are they using Domain or URL-prefix? If they have multiple properties (www vs. non-www, HTTP vs. HTTPS), note this—it can indicate configuration issues. Review the last 16 months of data to establish trends before you make any changes.

Question 3: Do you have Google Ads set up? If so, can you share access?

Why it matters: Even if SEO is your primary focus, Google Ads data is gold. It reveals which keywords convert, which landing pages drive revenue, and what ad copy resonates with the audience. This can shortcut months of keyword research.

What to do with the answer: If they run Ads, request read-only access to their account. Pull the Search Terms report to identify high-converting keywords you should prioritize organically. If they don’t run Ads, that’s fine—but make a note, because you won’t have paid search data to inform your strategy.

Question 4: Do you have access to any existing SEO documentation, keyword research, or audit reports?

Why it matters: Previous agencies or consultants may have done work that’s still relevant. You don’t want to duplicate a full technical audit if one was completed six months ago. More importantly, existing documentation can reveal what strategies were tried and whether they worked.

What to do with the answer: Ask for any keyword maps, content calendars, technical audit reports, or strategy decks. Review them critically. Look for gaps, outdated recommendations, and opportunities the previous team missed.

Question 5: What CMS does your website run on, and who has admin access?

Why it matters: The CMS dictates what you can and can’t do. WordPress with full admin access? You can implement most changes yourself. A custom-built CMS managed by an in-house dev team? Every change goes through a ticket queue. Shopify? Some technical SEO limitations are baked in.

What to do with the answer: Map the implementation path. If you need developer support, find out who the point of contact is, what their sprint cycle looks like, and how long changes typically take to go live. This will directly affect your project timelines.

Section 2. Questions about your client’s business

SEO doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Every keyword you target, every page you optimize, every link you build needs to serve the business. This section helps you understand the business deeply enough to align your SEO strategy with what actually matters.

Question 6: Can you describe your business in one or two sentences—as if explaining it to someone unfamiliar with your industry?

Why it matters: This isn’t small talk. Their answer reveals how they think about their value proposition, which directly affects how you’ll position them in search. If they struggle to articulate what they do, you’ve already identified a messaging problem that will affect everything from title tags to landing page copy.

What to do with the answer: Use their language as a starting point for your keyword and topic research. The words they use to describe their business often align with how potential customers search.

Question 7: Who is your ideal customer? What does a high-value lead look like for you?

Why it matters: SEO that drives the wrong traffic is worse than no SEO at all. You need to know whether they’re targeting enterprise buyers, SMBs, consumers, or a specific niche—so you can prioritize keywords and content that attract the right audience.

What to do with the answer: Build a simple persona. Note their ideal customer’s job title (for B2B), demographics, pain points, and the language they use when searching for solutions. This persona should inform every piece of content and every keyword strategy decision going forward. Tools like Analyze AI’s free Keyword Generator can help you expand initial seed keywords into broader topic clusters once you understand the audience.

Question 8: Who are your top three to five business competitors?

Why it matters: Business competitors and SEO competitors are often different. But your client’s perceived competitors are a useful starting point—they reveal the market landscape and give you domains to analyze for keyword gaps, content ideas, and backlink opportunities.

What to do with the answer: Run a competitor analysis on each domain using an SEO tool. Compare their organic traffic, top-ranking keywords, content strategy, and backlink profiles. Identify where your client is behind—and where you can leapfrog. Free tools like Analyze AI’s Website Traffic Checker and SERP Checker can give you a quick read on competitor positioning before you invest in a full paid analysis.

This is also where AI search enters the picture. Your client’s competitors in traditional search may not be the same brands dominating AI-generated answers. Run a few of the client’s core prompts—the questions their customers would ask ChatGPT or Perplexity—and check which brands appear. You’ll often find unexpected players.

With Analyze AI, you can automate this. The Competitors dashboard surfaces entities that are frequently mentioned alongside your client’s brand across AI search engines, showing you exactly who’s winning the prompts that matter.

Question 9: Is your business seasonal? Are there specific months or periods where demand spikes or drops?

Why it matters: Seasonality affects everything—keyword volume, content timing, and how you interpret traffic changes. If you don’t know that December is always slow for your B2B SaaS client, you might panic over a traffic dip that’s entirely normal.

What to do with the answer: Map their seasonal patterns to your content calendar. Plan campaigns and content pushes two to three months before peak seasons so pages have time to rank. During slow periods, focus on foundational work like technical improvements, content refreshes, and link building.

Question 10: What are your primary products or services, and which ones are most important to grow?

Why it matters: Most businesses have multiple offerings but limited SEO budget. This question forces prioritization. If they have 20 products but 80% of revenue comes from three of them, that’s where your effort should go first.

What to do with the answer: Rank their products or services by business impact. Align your keyword research and content strategy with the ones they want to grow most, and build a phased roadmap that tackles high-priority areas first.

Question 11: What geographic markets do you serve? Local, national, or international?

Why it matters: The answer completely changes your strategy. A local business needs Google Business Profile optimization and local citation building. A national brand needs broad keyword targeting. An international company may need hreflang tags, country-specific content, and a multi-domain or subdirectory strategy.

What to do with the answer: If local, verify their Google Business Profile is claimed and optimized. If international, audit their current internationalization setup and identify gaps. Match your keyword research to the specific markets they serve.

Section 3. Questions about their website

Your client’s website is where everything happens. Before you touch a single meta tag, you need to understand what you’re working with.

Question 12: How many domains, subdomains, or microsites does your business operate?

Why it matters: Many businesses have more digital properties than they realize—a blog on a subdomain, a careers site, an old microsite from a campaign three years ago. Each one affects SEO, and you need a complete inventory.

What to do with the answer: Document every property. Check if they’re all linked properly, whether any are cannibalizing keywords, and if consolidation would help. A common scenario: the company blog lives on a subdomain that gets no authority from the main domain. That might need to change.

Question 13: Are there any planned website changes—redesigns, migrations, or major feature launches—in the next 6 to 12 months?

Why it matters: This is a red-flag question. A site migration can wipe out organic traffic if handled poorly. A redesign might remove pages that currently rank. A new platform launch might break URL structures. You need to know this before you build a strategy that assumes the current site stays stable.

What to do with the answer: If a migration or redesign is planned, immediately prioritize a migration plan. Document current URLs, set up redirect mapping, and ensure someone on the team understands how to preserve SEO equity. If there’s no planned migration, great—you can focus on optimization instead of damage control.

Question 14: Does your website have any known technical issues—slow loading times, crawl errors, indexing problems?

Why it matters: Technical issues are the silent killers of SEO performance. A site that takes five seconds to load or blocks Googlebot from crawling key pages will underperform no matter how good the content is.

What to do with the answer: Run a quick crawl audit using a tool like Screaming Frog or an SEO audit tool as part of your onboarding. Compare what the client reports with what you find. Common discoveries: orphan pages, duplicate content, broken internal links, missing canonicals, and unoptimized Core Web Vitals. Analyze AI’s free Broken Link Checker is a good starting point for identifying link rot across the site before committing to a full crawl.

Question 15: Do you have a staging or development environment where we can test changes before pushing them live?

Why it matters: You need a safe place to test changes—especially for enterprise clients where a broken page can mean lost revenue. If they don’t have one, you’ll need to be much more careful with implementation and may need to recommend setting one up.

What to do with the answer: If they have a staging site, verify it’s blocked from search engines (check robots.txt and meta noindex). If they don’t, factor this into your workflow. You may need to implement changes during off-peak hours and test in smaller batches.

Section 4. Questions about goals and KPIs

This is where you align expectations. Misaligned goals are the number one reason client relationships fall apart.

Question 16: What are your primary goals for SEO? What does success look like in 6 months? In 12 months?

Why it matters: You need concrete targets, not vague aspirations. “We want more traffic” is not a goal. “We want to increase organic traffic by 30% and organic-attributed leads by 20% in 12 months” is a goal you can plan against.

What to do with the answer: If their goals are vague, help them get specific. Use your initial data review to set realistic baselines and targets. If their goals are unrealistic—like ranking #1 for a head term dominated by billion-dollar companies in three months—this is the time to recalibrate. Use a Keyword Difficulty Checker to show them the competitive landscape for their target terms, and a Keyword Rank Checker to establish their current positions. Be honest. It builds trust.

Question 17: What KPIs do you currently track to measure marketing success?

Why it matters: KPIs reveal what the business actually values. Some clients care about traffic. Others care about leads. Others care about revenue. If you optimize for traffic but they measure leads, you’ll look like a failure even if you’re doing great work.

What to do with the answer: Map your SEO work to their existing KPIs wherever possible. If they track leads, make sure your reporting shows how organic traffic converts into leads. If they track revenue, set up e-commerce tracking or lead value attribution so you can demonstrate ROI in their language.

Question 18: What is your monthly budget for SEO, and how is it currently allocated?

Why it matters: Budget determines scope. A $2,000/month budget gets a very different engagement than $20,000/month. You need to know this to set realistic expectations and plan your deliverables.

What to do with the answer: Be transparent about what their budget can achieve. If it’s too low for their goals, say so. A good consultant helps clients understand the relationship between investment and results rather than overpromising and underdelivering. Break the budget into categories: strategy, content production, technical implementation, link building, and tools.

Question 19: How do you prefer to receive reports and updates? How often?

Why it matters: Communication preferences vary wildly. Some clients want a weekly 30-minute call. Others want a monthly written report. Enterprise clients may need different reports for different stakeholders—one for the marketing team, another for the C-suite.

What to do with the answer: Standardize your deliverables but customize the format. At a minimum, most clients should get a monthly report covering performance metrics, work completed, and plans for the next period, along with a regular check-in call. Set this cadence in writing during onboarding to avoid scope creep later.

Section 5. Questions about previous marketing efforts

Understanding the past saves you from repeating mistakes and helps you build on what already works.

Question 20: Have you worked with an SEO agency or consultant before? Why did that engagement end?

Why it matters: This is one of the most revealing questions you can ask. If they’ve churned through three agencies in two years, that’s a signal—either they have unrealistic expectations, or they haven’t found the right fit. Either way, you need to understand the pattern.

What to do with the answer: Listen carefully. If they say the previous agency “didn’t communicate well,” make communication a cornerstone of your engagement. If they say “we didn’t see results,” dig deeper: was the agency actually underperforming, or was the client expecting too much too fast? Use this to calibrate your approach and set yourself apart from day one.

Question 21: What other marketing channels are you currently investing in—paid search, social, email, PR?

Why it matters: SEO doesn’t work in isolation. If they’re running Google Ads, you can use that conversion data. If they have a strong email list, you can leverage it for content promotion. If they’re doing digital PR, you can coordinate link building efforts.

What to do with the answer: Identify synergies. Paid search data can inform your keyword research. Social media engagement signals can reveal what content topics resonate with their audience. Email newsletter performance can tell you which blog posts drive the most clicks. The best SEO strategies are integrated, not siloed.

Question 22: Do you have an existing content creation process or content team?

Why it matters: Content is the engine of most SEO strategies. Knowing whether they have in-house writers, use freelancers, or have no content process at all determines how you’ll plan content production.

What to do with the answer: If they have an in-house team, coordinate with them on editorial calendars and briefs. If they rely on freelancers, evaluate the quality of the existing content. If they have no content process, building one becomes part of your scope. Either way, assess their existing content library for quality, relevance, and opportunities to refresh or consolidate.

Question 23: Have you implemented any SEO standard operating procedures (SOPs) in the past? Do you have a content style guide?

Why it matters: SOPs and style guides tell you how mature their marketing operation is. A company with documented SEO processes is easier to work with because expectations and workflows are already established.

What to do with the answer: If they have SOPs, review them. Are they current? Do they align with best practices? If they’re outdated, update them as part of your engagement. If they have no SOPs, consider creating a lightweight set as a deliverable—it adds value and reduces friction for ongoing work.

Section 6. Questions about link building and digital PR

Link building remains one of the most impactful (and most misunderstood) parts of SEO. These questions help you assess the current state of their backlink profile and avoid stepping on any landmines.

Question 24: Have you done any link building in the past? If so, what methods were used?

Why it matters: You need to know what you’re inheriting. Legitimate editorial link building? Great. Guest posting at scale? Worth investigating. Paid link schemes or PBN links? That’s a cleanup project before you can do anything else.

What to do with the answer: Run a backlink analysis on the domain using a tool like Analyze AI’s Website Authority Checker or a backlink tool. Look for spammy patterns: large volumes of links from low-quality sites, exact-match anchor text, or links from irrelevant foreign-language sites. If you find red flags, document them and discuss next steps with the client before you start building.

Question 25: Do you have an in-house team or freelancer currently working on link acquisition?

Why it matters: You don’t want to compete with or duplicate someone else’s efforts. If another team is already doing outreach, you need to coordinate to avoid contacting the same publishers or building links to the same pages.

What to do with the answer: If they have an existing link building operation, establish clear ownership. Who handles what? Which pages are priorities? Create a shared tracking sheet so everyone can see what’s in progress and avoid overlap.

Question 26: Has your site ever received a manual action or penalty from Google?

Why it matters: A manual action is serious. It means Google found something violating their guidelines—usually related to links or content quality. If it hasn’t been resolved, all your SEO work will be fighting uphill.

What to do with the answer: Check Google Search Console’s Manual Actions report. If there’s an active penalty, resolving it becomes priority one. You’ll need to identify the cause, clean it up (usually through link disavows or content removal), and submit a reconsideration request. Only after the penalty is lifted can normal SEO work begin.

Question 27: Are you open to digital PR and content-driven link building as part of your strategy?

Why it matters: The best links come from creating content worth linking to—original research, data studies, tools, and expert commentary. If your client is open to investing in these assets, your link building will be far more sustainable than manual outreach alone.

What to do with the answer: If they’re open to it, plan content assets that attract links organically. Think data studies, industry surveys, free tools, or comprehensive guides. If they’re not open to it (budget constraints, brand concerns), focus on relationship-based outreach and earned media opportunities.

Section 7. Questions about AI search readiness

Here’s the section most SEO questionnaires miss entirely.

AI-powered search engines—ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Mode, Claude, Microsoft Copilot, Gemini—are generating a growing volume of answers to the same questions your client’s customers ask. These aren’t replacing traditional SEO. But they are creating a parallel channel that’s becoming harder to ignore.

The brands that appear in these AI-generated answers get visibility, credibility, and increasingly, direct traffic. The brands that don’t? They’re leaving an emerging organic channel on the table.

These questions help you assess where your client stands in AI search and identify opportunities.

Question 28: Are you aware of how your brand appears in AI-generated search answers (like ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google AI Mode)?

Why it matters: Most clients have no idea whether AI search engines mention their brand—or what they say when they do. This question opens a conversation about a channel that’s growing fast and that few competitors are actively optimizing for.

What to do with the answer: Whether they’re aware or not, run a quick check. Type their core prompts—the questions their customers would ask—into ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Mode. Note which brands appear, what the AI says about your client, and where competitors are mentioned instead.

With Analyze AI, you can do this systematically rather than manually. The Ad Hoc Prompt Search feature lets you enter any prompt and instantly see which brands are mentioned across AI search engines—before you commit to tracking it long-term.

Question 29: Do you know which of your website pages currently receive traffic from AI search engines?

Why it matters: AI search traffic is real and growing. Many brands are already receiving sessions from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Copilot—they just don’t know it because standard analytics don’t segment this traffic cleanly.

What to do with the answer: Check their GA4 data for referrals from AI platforms. Look for source domains like chatgpt.com, perplexity.ai, copilot.microsoft.com, and gemini.google.com. If you find AI referral traffic, document it as a baseline. If you don’t find any, that’s useful too—it tells you this is a growth opportunity.

Analyze AI’s AI Traffic Analytics dashboard connects directly to GA4 and breaks down AI referral traffic by engine, landing page, and engagement metrics—so you can see exactly which pages are working in AI search and which engines are driving the most sessions.

The Landing Pages report takes this further by showing you which specific pages receive AI-referred traffic, along with the prompts that cited them—so you can identify patterns in the content that AI engines prefer to reference.

Question 30: Have your competitors started optimizing for AI search visibility?

Why it matters: If your client’s competitors are already showing up in AI-generated answers and your client isn’t, that’s a gap worth closing. Conversely, if no one in the space is optimizing for AI search yet, there’s a first-mover advantage to capture.

What to do with the answer: Use Analyze AI to track competitors across AI search engines. The Competitors dashboard shows which brands appear most frequently in AI-generated responses for prompts relevant to your client’s industry—and the Sources dashboard reveals exactly which URLs and domains AI models cite most often.

This data is invaluable during onboarding. It shows the client a landscape they’ve never seen before, and it positions you as a consultant who understands where search is going—not just where it’s been.

How to use AI search data to strengthen your SEO strategy

The AI search questions above aren’t just nice-to-haves. They produce data that directly improves your traditional SEO strategy.

Here’s how.

Discover content gaps. The prompts where your client is absent in AI answers often correspond to keywords where they also lack strong content. If ChatGPT answers “best CRM for small businesses” and doesn’t mention your client, it’s likely because their content on that topic is either weak or nonexistent. Fixing this improves both traditional and AI search visibility.

Validate keyword priorities. If a keyword drives both Google search volume and AI prompt volume, it deserves higher priority than one that only appears in traditional search. Analyze AI’s Prompts dashboard lets you track which prompts mention your client’s brand and how that visibility changes over time—giving you a signal to complement traditional keyword data.

Identify citation-worthy sources. AI models cite specific URLs when generating answers. If your client’s competitor is getting cited from a particular blog post or resource page, you know exactly what content you need to create (and improve on) to compete for that citation. Analyze AI’s Sources dashboard breaks this down by content type, top cited domains, and individual URLs.

Monitor brand perception. AI search engines don’t just mention brands—they describe them. And those descriptions can be positive, neutral, or negative. The Perception Map in Analyze AI shows you how AI models characterize your client’s brand compared to competitors, so you can identify and address narrative gaps early.

Report AI search performance alongside traditional SEO. Clients increasingly want to know how their brand performs across all search channels. Analyze AI’s Weekly Emails automatically summarize changes in visibility, citations, sentiment, and AI traffic—giving you a ready-made update to share with clients each week without extra manual work.

Putting it all together: your onboarding workflow

Asking the right questions is step one. What you do with the answers is what separates good consultants from great ones.

Here’s a practical workflow for turning your questionnaire responses into action:

Week 1: Discovery call + questionnaire. Walk through the questionnaire on a live call. Don’t email it as a form—the conversation is where the real insights surface. Ask follow-up questions. Take notes on tone, priorities, and anything unsaid.

Week 2: Technical audit + competitor analysis. Use the platform access from Section 1 to run a full site audit. Analyze the competitors they named. Layer in AI search data: run the client’s core prompts through Analyze AI, set up competitor tracking, and document their current AI search baseline.

Week 3: Strategy and roadmap. Synthesize everything into a 90-day plan. Prioritize based on impact and effort. Present the plan on a call, tying every recommendation back to the client’s stated goals from Section 4.

Week 4: Kickoff. Start executing. Ship your first quick wins. Begin tracking the KPIs you agreed on. Set up your reporting cadence.

This process works whether you’re a solo freelancer or a 50-person agency. The questionnaire ensures you start with the right information. The workflow ensures you turn that information into results.

Quick-reference: all 30 questions at a glance

Final thoughts

That’s 30 SEO questions to ask new clients, organized into seven sections, with a template you can copy and customize today.

Most client questionnaires stop at “what to ask” and never tell you what to do with the answers. That’s a miss. The real value of a questionnaire is in how it shapes your strategy—not in the checkbox you tick.

Here’s the bigger point: a questionnaire isn’t a form to complete and file away. It’s the beginning of a strategic conversation. The best client relationships start with genuine curiosity about the business, honest expectations about what SEO can achieve, and a clear-eyed view of the landscape—including the AI search channels that are growing alongside traditional search every month.

Make a copy of the template. Customize it to your practice. And don’t skip Section 7. AI search isn’t replacing SEO—but it’s expanding what organic visibility means. The agencies and freelancers who understand this will build stronger client relationships and deliver more comprehensive results.

If you want to add AI search visibility to your client reporting and onboarding process, Analyze AI gives you the data to do it—from competitor tracking to prompt monitoring to AI traffic attribution. It’s how you show clients a complete picture of their organic performance across both traditional and AI search channels.