Developing A Survey To Assist With SEO Plan

[Function5]

Hello everyone,

I searched through the forums to see if this has come up but it appears that it has not.

I am in the process of developing an SEO plan for a client as part of an educational research project.

As part of general research, we are planning on sending out a survey/questionnaire to all of the client's contacts in order to help us develop the SEO plan. Obviously a big emphasis would be placed on keywords (i.e. what keywords would you use if you were looking for ______) but there are other areas to look at as well.

So, I would greatly appreciate any suggestions regarding the types of questions to ask in a SEO research project like this. What would you ask? What would you be interested in?

If clarification is needed, please let me know.

[Function5]

Thanks for your prompt response EGOL I agree that asking those questions to the people directly involved in the business would yield interesting and valuable results.

However, this project requires that we survey the organization's clients. The clients are directly impacted by the performance of the organization's website, and as such, they will be interested in helping out. As such, I'm curious as to what questions would be most valuable to ask.

The results of the survey need to direct the SEO plan to some degree, so the questions should relate to how the organization can improve their website, mainly from an SEO perspective. Does this make sense?

Further feedback would be much appreciated!

[EGOL]

I would rather speak with the person who every day answers the telephone at the business and ask that person how people, new to the business, ask for the products.  If the business has a store where customers come in to make purchases the people who serve these customers can provide similar information.

These types of employees are often extremely valuable in understanding the language of new customers who are having their first contact with the business.

I would do that rather than putting this information out to all of client's contacts.  I think that it would be easier to give this small number of employees the knowledge needed to answer your question properly than it would be to get good feedback from Joe Schmoe who will most likely delete or toss your questionnaire.

These people can also provide lots of information about customer misconceptions about the product, problems that they encounter.  These can be very valuable guides to content creation.