Digital Agency New Client Questionnaire + Template

June 28th , 2019

You just signed a new client – congrats!

Now what…?

Client onboarding isn’t the sexiest topic, but it’s incredibly important. It’s the first impression of your new working relationship that needs to flow smoothly.

 

 

Sending your new client a set of onboarding questions is a fast, effective way to download information and launch a new campaign.

Within our “5 Phases” of an SEO campaign, this questionnaire form is a subprocess of our Campaign Onboarding Process. The full program dives into everything we do when executing SEO campaigns.

By popular demand, we’ve made this questionnaire available to you here for free.

new client onboarding questions

We group our questions into 6 categories:

question categories

We’ve listed out all of the onboarding questions here, but you can grab the [free] Google Docs version here.

It’s important to note, you’ll want to hack down the number of questions based on the campaign. We’ve given you the full universe, we don’t recommend sending this as is.

1. Onboarding their platforms

Do you have Google Analytics setup on your website?

If so, please share access with youremail@gmail.com

Do you have Google Search Console setup on your website?

If so, please share access with youremail@gmail.com

Do you have Google Tag Manager setup on your website?

If so, please share access with youremail@gmail.com

We might need to make edits to your website throughout this campaign.

Can you provide us a login to your website, control panel and hosting?

We will not make any changes without your permission.

Website

  • Username –
  • Password –

Control Panel

  • Username –
  • Password –

Hosting

  • Username –
  • Password –

 

 

2. Questions about the business

What are your goals for the company and what are the challenges you face in meeting your goals?
When was the company founded?
How many employees are in the company?
What do you estimate your revenue will be in the next 12 months – how does this compare to past years?
Are there any market trends we should know about?
What’s your top acquisition channel to date? How did you build that pipeline?
Can you outline your ideal customer? Who are they?
Is there anyone out there that you’d like us to take a look at (in terms of what they’re doing for marketing)? Please give us at least 3 competitors to review.
What KPIs are most important to you (i.e. phone calls, leads, sales, etc)?
What’s your value prop against your competitors?
What are your customers pain points? Have you gotten any negative feedback?
What is the average life of a customer and how exactly does the customer cycle look like?
Is your business cyclical or seasonal (i.e. are there periods of natural dips in traffic and sales)?
Do you have an internal developer / developer team (or external)? If we needed to modify code on the website, who would handle it? If we want to modify page titles and body text, who would handle it?
What marketing specific resources (people) do you have internally? Do they support you full time? Part time? Contractor? Offshore?
What type of resources (people) do you have internally that KNOW the your industry inside and out? Can we leverage them for certain aspects of the campaign (i.e. coming up with topics for content marketing that ONLY insiders know about)?

3. Questions about content

What websites you do use / trust for the best information in your industry?
Are there any content topics you’d like us to focus on specifically?
Are there any content topics you’d like us to NOT cover?
Do you have a content writer you’d like us to work with? Please provide contact info if yes.

 

 

4. Questions about link building

Are you currently doing anything to acquire links? Do you have a list of websites you’d like us to start with?
Has your website had any issues with link (Penguin) penalties?
Has your website had any issues with manual link warnings?
Are you currently doing PR (or have you in the past)?
Has your website had any issues with link (Penguin) penalties?
Do we have permission to do email outreach on behalf of your brand? Or, use someone in the company as the outreach person. (Sending emails from WEBRIS drives down success rates)

5. Questions about SEO

Can you provide us with keyword research done by previous agency / staff?
Can you provide us with reports / work done by previous agency (we don’t want to waste time with duplicate efforts)?
Do you do any “offline” marketing / advertising?
Are you running paid search ads? If so, can you provide us access to the data (for KW research)?
Do you have a list of target keywords or pages you’d like us to focus on? Please list them out.

6. Questions about email marketing

Are you capturing emails (on your website, paid campaigns, etc)?
What email platform do you use? How many subscribers? Open rate? CTR?
Are you utilizing any automation sequences or funnels?
How often do you send emails?

7. Questions about social media marketing

Are you currently spending any money on social advertising? Could you provide us with details on the campaigns?
For social media management, do you use an agency or internal team?
What social networks are you most active on (please provide profile URLs)?
Have you done any influencer campaigns? How did they end up?

Want More?

We created an entire module on Campaign Onboarding. It’s specific to SEO, but the pointers are relevant to Social Media and Advertising too.

It’s completely free – check it out below.

Article Updated: 7th December 2020

Ryan Stewart

I build, grow and sell digital agencies. Most recently, WEBRIS, a 7 figure SEO agency.

June 28th , 2019

7 Comments

COMMENTS (7)

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  • Joesays

    Pure gold, as always! Thanks Ryan.

  • Manmohan Singhsays

    The valuable set of questions for transparent audience and the goals.

  • Paul Learysays

    This is a great list of questions, some I have not thought of. Thanks Ryan!

  • amol tolbandesays

    Hey Ryan,

    I am really thankful for the process which you laid down for agency owner like me.

    looking forward the few great content in future as well.