We generally kick off all our PPC and SEO projects with some basic questions to further develop an understanding of our client’s market space. The goal of this is to determine what keywords we will end up targeting both for an SEO and PPC marketing campaign. If you are considering optimizing your website or launching an Adwords campaign, here are a few good questions to ask yourself before moving forward.



1. In one sentence, how would you define your service or product? Getting this questions answered will give you a framework to move forward.  Although the question is simple, it is important to be able to succinctly define your business proposition, as this will be very relevant for what your potential customers will be searching for.



2. Off the top of your head, what are five keywords that you think are highly relevant and important for your business? Because you are the expert in your business sector, you probably can think of several keywords and phrases that customers may be searching for to find your business.  The next step is to do some research on these keywords to find how important they are for your geographic area, what kind of volume they are pulling and what the rest of the related keywords are.  The Google Keyword Tool is a great and easy place to conduct a majority of this research.



3. What type of customers represent the strongest profit centers for your business so far? (geographic, demographic, etc.) Are there any markets you would like to target going forward?  This type of forward thinking will help you target a long term SEO strategy for your website.  There could be some niche markets that are relevant to your business that haven’t been tapped online yet.
4. What are a few competitors in your market space? Viewing your competitor’s online SEO architecture and PPC strategy will be very valuable to determine your own path moving forward.  Although there are several tools online to ‘view’ your competitors, many of them are unreliable to say the least.  The easiest path is to simply type your target keywords into Google and see which competitors pop up.  Click into a few of the websites, right click on their homepage and then click ‘View Page Source.’  This will allow you to view the page titles, meta keywords, descriptions, and H1 tags that your competitors are using to rank for your target keywords.