Describe your agency, services, and onboarding process. Makeform turns the brief into an SEO client questionnaire that gathers goals, site details, audiences, competitors, access needs, and approval preferences before discovery begins.
Route new-client answers to Slack, Google Sheets, and Zapier.
Sample prompts for the builder
Choose a starting point, tailor the prompt, or send it to the Makeform builder. Each structure is an example you can edit.
Audience
New retainers entering strategy and technical discovery
Format
Multi-step onboarding questionnaire with conditional sections
Prompt size
470 chars
Example questionnaire structure
Multi-step onboarding questionnaire with conditional sections
Business goals and priority conversions
Website, CMS, and target markets
Which SEO services apply?
Organic-search competitors
Access and approval readiness
Suggested routing tags
Technical SEO
Content strategy
Local SEO
Ask clients to name the business outcome behind each SEO goal; rankings alone do not explain which leads or sales matter.
Step 1
Brief
services, scope, and client type
Step 2
Build
goals, site, access, and competitor fields
Step 3
Share
one onboarding link before kickoff
Step 4
Review
route gaps to the account team
Start discovery with context
A structured SEO client questionnaire gives strategists the business, website, and operational context they need to ask better follow-up questions.
Capture priority services, products, markets, conversions, and revenue context so the strategy is tied to what the client actually wants to grow.
Collect CMS, hosting, analytics, migrations, locations, languages, and known issues in structured sections instead of scattered email replies.
Identify the day-to-day contact, technical owner, subject experts, content approver, and reporting audience before work stalls in review.
Adapt the intake
Begin with the closest engagement, then change the language, required fields, and conditional paths to fit your delivery process.
Cover goals, service scope, stakeholders, access, implementation resources, reporting cadence, and quarterly priorities.
Add location inventories, service areas, profile ownership, directory details, local competitors, and review workflows.
Ask about platforms, catalogs, merchandising calendars, priority categories, markets, revenue measurement, and developer support.
Focus the intake on symptoms, change history, access readiness, past reports, technical constraints, and the team receiving findings.
Questionnaire workflow
Generate the structure, make agency-specific edits, and send one organized intake before strategists begin research.
Tell the builder what you sell, who completes the intake, and whether the work covers technical SEO, content, local search, ecommerce, or a defined audit.
Replace generic terms with your agency language, require the essentials, and reveal location, store, or international questions only when relevant.
Publish one link in the welcome email and set a completion date that leaves the strategist time to inspect answers before the call.
Send submissions to the account owner, flag missing access or unclear goals, and turn unresolved items into a focused kickoff agenda.
Form vs document vs email
The best format depends on scope, but structured fields make recurring agency onboarding easier to review and route.
Field guide
Use six focused sections to understand the opportunity, locate important systems, and learn how recommendations will move through the client organization.
Goals & measurement
Ask for business objectives before keyword preferences. The answers should explain which offers, conversions, audiences, and markets deserve attention and how the client currently evaluates organic search.
Website & technology
Record the domains, platforms, hosting arrangement, redesign history, and internal owners. This helps the team distinguish a strategy question from an implementation dependency.
Search history
Previous agencies, audits, content programs, link work, and major traffic changes are important context. Ask for approximate dates and source files instead of relying on memory during kickoff.
Audience & competitors
Clients often name only their commercial competitors. Ask who wins the same buyers and which sites repeatedly appear for important searches, then collect customer language and buying considerations.
Access & assets
Ask which systems exist, who can grant user access, and whether ownership is verified. Use invitation-based access processes; the questionnaire should not request account passwords or secret keys.
Workflow & communication
Recommendations only help when someone can review and implement them. Capture stakeholders, approval stages, meeting rhythm, reporting audience, deadlines, and practical constraints up front.
Related tools
Pair SEO discovery with broader onboarding, branding, content, competitor, and website planning forms.
Collect contacts, scope, milestones, files, and communication preferences for the wider engagement.
Open toolUnderstand brand positioning, audiences, voice, differentiators, and visual direction.
Open toolStructure competitor observations, alternatives, strengths, weaknesses, and market context.
Open toolTurn content needs into briefs with audience, topic, intent, source, and approval details.
Open toolGather site requirements, pages, functionality, stakeholders, assets, and launch constraints.
Open toolCreate a general-purpose discovery questionnaire for services beyond SEO.
Open toolFAQ
Practical answers for agencies and freelancers designing a repeatable SEO intake.
An SEO client questionnaire is an onboarding form used to collect the context needed for an organic-search engagement. It usually covers business goals, priority offers, audiences, websites, past SEO work, competitors, measurement systems, access readiness, stakeholders, approvals, and deadlines.
Start with business outcomes, priority conversions, products or services, target audiences, markets, and differentiators. Then ask about domains, CMS and hosting, migrations, known issues, previous SEO work, competitors, analytics and Search Console ownership, implementation resources, content approval, reporting expectations, and timing.
Keep every question tied to a decision your team will make. A focused audit may need a short intake, while an international ecommerce retainer needs more branches. Group questions into clear sections, use multiple choice where choices are known, and reserve long answers for context that cannot be captured cleanly.
No. Ask which platforms they use, whether ownership is verified, and who can send an invitation to the correct agency account. Keep passwords, recovery codes, API keys, and other secrets out of the questionnaire, and use each platform's user-access process instead.
Yes, if it uses conditional sections. First ask which business and site models apply, then reveal location inventories, catalogs and merchandising, or country and language questions only when relevant. This keeps the core intake consistent without forcing every client through unrelated fields.
Send it after scope and the main client contact are confirmed, but early enough to review the submission before kickoff. Explain who should contribute, which files or access invitations may be needed, and when answers are due. Use the kickoff to clarify important gaps rather than reading the form together.
Yes. Makeform is unlimited free for generating, editing, publishing, and collecting responses with your questionnaire. The paid tier removes the Makeform badge.
Review the answers before discovery, flag missing access and conflicting priorities, and assign follow-ups to named stakeholders. Summarize goals, constraints, competitors, measurement, and implementation ownership in the working brief, then use unresolved questions as the kickoff agenda.
Start the kickoff with answers, not admin.
