In the world of SEO, there are very few “quick” questions. Sure, I can give you the basic definition of what SEO and SEM are, explain why link building is important and give you a bullet list of blog post topic ideas, but what good is that really going to do for your website? All that information you could learn in ten minutes from the Google Webmaster Tools page on SEO and a few blog posts, but those sources aren’t going to give you any radical insights into how to make SEO work for your site. And neither can I in a ten minute call.
In order to answer your “quick” SEO question, I need to ask you ten not-so-quick questions about your marketing and your website as it stands right now. I need to dig through your site’s analytics and see what kind of visitor growth (or decline) your site has seen in the last year, how many inbound links your site has and where they are coming from, what keywords are driving most of your traffic, how well your site is converting and much more. In short, if you want me to give you any real SEO advice I’m going to need full access to your site!
That isn’t going to happen quickly.
Some SEO consultants may not mind, but I’ve never been a big fan of shooting from the hip. Sure, I can do an once-over of your site and give you my initial impressions, but there isn’t much SEO gold to be had in that. I would much prefer to give you a sound, educated answer. A great SEO campaign isn’t pulled out of thin air, it’s created based on the goals and objectives of each site, finding ways to leverage their online assets and bulk up weak points. There is no way I am going to know all that from just clicking through your site for a few minutes.
Another reason I’m hesitant to answer “quick” SEO questions is because they are almost never quick. While I appreciate a site owner who wants to learn more about SEO and how to properly optimize their site, I don’t have the time to spend two hours on the phone answering every question someone asks me. I don’t have a huge SEO company with dozens of employees, sales managers, client service representatives and the like to pick up my slack. I still handle a lot of the daily work needed to keep my company afloat and can’t afford (literally!) to lose that much time to “quick” SEO questions.
I’d be interested in hearing from other SEO professionals, or even business owners in other industries about this. Do you take the time to answer every “quick” question that gets asked?
