Interview Protocol

Basic/Introductory Questions

• What are your names?
• What is your relation to one another?
• What is the name of your business?
• What is the nature of your business?
• How long have you owned your business?
• Did you own any businesses prior?
• Was your current business owned by anyone else prior to you? If so, for how long?
• Do you sell any products that are exclusive to your business?
• If yes, where do you sell them? In store? Online?
• Do you sell any of your products through third party vendors? 
• Would you ever consider using a third party vendor to sell your products?

Interview Questions

• What is your relationship with the internet in regards to your business?
• How often do you use the internet, search engines specifically, to find informations/products/etc for your business?
• What is your success rate with using search engines for your business?
• How accurate are your results? 
• How specific are you with your searches?
• Can you describe a time that you found your search engine results to be less than perfect? Can you describe a time they were completely wrong?
• Why do you believe this happened?
• What are your feelings towards this experience? 
• Do you see any problems with this?
• If you do not sell your product through a third party vendor, would you consider it? Would you only consider it online, or would you also allow a store to sell your product?
• How would you feel if your vendor came up higher than you in search results than your business? Is any exposure good exposure or would it be taking away sales from your own business?
• If one of your vendors was a larger company with more resources, do you believe that it is fair that they can pay in order to have their results come up higher than yours? How do you feel about this practice of search engine optimization?
• If a local apartment community paid to have their results come up higher on search engines by highlighting local businesses, including your own, how would you feel about this? Keep in mind, the writers who are describing your business have little to no knowledge about the nature of your business. 
• Would you ever consider paying someone to write web content for you in the manner of hyperlink-sensitive articles made specifically to make your website come up higher on Google (or other search engines)? 
• Do you believe that just because a company has more money they are entitled to advertise more?
• Should it be about quality of a product/company or how much money they have to spend on getting their results up higher? 
• How often do you use social media?
• Do you use any social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, etc) in order to promote your business?
• How much business do you believe is brought in by utilizing these sites? 
• How much of an emphasis do you place on maintaining your social media pages? 
• Do you advertise in any other way outside of the internet? For example, do you ever use newspapers or paper advertising? 
• Is word of mouth an important aspect of attracting new clients or customers to your business?