MarketingLokam resource
SEO client onboarding checklist
- Client
- Service or project
- Prepared by
- Date
Client and SEO service scope
Confirm exactly what the client purchased so the onboarding requests match the signed SEO engagement.
- Client legal name, trading name, primary website, and organization details
- SEO service type: technical, content, local, ecommerce, migration, recovery, or full service
- Contract start date, initial term, review dates, deliverables, and reporting cadence
- Included websites, countries, languages, locations, product lines, and business units
- Scope exclusions, client responsibilities, agency responsibilities, and external dependencies
Business and market context
Give the SEO team enough commercial context to prioritize search opportunities that matter to the business.
- Core products or services and the problems each one solves
- Highest-priority products, services, categories, locations, or customer segments
- Primary markets, sales territories, languages, and seasonal demand periods
- Average sales cycle, conversion path, lead value, order value, or other supplied commercial context
- Business changes planned during the engagement, including launches, closures, pricing, or rebrands
Website and CMS access
Document the current website setup and verify access using the client's approved permission method.
- Production domain, subdomains, staging environments, and any separate country or language sites
- CMS platform, administrator access, and the person authorized to grant or revoke access
- Hosting, CDN, DNS, domain registrar, and server access required for the agreed scope
- Development repository, deployment workflow, release owner, and rollback process where relevant
- Robots.txt, XML sitemap, redirects, plugins, and SEO tooling currently controlled outside the CMS
Analytics and measurement
Verify the measurement sources that will establish the baseline and support ongoing reporting.
- Google Analytics property, stream, access level, and verified working status
- Google Tag Manager container, publishing owner, and access level where included
- Primary conversions, key events, ecommerce events, call tracking, and lead-source rules
- Consent management, cookie controls, attribution limitations, and known tracking gaps
- Other analytics, CRM, call-tracking, rank-tracking, or business-intelligence sources used by the client
Search Console and indexing
Confirm ownership and indexing visibility for every search property covered by the SEO service.
- Google Search Console domain or URL-prefix properties and verified permission level
- Bing Webmaster Tools access where relevant to the target market
- Submitted XML sitemaps, excluded URLs, crawl issues, manual actions, and security notices
- Known indexing problems, recent removals, legacy properties, or ownership disputes
- Access verified by the SEO lead rather than relying only on a client confirmation
Current organic performance
Capture a dated baseline so the agency and client can distinguish existing performance from future work.
- Current organic clicks, impressions, click-through rate, and average position by agreed source
- Top landing pages, queries, countries, devices, and search appearances
- Current conversions or revenue attributed to organic search, with measurement limitations recorded
- Known ranking losses, traffic changes, algorithm-update concerns, or previous penalties
- Baseline date range, comparison period, annotations, and exported evidence location
Audience, keywords, and search intent
Start keyword research from customer needs and buying journeys instead of an unqualified keyword wish list.
- Priority customer groups, their needs, objections, terminology, and decision process
- Search themes and seed keywords supplied by sales, support, product, and leadership teams
- Branded, non-branded, local, informational, commercial, and transactional search priorities
- Terms the client considers essential, irrelevant, misleading, regulated, or out of scope
- Existing keyword research, rank tracking, paid search terms, site search data, and customer questions
Services, products, and priority pages
Map commercial priorities to the pages and page types that can legitimately satisfy search intent.
- Complete service, product, category, collection, or location inventory
- Priority landing pages and the business owner responsible for each offer
- Approved pricing, availability, claims, specifications, and geographic restrictions
- Pages that must remain unchanged and pages available for optimization or replacement
- Planned product launches, discontinued offers, inventory constraints, and campaign destinations
Locations and local SEO
Collect consistent location information when the engagement includes local visibility or physical operations.
- Business name, address, phone, hours, service area, and landing page for every location
- Google Business Profile access, primary category, additional categories, and verification status
- Location-specific services, products, photos, attributes, and customer contact paths
- Citation or directory accounts, duplicate listings, previous locations, and name changes
- Review process, review-response owner, prohibited review practices, and escalation path
Organic competitors
Separate commercial competitors from domains that compete only in the search results.
- Direct business competitors by service, product, audience, and target location
- Search competitors that repeatedly rank for priority non-branded topics
- Competitors the client admires and the specific reason each example matters
- Marketplaces, directories, publishers, affiliates, or aggregators competing for visibility
- Known competitive strengths, weaknesses, differentiators, and claims that require verification
Content, brand, and subject expertise
Identify the people, evidence, and approval resources available to produce accurate and distinctive content.
- Brand guidelines, tone, terminology, prohibited language, and approved claims
- Existing content inventory, research, product documentation, case studies, and reusable media
- Subject-matter experts, interview availability, author details, and factual review owners
- Legal, medical, financial, compliance, or brand review required before publication
- Content production capacity, publishing owner, expected turnaround, and localization process
Technical SEO constraints
Record platform limitations and upcoming changes before recommendations create work the client cannot implement.
- Framework, rendering method, site architecture, international setup, and structured-data implementation
- Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, crawl behavior, faceted navigation, and parameter handling concerns
- Known migrations, redesigns, domain changes, CMS upgrades, or release freezes
- Engineering capacity, deployment schedule, testing requirements, and technical decision owner
- Security, privacy, accessibility, compliance, and data-handling constraints affecting SEO work
Approval and implementation workflow
Define how recommendations become published changes and who has the authority to approve them.
- Day-to-day SEO contact, final decision owner, backup contact, and escalation path
- Who reviews strategy, keywords, copy, design, development, legal, and analytics changes
- Expected response time, revision allowance, unavailable dates, and meeting cadence
- Agency implementation access versus client implementation responsibility for each work type
- Ticketing, comments, file handoff, release approval, and proof-of-publication process
Baseline, goals, and reporting
Agree on the business questions reporting should answer without presenting uncertain outcomes as guarantees.
- Primary SEO objective and why the client is investing now
- Baseline metrics, data source, date range, exclusions, and known data-quality limitations
- Leading indicators, business outcomes, and the person who validates conversion quality
- Reporting audience, format, frequency, annotations, and required commentary
- How scope, seasonality, releases, paid campaigns, and offline activity will be documented
Final SEO readiness review
Complete this gate with the account owner and SEO lead before declaring the campaign ready to start.
- Signed scope, priority markets, services, goals, and exclusions agree with the onboarding record
- Analytics and Search Console access are received, tested, and usable for the agreed properties
- Website implementation access or a named client implementation owner is confirmed
- Blocking answers, files, or permissions have an owner, due date, and effect on the delivery plan
- Baseline captured, first milestone agreed, readiness decision recorded, and kickoff date confirmed