If there's one thing working at an agency will teach you, it's how to onboard with a company quickly and seamlessly. Unlike an in-house role where an employee of 1-2 months will be excused as "new" and "still learning the ropes", at an agency you more than likely already created a strategy and started executing on it by month two.
Regardless of where you work, taking ownership of your own onboarding will help you to start having an impact faster in your role and will quickly give your boss confidence that you know what you're doing and can be trusted.
Kickoff Calls
At an agency, the majority of your onboarding takes place in a one-hour kickoff call. Given the amount of information you need to collect in such a short period of time, having a clear checklist of what you need to learn is critical.
A typical kickoff call template would look something like this:
- What are the primary goals you're hoping to achieve?
- What led you to hire an agency?
- Who are your main competitors?
- Who are your buyer personas?
- Do you have documented messaging?
- What are your most important products/services? Which ones do you want us focusing on? (Nearly every company offers more than one product and typically some are more important than others.)
- What work has been done on SEO in the past?
- Who is involved in content approvals?
- Who is a subject matter expert we can leverage? (For technical clients)
Things to request access to
- Google Analytics and any other analytics system the company uses regularly
- Google Search Console
- Design style guide
- Copy style guide
In-House Onboarding
Similar to a kickoff call, your first two weeks at an in-house job is a critical time to gather the information you need to do your job. In addition to the information you need to do SEO, you'll also use this time to get familiar with the company as a whole.
Unlike an agency situation where a company has already made a business decision to hire an agency to fulfill a pre-identified need, your in-house role will include identifying needs and requesting necessary resources based on a one to two year plan.
Jumping into a site audit may help you to formulate that plan, but spending the first few weeks making minor dev requests won't have the same impression on company leadership as creating a strategy with expected ROI and budget requests will.
I'd divide your onboarding process in the following often overlapping phases:
Phase 1: Information Gathering
This is the time you focus on getting access to all of the information, people and tools to form a coherent strategy.
Tools to request access to:- Google Analytics
- Every other analytics system the company uses regularly
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs (Or your preferred tool)
- ScreamingFrog (Or your preferred tool)
- Excel
- Website's backend
- Creative request form
- Legal request form
- Project management tool
- The company's product (For SaaS. Most companies will set you up with a normal user account as well as demo access.)
- Shared Google Drive folders
Information to collect:- Design style guide
- Copy style guide
- Revenue data segmented by organic channels
- Conversion rate data by first touch organic landing pages
- Messaging docs
- Persona docs
- Product information (In the form of support or sales enablement documents)
- Budget request and management process
- Companies quarterly or annual goals
- Marketing department's quarterly or annual goals
- Previous SEO strategy docs (collect this verbally if there's no documentation)
- PPC keyword and conversion data
People to meet:A lot of companies will set up meet and greets as part of the onboarding process, but if that's not done for you, be sure to meet and get to know the following groups of people:- Product marketing
- Content/Copy
- Legal
- Dev
- Creative
- Product manager
- SMEs
- Email
- Paid
- CRO
- PR
- Social media
- Sales
Use this time to listen and hear their perspective; avoid immediately jumping in with your own ideas. At this point there's a lot you don't know about the company, what's been done in the past and potential roadblocks you may run into. Employees who have been at the company a while can help you to head in the right direction and avoid wasting time on unnecessary tasks.
Phase 2: Research
Now you're ready to dive into actual SEO work. The goal of this phase is to gather the data you need to put together your one year SEO plan.
Complete a site audit and group findings by priority. If the website has more than a handful of pages and a blog, it may also be helpful to create a visual sitemap to help you identify how the site is currently structured and whether the structure needs to be updated.
Identify groups of existing website pages and map them to keywords. Examples of groups might include:- Product Pages
- Industry/Persona-based pages
- Templates
- Use Cases
- How-To's
- Blog Posts
- Brand Terms (home page, review pages, FAQ page, pricing page)
Complete full keyword research based on competitors. Group keywords by keyword group and keep those secondary keywords in the spreadsheet to use for forecasting later. Combine that research with your mapped pages to identify new pages that need to be created and current pages that need to be optimized.
Complete an initial link building analysis. Based on competitive research on your core product keywords, about how many links do you need to build? How do you compare at the domain level to your competitors? Would a broader digital PR campaign be helpful?
Will your answer to these questions change as you start working? Absolutely. The goal of this initial research is to gather enough data to justify budget for link building work.
Phase 3: Strategy
You're now ready to pull all of that information together into a single strategy document. I recommend a Google Slide or PowerPoint, so it's ready to present to stakeholders. I recommend formatting a strategy doc into the following sections:- Gaps between the company and its competitors. Keep this high level such as differences in organic traffic volume, domain authority, and links.
- Projected organic traffic and revenue based on increasing current keyword rankings and building new content.
- Summarization of content needs by content types. EX:
- 5 product pages
- 50 blog posts
- 6 templates
- Summarization of link needs
- Budget and other resources needed with expected ROI
- Resources to include:
- Copy (in-house and/or freelance)
- Content (in-house and/or freelance)
- Link budget
- PR (in-house and/or freelance)
- Dev time
- Design work (in-house and/or freelance)
- SEO
Phase 4: Roadshow
Once the strategy is in place, it's time to get buy in from stakeholders, budget decision makers, your boss and supporting co-workers. Unless you work with a team of less than 10, avoid the temptation of meeting with everyone at once. Instead present the plan several times to smaller, logical groups. Each group will have its own areas of interest and questions that will be easier to address with less people in the room. It will also allow you to seek input from each group, so they feel you are working with them instead of steamrolling.
Phew, ready for the weekend? Yes, this onboarding process is extensive, but I promise if you put the work in upfront it will ensure you don't waste time pursuing the wrong strategy or fighting for resources.
- Google Analytics
- Every other analytics system the company uses regularly
- Google Search Console
- Ahrefs (Or your preferred tool)
- ScreamingFrog (Or your preferred tool)
- Excel
- Website's backend
- Creative request form
- Legal request form
- Project management tool
- The company's product (For SaaS. Most companies will set you up with a normal user account as well as demo access.)
- Shared Google Drive folders
Information to collect:
- Design style guide
- Copy style guide
- Revenue data segmented by organic channels
- Conversion rate data by first touch organic landing pages
- Messaging docs
- Persona docs
- Product information (In the form of support or sales enablement documents)
- Budget request and management process
- Companies quarterly or annual goals
- Marketing department's quarterly or annual goals
- Previous SEO strategy docs (collect this verbally if there's no documentation)
- PPC keyword and conversion data
People to meet:
A lot of companies will set up meet and greets as part of the onboarding process, but if that's not done for you, be sure to meet and get to know the following groups of people:
- Product marketing
- Content/Copy
- Legal
- Dev
- Creative
- Product manager
- SMEs
- Paid
- CRO
- PR
- Social media
- Sales
Use this time to listen and hear their perspective; avoid immediately jumping in with your own ideas. At this point there's a lot you don't know about the company, what's been done in the past and potential roadblocks you may run into. Employees who have been at the company a while can help you to head in the right direction and avoid wasting time on unnecessary tasks.
Phase 2: Research
Now you're ready to dive into actual SEO work. The goal of this phase is to gather the data you need to put together your one year SEO plan.
Complete a site audit and group findings by priority. If the website has more than a handful of pages and a blog, it may also be helpful to create a visual sitemap to help you identify how the site is currently structured and whether the structure needs to be updated.
Identify groups of existing website pages and map them to keywords. Examples of groups might include:
- Product Pages
- Industry/Persona-based pages
- Templates
- Use Cases
- How-To's
- Blog Posts
- Brand Terms (home page, review pages, FAQ page, pricing page)
Complete full keyword research based on competitors. Group keywords by keyword group and keep those secondary keywords in the spreadsheet to use for forecasting later. Combine that research with your mapped pages to identify new pages that need to be created and current pages that need to be optimized.
Complete an initial link building analysis. Based on competitive research on your core product keywords, about how many links do you need to build? How do you compare at the domain level to your competitors? Would a broader digital PR campaign be helpful?
Will your answer to these questions change as you start working? Absolutely. The goal of this initial research is to gather enough data to justify budget for link building work.
Phase 3: Strategy
You're now ready to pull all of that information together into a single strategy document. I recommend a Google Slide or PowerPoint, so it's ready to present to stakeholders. I recommend formatting a strategy doc into the following sections:
- Gaps between the company and its competitors. Keep this high level such as differences in organic traffic volume, domain authority, and links.
- Projected organic traffic and revenue based on increasing current keyword rankings and building new content.
- Summarization of content needs by content types. EX:
- 5 product pages
- 50 blog posts
- 6 templates
- Summarization of link needs
- Budget and other resources needed with expected ROI
- Resources to include:
- Copy (in-house and/or freelance)
- Content (in-house and/or freelance)
- Link budget
- PR (in-house and/or freelance)
- Dev time
- Design work (in-house and/or freelance)
- SEO
Phase 4: Roadshow
Once the strategy is in place, it's time to get buy in from stakeholders, budget decision makers, your boss and supporting co-workers. Unless you work with a team of less than 10, avoid the temptation of meeting with everyone at once. Instead present the plan several times to smaller, logical groups. Each group will have its own areas of interest and questions that will be easier to address with less people in the room. It will also allow you to seek input from each group, so they feel you are working with them instead of steamrolling.
Phew, ready for the weekend? Yes, this onboarding process is extensive, but I promise if you put the work in upfront it will ensure you don't waste time pursuing the wrong strategy or fighting for resources.
