Onboarding Process
Onboarding: An Important and Valuable First Step
We often get asked about how and why our onboarding process works. It’s important that we follow this process that we have considered and simplified over a long period of time.
Effective onboarding allows us to get-to-know your client’s site while ensuring proper foundations are in place to achieve the most success from the upcoming SEOHive pathway work. The purpose of this process is to ensure that we have the tools and cornerstones in place to build a lasting and effective SEO strategy for your clients – and ultimately demonstrate major value to them on behalf of your agency.
While every website is different and comes to us in various conditions, the onboarding process can bring quick improvements to many sites. In fact, it’s not uncommon to see a drastic increase in traffic within just a few short weeks – sometimes before we even begin the pathway work. To make sure everything is super clear though, here’s the general workflow we go through during the 14-day onboarding process.
Jump to Onboarding Details
Website Access, Systems & Reporting
The first thing we will need to do is connect to Google Analytics and Google Search Console. This allows us to analyze existing traffic, site structure, and provide ongoing reporting details for our dashboards, audits, and reports.
Here’s what we need from you:
- Login details, or (ideally) dedicated administrator-level account for your client website
- Shared access to the Google Analytics (GA4) property
- Shared access to the Google Search Console property
Don’t have things fully set up quite yet? Don’t worry. Just let us know and we can set up Google Analytics & Search Console for you. Just let us know and our team will take care of it.
Client Details & Background Info
After registration you’ll be presented with a short onboarding form to help us intake the various details needed, including some background information on your client’s website, business, location, and target customers. It’s not terribly complex, and you can take the questions back to your client before submitting the details to us, if needed.
Here’s what we need from you:
- Client service and product details
- Details on their target customers
- Any existing keywords being targeted
Website Audit Report
Our on page department will run and provide an in depth audit detailing the site’s technical SEO health and any major issues. Included are clear and intuitive charts as well as details on any of the various issues uncovered.
Here’s a sample of what the audit report includes:
- Details on the site’s loading speed and efficiency
- Information on the crawlability of the site’s internal content
- Analysis on content, heading, and meta issues
- Important information regarding site security issues and concerns
- Information on dozens of actionable errors and issues and more!
Technical Health Improvements
One of the most important elements of SEO-success is having a website with a good technical health score. If your client’s site isn’t serving up information in an ideal manner, suffers from broken links or inefficient redirects, or has any number of technical issues, it’s likely not going to be ranking as well as it should.
After an initial analysis, our audit will provide a technical health score from 0-100%. Our goal is to get this to 90% or above in the within the first 3 months. Often times this can be done during the first month, but can vary greatly depending on the size of the site and its current state.
While it’s impossible to predict what kind of results you will see after things are cleaned up, it’s not uncommon to see an immediate increase in traffic. Often as much as 100%!
What kind of tasks to we typically take care of?
- Updating core URL meta titles, descriptions, focus keywords
- Fixing or removing broken links
- Setting up efficient redirects
- Reviewing the site for real-world usability
- Look for ways to improve conversions
- Ensure vital information is present, both for search engines and visitors
WordPress Upgrades
Registered WordPress sites benefit from additional optimizations and upgrades to improve site speed/load times, indexability, essential SEO site structure, and more.
Improvements typically include:
- Optimization of existing site images
- WP Rocket setup and configuration for caching and optimal performance
- SEOPress installation & configuration
We will review and if already optimized or running comparable tools, we will leave them in place unless a clear benefit or improvement is available.
Ready to Scale Your Agency?
If you’re ready to join The Hive and begin delivering high-quality SEO services to your agency clients you can get started by registering your first site with us today.