Client Onboarding (9 steps)

When an agency workspace adds a client, the project opens into a locked onboarding journey instead of the workspace. You work through nine steps, and the workspace unlocks at the end. This page is what the "View onboarding guide" link in that sidebar points to.

●Live🔑Agency workspaces (Founding, Agency)

Why it's locked

The whole strategy is keyword-grounded. Approving a plan before anyone has chosen what the client should rank for approves nothing, and a workspace full of tabs before that point is just noise. So the journey runs first, in order, and the workspace opens once you kick off.

Your progress is derived from what you have actually saved — not from how many screens you have clicked past. Leaving and coming back lands you on the step you were on. You can always jump back to a completed step from the rail on the left; doing so never re-locks the steps after it.

Choosing how to onboard

The first screen offers three methods. Manual Wizard is the one that's built — you fill each section yourself. AI Guided Conversation and Import existing information are marked Coming soon and are not selectable yet.

The nine steps

1 · Business Understanding

Who the client is, and the Client Mission — the single outcome this workspace exists to move. The mission is the north star every later recommendation ties back to, so it's required.

Everything on this screen is saved and feeds the AI that writes your keyword ideas, content plan, fix suggestions and directory pitches: the client's name and logo (these appear on every report you send them), industry, business model, description, services, location, years in business and team size. Fuller answers here mean better output everywhere later — this is the highest-leverage screen in the flow.

Save & Exit keeps everything and returns you to your client list.

2 · Competitors

Add the rivals to measure this client against. Each one is crawled with the same engine that audits your client's own site, so the comparison is like-for-like. Your plan sets how many you can track; the counter above the table shows where you are against it.

The status column reports the real crawl state — Queued, Analyzing…, then the grade. You do not have to wait for it to finish before continuing.

3 · Keyword Research

Build the shortlist. Keywords come from two places: Found on your website (pulled from the client's homepage when you added them) and anything you type or generate yourself in the keyword strategy panel below.

Mark the two or three that matter most as Primary — those are what drive the strategy, the "are you showing up in ChatGPT?" checks and the weekly report.

Volume, difficulty and opportunity columns need the paid keyword-metrics pipeline and are shown as dashes until it's connected.

4 · Select Keywords

The same set, confirmed. Lock keywords & continue is the real gate in this journey: it starts the client's full site crawl, pulls their real Google positions from Search Console if it's connected, and runs the AI-visibility check. Everything downstream is built on this set.

You can still add and remove keywords in the workspace afterwards.

5 · Website Strategy · 6 · Proposal & Plan · 7 · Page Mapping

How the site should be structured, the scope and sequence you'll present, and which page owns which keyword cluster.

These three screens are currently placeholder layouts. They show the shape of the deliverable, and each carries a visible "sample layout — not this client's data" banner. The crawl you started in step 4 is still running at this point; the real numbers populate in the workspace once it lands. Read them, then continue — nothing you do here is discarded, and nothing shown here should be sent to a client.

8 · Approval

Confirm the plan. The checklist has to be ticked before the approve button unlocks — it's your record that a human agreed to this, not a formality. The panel beside it reports the real state we can vouch for: how many keywords you locked, and whether the client mission is set.

Approving requires that keywords were finalized in step 4.

9 · Kickoff

A summary of what you set up and what happens next. Finish onboarding & open workspace stamps the kickoff, ends onboarding for this client permanently, and hands you into the workspace.

What onboarding does not do yet

Being straight about the edges, so you don't go looking:

• Steps 5–7 don't compute from the client's data yet.
• Onboarding doesn't create tasks in the Action Center — the workspace builds its first queue from the crawl and Search Console after kickoff.
• There's no client-facing proposal export from step 6 yet. Use the branded client report from the workspace once the crawl has completed.
• Cloning a previous client's setup is not available.

Existing sites

Sites added before this journey existed, and non-agency plans, are unaffected — they use the lighter five-step setup described in Setup & This Week.