Setting Up Agency Processes to Deliver Local SEO More Effectively

Foreword: Saving the Dream

Why did you start on this little mission of yours in the first place? I’m assuming you’re not a classic movie villain, and you’re not going after power for power’s sake. You probably did it for promises of freedom or a better life. A little green in the bank probably caught your imagination too, but even that, I would say, comes from a desire to have more control over one’s life. After all, what do we want money for if not for spending our time and energy in more fulfilling ways?

But every company reaches what Michael E. Gerber calls the “Adolescence” phase. You’ve realized you can’t do it all alone, so you start delegating and hiring new people. And too often, when people reach this phase, that promise of having more control over one’s life starts to feel a bit like snake oil. Your team’s problems haven’t really stopped being your problems, and now new challenges seem to be forming in places you didn’t realize existed.  Not only is your sense of control not improving, but it’s actually made worse by an exponentially increasing number of questions to answer, crises to avert, and futures to plan for. You may feel like you have anything but control over your life.

The solution is process.

Now, those of us who work in SEO, local SEO, or any form of digital marketing, for that matter, hate being put into a box. We’re a proud people. We’re battle-hardened from years of explaining to clients why the strategy they’re suggesting is overlooking important nuance and why all of those KPIs they want to focus on aren’t as clear-cut as they want to make it out to be. And every time a new trainee asks a question about SEO theory, we’re always happy to provide them with the infamous “it depends.” Additionally, the mad scientist in us is often a perfectionist who doesn’t want to sacrifice quality in favor of an assembly line approach.

But I want to stress to you that creating a process for your work does not have to be the death of quality. On the contrary, I hope to show you that implementing processes will help you regain control and even help you deliver a better service.

Vision

If your team doesn’t know where the company is going, how are they supposed to help you achieve your goal? How could they possibly think outside the box and provide creative solutions if they don’t even know there’s a box to begin with? And how are you supposed to prioritize anything properly? You need to create something tangible to latch on to.

The Definition of a Vision

There is a strange amount of debate on the definition of a company vision and how it relates to things like a mission statement. Personally, I believe those arguments are mostly about semantics. What really matters is that there is a clear and compelling future that you and your team are working towards.

Think of it this way: The most important part of developing a good local SEO strategy for a client is researching and determining your core terms. Is that not the case? Without them, you’re just guessing, and any optimizations may turn out to be futile. You might get lucky, but you might also be that guy building a strategy primarily centered on ‘near me’ keywords in 2024.

Determining a primary topic and the terms associated with it will guide the nuances of the rest of your strategy. The clarity that comes from your long-term vision for your client’s success will answer many of the open-ended questions about how to approach aspects of your on-page, linking, or Google Business Profile (GBP) strategy. You, your organization, and your processes are no different.

Defining Your Positioning and Choosing Your Niche

Read more

Define Your Ideal Customer

A good vision of success should include a vision for who you will be helping and how. Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs) are nothing new, but too often, I see people companies trying to service every type of customer that sends them an RFP. If that’s you, I highly recommend re-evaluating that reality.

It can be hard to turn down a potential source of income. At the end of the day, you’re trying to bring in revenue. And maybe, in your current state, you’re struggling to believe you could say no even if you wanted to. If that’s you, and now isn’t the best time to start saying no to RFPs, then maybe you at least begin the process of defining an ideal customer profile and make it a goal to strive for. 

What’s required of you and your team can vary wildly already before introducing entirely different client types into the mix. Suppose you’re being pulled in too many different directions. In that case, you’ll eventually reach a point in your growth where effectively pricing your service, setting boundaries, and setting up processes for better efficiency for your team becomes impossible.

This doesn’t mean you can’t expand into services for more than one vertical or client type. But you should try to own your backyard first. Focus on what you’re best at and who you have the most rewarding experience with first. To use another SEO analogy, it’s like trying to overcome the proximity bias with your map rankings. Owning your backyard first will give you the strength and footing necessary to overcome the next obstacle. But if you don’t start there, you leave a lot to chance.

Building and Organizing Processes

You’ve likely heard the phrase, “You can lead them to water, but you can’t force them to drink.” But are you leading them to water? Is there even a watering hole to go to? Or is everyone wandering through the woods until they find a stream on their own? 

Self-reliance is an important attribute to look for in a good recruit, and I’m as big an advocate for that as the next guy. Everyone wants a team of rock stars. But as a leader, it’s your job to bring people together and align their goals. And that starts with the processes you use to achieve those goals. If everyone has their own way of doing everything, there will be a lot of unnecessary bottlenecks and arguments about best practices. You may all want what’s best for the client, but what that looks like to each of you is not always going to match up. And while it’s always good to challenge ourselves and be willing to improve, if there isn’t a standard to measure your work against, your discussions will just go in circles. 

A Process for Creating Process

Is it meta to have a process for creating process, you ask? 1000% it is. But if you don’t use one, you’ll likely fall into any of the countless traps that await your inner perfectionist. So, your first and most important process is a process for creating process. (Say that five times fast)

It’s super simple: Gather, Simplify, Capture, and Document.

Gather 

Start by gathering the information for a rough outline of what your organization does. It’s really important that you don’t get ahead of yourself here. Adding some detail can be helpful; after all, we’re mostly brainstorming right now. But during this step, you should focus on boiling things down to their major pivot points.  

When I’m first getting started with this, I usually prefer to go analog and use a large whiteboard before transferring things over to my computer. It gives me the freedom to get a little chaotic as I brainstorm, allows me to see the whole “picture” at once, and requires less effort to make adjustments when I reach the “Simplify” step. However, depending on your needs and preferences, using something digital like a Google Doc or even something more sophisticated like a mapping tool may make more sense. In either case, just make sure to pick one and stick with it. 

If you’re worried about missing something important, remember you can always break things down into more detail later. Don’t make it harder on yourself than it needs to be. Get it all together as best you can first and go from there.

Simplify

Before we start documenting anything, take some time to look at what you have and see if there are any ways to organize better or simplify the outline’s structure. One of the ways I like to approach it is to ask myself how well someone would retain this information if I used the same structure to create a sales pitch. This helps me stay concise (as the incessant, rambling ADHD-er that I am), and it helps me quite literally later when building a pitch for our sales conferences, training programs for new employees, and presentations for onboarding clients. 

This is also a stage at which I recommend having someone look at what you’ve got with fresh eyes. 

Capture

Now it’s time to start recording yourself. Start capturing the “How-to’s” of your major services. For example, if you have a periodic audit for a client set every month, have whoever’s best suited on your team record themselves going through the process and explaining it along the way.

There are  various tools you can use for this. Anything that records your screen and audio will do. My personal recommendation is Loom. We originally started using it to help with remote work collaboration but found it worked even better for training videos. It’s simple to use and has some really convenient features, including easy integration with our training manual program.

Document

Now for the Pièce de résistance. Now that we have an outline and videos to go with it all, we want to write down the essential goals, how-tos, and anything else that can clarify or support the training video. This is where I recommend getting the most detailed. Some of the best details you can provide here are any useful sources or references that further explain your reasoning or provide an easy path to the tools needed to complete the process. 

I highly recommend getting a good training manual software like Trainual to document everything. It’s not required, though. If you’re pressed for cash or would prefer an alternative, you could always go the simple route and use something like Google Docs or Slides. The first SEO Manual I ever made was a Google Slides deck with videos and diagrams. Eventually, that slide deck got too big (hundreds of slides too big) and increasingly harder to maintain and keep organized. As time progressed, people had an increasingly harder time going through them.

Using good software has made it easier to keep things up to date and divvy up lessons in a way that’s far more user-friendly. As a bonus, making it more user-friendly for my team has made it more engaging, which has led to better knowledge retention and, therefore, fewer unwanted opportunities to repeat myself. 

The Anatomy of a Good System

When you begin evaluating your systems or are just creating a new one from scratch, I recommend having a framework for that approach, too. Call this a second process for creating. Supplemental to the documenting process we just went over, it can help define current processes better and ensure that any new processes you create are done efficiently. 

The best framework I’ve found to help me in my thought process is to define what you do, when you do it, how you do it, and who is doing it. The key for me is to force myself to answer these questions as much as possible to keep myself from getting lost in the weeds. 

What You Do

Start with the value being provided. This will become more difficult as you get into smaller actions, but always start with what the client is actually getting out of it, or at least what provided value the task is feeding into. Then,  define the deliverables. 

For example, instead of “GBPs tasks” or even “Optimize GBP’s,” I would label it “GBP Management” at the very top. “Optimize GBP’s might be a part of it, but it’s not the overarching value you’re providing if you’re also taking care of suspensions, appeals, and the like. “GBP Management” provides a better umbrella to fit your current systems under and a framework any new ones you create can funnel into easily.

When You Do It

This is the step I see overlooked the most. Everything seems simple on paper until it’s put into practice. That’s because context is what pulls your system apart. Consider onboarding a client as an example: When does your team begin and finish optimizing a GBP? What about On Page? Links? The simple answer is when the client signs the contract, but what about the accesses you need to entities like the site? Clearly defining the “When” of one process often clearly identifies the “What” of another. The GBP example did so by outlining what was needed on the Client Success Managers’ part to ensure onboarding went quickly and smoothly. 

How You Do It

This is the step most people naturally tend to start with, but it’s important to do it after What and When. Because how you do something is what evolves the most. If your company grows, you’re going to need to make changes at some point. If you add to your service offering or make addendums to your company vision or identity, the How is more likely to change. But the What and When, while still subject to change, are much more rigid in comparison. Doing it after What and When also provides the perspective you need to question the current How and refine it if necessary.

Who is Responsible

While perhaps the most important part of the process, choosing who is responsible is easiest when you realize the scope. If you’re a one-man show, I would still recommend creating some form of title or label so that if the day comes that you need to delegate it out for one reason or another, it’s a seamless transition.

An Ongoing Process

Not only do you not need to document everything now, you shouldn’ t. 

The most straightforward reason is that your time is limited, and this is supposed to help you with that, not make it worse. These steps are also meant to help you improve your processes, not just record them. Seeing how your organization functions in a clearer and more concrete format makes decisions to modify it easier. Paired with your company vision, you’ll be able to see more clearly if certain secondary procedures in the fine print of your strategy are worth your time or not. But if you spend all your time in the fine print, you’ll never get around to that.

This is an ongoing process. If I were to compare it to anything, it’d be dieting. No amount of extreme calorie deficit in the short run is going to erase the need for long-term consistent habits. For most people, it’s better to start by building a few good habits at a time and build on top of that consistency one piece at a time.

Practical Principles for Process

All the process documentation in the world won’t fix anything if you don’t take the time to simplify, organize, revise, and optimize them. In this section, we’ll review a few ideas that can get you pointed in the right direction. At the end of the day, you’ll have to create your own systems that fit into your business model and best serve your clients. But these can serve as inspiration and a good place to start.

Some examples include the use of task management software. Project management tools like Asana, Click Up, or even Notion can be really helpful in speeding up delegation and organization. However, they are not required to implement these principles.

Choosing the Best Project Management Tools for Your Agency

Read more

Using Targets Instead of Tasks

Let’s set the scene: I was a new manager, still young in my experience in SEO. My team was comprised primarily of college students who first heard about SEO when they applied for the job. I felt like I was losing a lot of time creating and following up on Asana tasks, so I decided I was going to automate some of it.

I wasn’t sure how, but I knew I needed to eliminate the monotony for my own and my client’s sake. But how was I supposed to create a linear process for something as ambiguous as SEO? And how would I structure it so I could easily delegate it to a very inexperienced team? I didn’t have the benefit of hiring “rockstars” like so many business gurus on YouTube suggest. We hired great people, but we were a small start-up and didn’t have pockets deep enough for experienced professionals. 

I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it, but I knew I had to try something, so I started with onboarding. It was the most straightforward process we had, and we even had a checklist of sorts already. So, I organized it and automated it with an Asana project template. It covered everything we needed to do when we took on a new client, including collaboration tasks with our client success department, content team, and design team. I thought I was genius.

Then, all of the reasons “it depends” in SEO started showing up in my Slack inbox. Mistakes started rolling in, and millions of questions came with them. Externalities weren’t being taken into account or were even being ignored because someone assumed it was someone else’s responsibility. In many cases, I had a hard time arguing with that assumption. If I were in their shoes, I think I would have done the same.

You Can’t Templatize Everything

Despite my best efforts to automate the process, I ended up more overwhelmed than when I started. So, in a stroke of genius (otherwise known as panicking), I tried to templatize everything even further. Clearly, the problem was that I hadn’t used enough skip logic in my process, so I started looking for every opportunity I could to create an if/then statement and create more preventative measures.

Surprise, surprise, it only got worse. Everything was turning into what Dan Martell calls Transactional Leadership, and I was pounding my head against the “Tell-Check-Next” ceiling. I’d tell them what to do, check that it was done correctly, and then tell them what to do next. I thought that’s what I was supposed to do as a manager.

However, the problem with a transactional approach is that the only way it can scale is by adding more transactions. This can only translate into more time lost and more quality compromised. In this framework, all your team’s problems don’t stop being your problems, and you’re eventually consumed by the endless pit of QC-ing everything, everywhere, all the time. And that’s time you and your client don’t have. 

The Definition of Done

Everything took a turn for the better when I stopped focusing on all the things that could go wrong and started focusing on prioritizing my end goals for each project. The tasks on my onboarding template became a list of areas that needed to be covered rather than a list of every step to complete. I started defining what “done” looks like at the highest level for those areas (also an idea I stole from Dan) and introduced stewardship to the system by making the assignees responsible for the outcome instead of just the tasks. If they were waiting on assets from a client or another department in the company, it was on them to follow up and solve the problems.

Of course, I still provide training and answer questions. But when I do, I often start by asking, “Well, imagine I didn’t exist. How would you handle this?” Ultimately, it’s my job to give them the tools they need, a destination to reach, and assistance as necessary along the way. 

This mindset can and should be applied in every stage of your process. When you work in something more creative or analytical, like SEO, it’s better to use targets instead of tasks. Otherwise, your “process” will just be one big juggling act.

“Once you set the outcome instead of telling your employees “how,” they start talking about results, not tasks. They begin offering their energy, not just their skills. They start asking themselves, ‘ Is there a better way?’ instead of asking you, ‘ How do we do this?” – Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time

Process Beats Paranoia Every Time

A scenario pretty much every SEO provider has had nightmares about at some point is the dreaded morning phone call from a client asking why something on the website is broken, or the GBP is set up wrong. “How did we miss this?” you ask yourself. You know the person you assigned to the project wouldn’t knowingly leave that behind for someone to find. So how’d it happen?

Simple: They’re human.

Fun fact: we all are, and that’s not changing any time soon. And while emphasizing the importance of not making mistakes to your team is important, “Don’t Make Mistakes” is not a strategy. You can’t stop biology from doing its thing. So what can we do about it? It’s here where most fall into the trap of thinking they must QC everyone’s work. But while QC-ing is also important, I urge you to remember the Tell-Check-Next loop I mentioned earlier. That’s a ceiling you cannot break through. Besides, nobody wants a helicopter parent, and nobody wants to be one, and it’s not effective anyway. But the good news is, you don’t have to be one. 

Set up Routines Based on the System You Already Have

Instead of checking everyone’s work all the time, create routines for checking or auditing clients periodically. This doesn’t always have to be a major QC audit, either. My team’s smallest QC checkpoint is a final QC at the end of onboarding from the SEO, Design, and Content teams. Everyone is already there, and it’s hard for something glaring on a page to get past three individuals in a single sitting. It’s simple and takes little to no extra time because it’s just a part of the Asana task template we have set up. 

For larger QC measures, I’d recommend starting with any routines or systems you already have and simply adding to them. You probably already have periodic check-ins every week or month where you evaluate rankings and any other metrics you’ve deemed top priority. Introduce some QC-ing into them.

What’s likely to get overlooked? Grammar, for example, is an easy one to forget when you’re worried about keyword density, word count, backlinks, etc. It seems small, but it’s no less embarrassing when it comes up on a phone call with one of your biggest clients. Make it a routine to check that, along with some other on-page optimizations, when building location pages or anything that involves the written word for a client, once a month when your team is already there.

This allows you to show your team you trust them while still putting in some countermeasures to support their humanity.

Minimum Viable Product

There’s no law for how long these intervals should be; it’ll depend on your time and resources. So, just start with something. Processes are iterative anyway. You’ll probably reach a point where some of the intervals feel a little too far apart. In that instance, remember two things:

1. A little too far apart is better than the alternative.

   You do not have the time to check everything all the time, and you won’t break through the Tell-Check-Next ceiling.

2. You can always improve it, but you can’t do that if you don’t try something.

   Theory only takes you so far. Once you get a process down, you can find ways to speed some of it up or simplify it.

Simple System Examples

Improved Collaboration

One of the best changes I made was to my weekly 1:1’s with my team. I had actually discontinued the meetings for a time because I felt like they were a waste of time and always got too convoluted with all of the objectives I tried to tackle every meeting. But not having a scheduled time meant I just wasn’t getting around to talking with my team members enough. So, I re-implemented them and changed how I approached them. Keeping the idea of transformational leadership in mind, I changed my meetings to be oriented around outcomes rather than just task instructions. We still discuss tasks and questions as necessary, but the primary goal of every meeting is to answer the following questions:

1. Were there any notable improvements in rankings?
2. Were there any notable drops in rankings?
3. What are you doing about it?
4. What do you need from me?

There’s always more that could be discussed, but ultimately, this is what they’re responsible for. Everything else hangs off of these questions. Keeping simple, quantifiable markers of success at the forefront of the discussion keeps the meeting focused, helps prioritization, and makes it clear to your team members what they’re responsible for. It also gives them the ruler they need to measure their own day-to-day priorities against, helping to eliminate the extra busy work that might otherwise get in the way.

Quarterly Link Planning  

The most dreaded phase of service for me has always been what I call the “Now what?” phase. You’ve been working on a client for some time now, and you’ve achieved the primary objective of your contract to rank for the core terms you’ve selected, and now there are no obvious next steps. Now what? We know all of the things we could do. But what should we do? What will be the best use of our time and the client’s money? How do we make sure something is always being done while also making sure it’s beneficial for the client and not just busy work? These are just some of the questions I always found myself trying to answer.

One of the deliverables I decided to tackle first was link building. I started by trying a rigid schedule for certain deliverables like backlinks. I needed to make sure things were happening without having my hands on every lever in the machine. However, the problem was the same as the onboarding template. It was too rigid, it didn’t scale nicely at all, and, most importantly, it ignored the unique needs of the client. So, I replaced it with a simple planning phase that we now go through every quarter. This made the schedule the rigid pivot point rather than the deliverables themselves and created a balance between consistency of process and quality of service. And there was no need to introduce automations to do it. This thought process is beginning to guide how we approach most of our ongoing services.

Conclusion

Implementing structured processes within your agency is not about stifling creativity or turning local SEO into an assembly line—it’s about reclaiming control, improving efficiency, clarifying directives, and ultimately delivering better results for your clients. Without clear frameworks, scaling becomes chaotic, decision-making slows, and your time gets consumed by unnecessary firefighting. But by defining goals, setting measurable targets, and building adaptable processes, you empower your team to operate with autonomy while maintaining quality and consistency.

The key takeaway? Processes should evolve alongside your agency. Start small, document what matters, and refine over time. Prioritize outcomes over rigid task lists, foster accountability within your team, and establish systems that reduce errors without micromanaging. When done right, these systems won’t just improve your SEO services—they’ll give you the freedom and control you originally sought when you started this journey. Your agency’s growth doesn’t have to come at the cost of your sanity—process is the answer.

About the author

Brendan Whipple

Brendan Whipple is the SEO Manager at Incline Marketing, a full-service digital marketing agency with clients around the United States.

See all of Brendan's articles (2)