The first weeks of a search engagement decide most of what follows, and they are usually spent on an audit when they should be spent on agreeing access, ownership, publishing rights and what success will be measured against. A supplier who leads onboarding with questions rather than with a document is usually the better one.
What a good supplier asks you
Which services actually make money and which you want more of, what a lead or a sale is worth, what has been tried before and what happened, who can publish and who approves, what is coming that will disrupt the site, and what is off limits. A supplier who asks none of this will optimise for traffic because nobody told them what else to aim at.
What you should ask them
Who is on the account by name and what else they carry, what happens in the first thirty days specifically, what they need from you and by when, what they will implement themselves, and what they would do if results were flat at six months. That last question separates firms that have had hard accounts from firms that have not.
Access, granted properly
Analytics and search console properties in your ownership with the agency granted access, not the reverse. Content management access at the level actually needed. A staging environment if changes are substantial. Access granted from agency-owned accounts is the single most common reason a business cannot reclaim its own data later.
Set the measurement before the work
Agree the commercial number the programme is aimed at, the leading indicators that will move first, the reporting cadence, and what a bad quarter would look like. Agreeing in advance what failure looks like is what makes an honest review possible, and almost nobody does it.
Questions people ask about seo onboarding questions
How long should onboarding take?
Days for access and agreements, a few weeks for the audit and plan. If the first month produces only a document, ask what will be implemented and by whom in the second.
Should I give full site access?
Grant the level needed for the work, from accounts you own. Agree what may be changed without asking and what must always be approved.
What is the most commonly skipped step?
Agreeing the commercial measure. Programmes that never settle it default to reporting traffic and rankings, which is where most disappointment starts.