Set up a client's site

Tell the client what we will do, and get their go-ahead, as you would for any tool that touches their site. Once the site is set up, we crawl it on a schedule, check its key pages after each deploy and once a day, and e-mail whoever you choose when something stops pages being crawled or indexed. We only read pages, as a search engine does.

If the site sits behind a firewall or bot protection, ask whoever runs it to let our crawler in. Our crawler's page says how to recognise it, and is a good link to send them.

Sites belong to a team, and everyone in a team sees all of its sites. So the question is who should be able to sign in and see what.

• One team for all your clients. The simplest. Only your own people sign in, and every site counts toward one plan: Pro watches up to 10 sites, and for more, write to us. Clients still hear about problems, by e-mail or Slack, without an account.
• A team for each client. When the client's own people should sign in and see their site, and no other client's. Each team has its own plan. Each person can have one team on Free, which watches 1 site; to make another team, move the first to Pro.

The person who makes a team stays its owner, and only the owner pays for its plan. If the client is to pay, let them make the account and invite you as an admin: an admin adds sites and changes their settings, everything this guide needs. Your team and plan has the roles.

To make a team, click the team's name at the top of the sidebar, then "New team".

Add the client's site as in Get started. Monitoring starts once you show the site is yours to change, which an agency that builds or looks after it can. Pick the way that fits who controls what:

• You deploy the site's code. Add the meta tag or the file with your next deploy. It lives in the code, so nobody at the client has to do anything.
• The client controls the domain, and you don't deploy the site. Send them the DNS record from the Ownership panel. They don't need an account; whoever manages their domain adds it.
• You already have the client's Search Console. If your Google account is an owner or a full user of the site there, connect it and the site is verified in the same step.

Add the code on your platform says where the tag, the file or the record goes on WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, common frameworks and DNS providers.

We check every 30 days that the proof is still there, and if it is gone, the e-mail goes to the team's owner. A redesign or a new theme is when it goes missing most often, so keep it in whatever template the client's homepage uses next, even if someone else builds it.

Alerts go to whoever needs to act: you, to fix things, and often someone at the client, such as their marketing lead, to know. Add both in the site's Settings, under Alerts.

• The site has to be verified first. Until then, only your team's own addresses can be added.
• An address outside your team gets an e-mail asking it to confirm, with a Send me these alerts button that works for 7 days. Nothing goes there until they click it, so tell the client to look for it.
• Every e-mail address in the site's alerts also gets the weekly summary, on Mondays.
• A channel in the client's Slack works too: someone there makes a webhook URL for it, as the alerts guide shows, and gives it to you.

Choose who gets alerts says what each alert says and when it is sent.

Each site has its own deploy key. It goes, as the secret SEO_HOOK_TOKEN, into the pipeline that deploys that client's site, never into another client's. On Pro every deploy is checked; on Free, 20 deploys a month.

Check every deploy has the steps, with examples for GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Bitbucket Pipelines and a plain deploy script.

• To stop watching a site, delete it in its Settings, under Advanced. That frees its place on your plan.
• Take the tag, the file or the DNS record off the client's site, or ask them to. Nothing breaks if it stays, but it no longer means anything.
• If the client goes on using SEO Uptime on their own, they add the site to their own account and verify it there. Each site has its own code, so theirs differs from yours.