Jake Labate, SEO Professional

What A Finished Engagement Hands You

Every engagement ends in a document, and most of them stop being used within a month of arriving. This collection specifies mine: what is inside each one, how it is structured, which numbers are computed rather than asserted, and what a client can still do with it six months later.

Below is the full index. 104 deliverables, each with the one sentence that says what it is and what it is not, ordered the way work actually moves, from finding out what is wrong to handing the judgment over.

Browse the index Scope an engagement

How To Read This Index

104

Deliverables, each defined in one sentence

7

Stages, in the order work moves

1

Sentence that says what each one is not

A deliverable is the unit of scope: the smallest thing that can be separately scoped, priced and accepted on its own. An engagement is the unit of sale. Most engagements combine several deliverables, and any single one of them can be commissioned by itself.

  • Indented items are scoped inside the deliverable above them. They are real, separately priceable work, but they are usually bought as part of the larger piece rather than alone.
  • A linked name has its own specification. The rest are defined here and specified in full at the point they are scoped.
  • Nothing here is a package. The index is deliberately longer than any engagement, so what is excluded is as visible as what is included.

Specified In Full

Diagnostics

What is broken?

Work that establishes the current state and names what is wrong with it, in an order you can act on. 31 deliverables sit at this stage.

Technical SEO audit
A full examination of how search engines and AI crawlers reach, render and interpret the site, ending in a prioritised list of what to fix and in what order.
  • Crawl and indexation audit. A narrower examination of what gets discovered and what gets indexed, for sites where the gap between the two is the problem.
  • JS rendering audit. An assessment of what content exists only after JavaScript executes, and whether crawlers are seeing it.
  • Crawl budget analysis. An account of where crawler attention is being spent, and how much of it is wasted on pages that will never earn anything.
  • Log file analysis report. What crawlers actually did on the site over a defined window, as opposed to what the site intended them to do.
  • Site architecture / IA audit. An assessment of whether the site's structure puts its most valuable pages within reach of both users and crawlers.
  • Internal linking audit. An examination of how authority and topical context move through the site, and where that flow is broken or wasted.
  • Core Web Vitals / performance audit. A diagnosis of real-user performance by template, separating what users actually experience from what synthetic tools report.
  • Mobile and responsive audit. A check that the mobile experience carries the same content, links and markup as desktop, since mobile is what gets indexed.
  • Faceted navigation audit. An assessment of how many URLs the site's filtering can generate, which of those should exist, and how the rest should be controlled.
  • Status code / HTTPS / security audit. A check that every URL returns the response it should, over a valid secure connection, without chains or mixed content.
Structured data audit
An assessment of what the site currently tells machines about itself through markup, and where that description is wrong, missing or inconsistent.
AEO / GEO readiness audit
An assessment of how readily AI answer engines can extract, attribute and cite this site, with a baseline of how often they currently do.
  • Agent access audit. A review of which automated agents can reach the site and which are blocked, and whether that matches what the business actually wants.
  • Query fan-out research. The chain of sub-questions an assistant works through before answering, and which of them the site can currently satisfy.
Content audit and inventory
Every page scored on performance, intent match and decay, ending in a keep, improve, merge or remove decision for each.
  • Content quality / E-E-A-T review. An assessment of whether the site's content carries the authorship, sourcing and expertise signals its subject matter requires.
  • Keyword cannibalisation analysis. An identification of where multiple pages compete for the same query, and a decision on which one should win.
  • Index bloat / thin content analysis. An account of how many indexed pages earn nothing, what they cost in crawl attention, and which should be removed or consolidated.
Backlink profile audit
An assessment of the site's external authority, its concentration, and any part of it that plausibly carries risk.
Local SEO audit
A check of listing accuracy, local entity consistency and location page quality across the platforms that drive local visibility.
International / hreflang audit
A verification that every locale is correctly declared, reciprocated and served, so the right market sees the right page.
Accessibility overlap review
The subset of accessibility issues that also degrade machine comprehension, flagged where the two disciplines agree.
Post-migration forensic analysis
An after-the-fact reconstruction of what a launch broke, in what order, and what can still be recovered.
Manual action / penalty review
A determination of whether a decline is a penalty or something else, and what a reconsideration would require.
Algorithm update impact analysis
An assessment of whether a named update explains the site's movement, and what the update appears to have rewarded.
Competitor technical benchmark
The same technical measurements taken across named competitors, so the site's position is quantified rather than assumed.
Competitor content gap analysis
The topics and queries competitors own that this site does not, sized by what closing each gap would be worth.
SERP feature opportunity analysis
Which result features are winnable for the target query set, and what each would require.
Platform or vendor evaluation
A scored comparison of candidate platforms or tools against the requirements that actually constrain this site.
Second opinion review
An independent read of another party's plan or work, stating plainly what is sound, what is wrong, and what is missing.
Migration risk audit
A pre-launch account of everything the planned change could break, sized by what each break would cost. Scoped inside Migration plan.

Opportunity

What is it worth?

Work that sizes the demand before anyone commits budget to chasing it. 7 deliverables sit at this stage.

Keyword research and URL mapping
The addressable query set, grouped by intent and assigned to the single page meant to answer each one.
Search intent analysis
What the result page currently rewards for each query cluster, and therefore what kind of page can win it.
Topic and entity model
The concept graph the site needs to own to be understood by machines, and how its pages should express it.
Demand forecast / opportunity model
A modelled range for what the addressable demand is worth, with the assumptions that would change it.
Organic market sizing
The total reachable search demand in a market or category, and the realistic share of it this site could hold.
Persona to query mapping
Which audience asks which questions at which stage, so content can be aimed rather than sprayed.
Query fan-out research
The chain of sub-questions an assistant works through before answering, and which of them the site can currently satisfy. Scoped inside AEO / GEO readiness audit.

Direction

What should we do?

Work that turns findings and demand into a sequence, with the reasoning left visible. 12 deliverables sit at this stage.

SEO roadmap
A sequenced, resourced plan with owners and dependencies, built so it can be funded and tracked rather than admired.
Prioritisation matrix
Every recommendation placed by impact against effort, with severity and likelihood attached, so the order is defensible.
Measurement plan / KPI framework
What counts as success, how each number is calculated, and what the measurement explicitly cannot prove.
Content strategy
What the site should publish, in what order, to own the topics its business depends on.
Internal linking strategy
How authority and context should move through the site, expressed as rules rather than one-off suggestions.
Migration plan
The full sequence for moving platform, domain or structure without losing what the current site has earned.
  • Migration risk audit. A pre-launch account of everything the planned change could break, sized by what each break would cost.
  • IA and URL architecture plan. The structure the site should have, the URL rules that express it, and the path from here to there.
  • Redirect map. A complete, tested mapping of every existing URL to its destination, so nothing that earns traffic or links is lost at launch.
International expansion plan
Which markets to enter, in what order, and what each one requires technically and editorially before launch.
Structured data strategy
Which entities the site will describe, how markup will be produced and governed, and who owns it afterwards.
AI visibility strategy
How the site becomes a source assistants cite, and how that will be measured given nobody controls the retrieval layer.
Experimentation plan
What will be tested, how, and what result would be strong enough to act on.
Annual budget recommendation
Recommended spend by workstream for the coming year, with the expected return and the confidence behind each figure.

Specification And Build

Make it real.

Work that specifies a change precisely enough to be built, or builds it. 24 deliverables sit at this stage.

Technical requirements doc / tickets
The findings converted into dev-ready work in the client's tracker, each item independently shippable and independently verifiable.
Schema markup spec
Exactly what markup each template must emit, precise enough that two engineers would build the same thing.
Schema deployment
The markup live on the site, validated across every template, with the configuration recorded.
Robots.txt spec
The literal robots file, with every rule justified, so nobody later removes a line they do not understand.
XML sitemap spec
Which URLs belong in the sitemaps, how they are split, and how they stay current without manual work.
llms.txt / agent policy file
An explicit, published statement of what automated agents may do with this content, and where the good material is.
Canonical and meta directive spec
Which URL is authoritative in every duplicate scenario, and what each template tells crawlers to do.
Title and meta description sets
Written titles and descriptions for the target URL set, inside length limits and matched to intent.
Content briefs
The angle, structure and entities for each piece, written so a competent writer needs no further instruction.
Optimised copy
The finished page copy, written to the brief and ready to publish.
Internal link implementation
The specific links added across the site, following the linking rules rather than editorial instinct.
Hreflang implementation
The locale tags live, reciprocated and validated across every market pairing.
Template and component specs
What each page template and reusable component must contain and emit, at every state.
Annotated wireframes
Layouts with the machine-readable requirements marked directly on them, so nothing is lost between design and build.
QA and acceptance checklist
What must be verified before a release ships, with pass and fail criteria that do not require judgement.
CMS configuration
The platform settings that govern URLs, directives and markup output, set correctly and documented.
GA4 and Search Console configuration
Measurement set up so the numbers reported later are trustworthy and consistently defined.
Tag manager implementation
Tracking deployed through tag management, with every tag owned and documented rather than orphaned.
Page speed implementation
Performance changes made and measured, with the before and after recorded per template.
Migration execution support
Hands-on presence through cutover, running the checks and calling the go or no-go in real time.
  • Redirect implementation and testing. The redirects live and verified, with evidence that each returns the right status and lands on the right page.
  • Pre-launch gate sign-off. The formal go or no-go, recorded against the criteria agreed at the start rather than negotiated on the day.
Product feed optimisation
Product data mapped and cleaned so shopping and marketplace surfaces accept and rank it.
Redirect map
A complete, tested mapping of every existing URL to its destination, so nothing that earns traffic or links is lost at launch. Scoped inside Migration plan.

Monitoring

Tell me when it breaks.

Standing attention on the things that regress quietly between engagements. 11 deliverables sit at this stage.

Monitoring and alerting setup
The one-time build of everything that will be watched from now on, tuned so alerts mean something.
  • Index coverage monitoring. Continuous tracking of what is indexed and excluded, so a drop is caught in days rather than at the next audit.
  • Schema validity monitoring. Continuous checking that structured data stays valid and present across templates, so breakage is caught in days rather than quarters.
  • Core Web Vitals monitoring. Ongoing field performance tracking by template, so regressions surface with the release that caused them.
  • Rank and visibility tracking. Ongoing position tracking across the query set that matters, weighted so movement is read in value rather than averages.
  • AI citation and answer tracking. Repeated sampling of how assistants answer the target questions and who they credit, so the trend is visible.
  • Competitor movement alerts. Notification when a tracked competitor ships something worth reacting to.
  • Site change detection. Automated diffing of robots, canonicals, directives and markup, so a change nobody announced is still caught.
  • Log anomaly monitoring. Ongoing watch on crawler behaviour, flagging the shifts that precede visible problems.
  • Crawl error alerting. Immediate notification when the crawled surface starts returning errors or stops responding.
Algorithm update watch briefing
A short note whenever a confirmed platform change lands, saying whether it plausibly affects this site.

Reporting

Did it work, and how do I explain it?

Work that accounts for what changed and makes it legible to people who were not in the room. 7 deliverables sit at this stage.

Executive one-pager
The entire engagement compressed to one decision, one number, and the cost of not acting.
Board or stakeholder deck
The case for the plan, built to survive a room of people who did not commission it.
Experiment readout
What was tested, what happened, at what confidence, and what should now change.
Findings presentation
A live walkthrough of the findings, built so the room reaches the same conclusion rather than being told it.
Monthly performance report
What moved this month, why, and what changes next, written so the first page can be read alone.
Quarterly business review
The quarter told as a narrative with a conclusion, aimed at the people who decide whether this continues.
Live dashboard
An always-current view of the agreed metrics, at the grain each audience needs.

Enablement

So my team can do this.

Work that transfers the judgment rather than renting it. 12 deliverables sit at this stage.

Playbook / SOP
How the team does the thing without me in the room, written at the grain a competent person can follow unsupervised.
New-hire onboarding curriculum
The sequence that takes someone from hired to useful on this specific site and stack.
  • Training workshop. A live session that leaves a named team able to do something they could not do the day before.
  • Internal documentation. The written record of how this site actually works, so the knowledge does not leave when a person does.
  • Recorded course modules. The training captured and sequenced so it keeps working for people hired after the engagement ends.
Schema governance doc
Who owns structured data, how a change gets approved, and what happens when a template ships without it.
Publishing standards
The rules content must satisfy before it goes live, written so they can be enforced rather than admired.
QA standards doc
What gets checked before any release touches the site, and who signs it off.
Dev SEO checklist
The short list an engineer runs before merging, designed to stop the same regressions recurring.
Office hours program
A standing session where the team brings live problems and leaves able to solve the next one themselves.
Competency assessment
An honest read of what the team can and cannot do today, and what would close the gap.
Decision trees and escalation guides
The branching logic behind recurring judgement calls, so the team makes them consistently without asking.

Scope A Deliverable

If one of these documents is the thing your team is missing, or you want the specification adapted to a portfolio, a migration, or an in-house standard, the conversation starts here.

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