SEO Specialist onboarding

These three panels have site-wide consequences. Complete them before anything else. A misconfigured Global SEO or Robots.txt will quietly undermine every other SEO action you take.

1a. Confirm Global SEO is configured correctly.

Open SEO → Global SEO. Confirm or correct four things:

• Search engines can index this site is toggled ON (unless you are intentionally in a pre-launch hold).
• Title separator is set to your preferred character — | or – are the two most common choices. Every page title on the site inherits this separator between the page name and the site name.
• Force trailing slash is on or off. Pick one and keep it consistent — mixing /about/ and /about on the same site creates duplicate-URL signals in Search Console.
• External sitemap URLs — if the site has a separate blog platform, a storefront on the same domain, or a docs subdomain, add those sitemap URLs here so search engines index them.

See Set site-wide Global SEO defaults for a field-by-field walkthrough.

Known caveat — title separator. If you change the separator, some pages may continue to display the old separator for a short period before their cached version refreshes. If a page title looks stuck after a separator change, open the page editor, save without changes, and check the public page again. This is a known per-page cache edge case under active investigation.

1b. Review and save your Robots.txt.

Open SEO → Robots.txt. The editor shows the raw file search engines read before any page on your site. At minimum, confirm:

• /sg-admin/ is in a Disallow block (it should be by default — verify it is there).
• Your sitemap URL appears as a Sitemap: directive.
• No staging or preview paths you intended to block are missing from the Disallow list.

See Edit robots.txt for format guidance and common patterns.

A correct Robots.txt for your business looks like this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /sg-admin/
Disallow: /preview-fall-2026/
Disallow: /internal-docs/
Sitemap: https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

1c. Verify site ownership with Google Search Console.

Open SEO → Google Search Console. Paste the long string from inside Google's content=".." HTML verification tag into the verification field and save. Then return to Search Console and click Verify.

See Verify your site with Google Search Console for the full round-trip — what to copy from Google, where to paste it in SGEN, and how to confirm Google sees the tag on the public page before you click Verify.

Once the foundations are locked, spend the first week building the 15-minute daily check into muscle memory. The daily check has three moves: SEO Manager Issues scan, Event Logs 404 sweep, Analytics Reports top-entry-pages view.

2a. Open the SEO Manager and run the Issues filter.

Open SEO → SEO Manager. Every page, blog post, and event on the site appears in one table with 18 SEO signals per row. Click the Issues chip at the top to filter down to rows with missing SEO fields. Fix each missing field inline: click the SEO Title cell, type, press Enter. Click the Meta Description cell, type, press Enter. Click the Index Status toggle to flip it. The whole loop — scan, click, type, Enter — runs without a single page reload.

See Audit SEO across your whole site for the full command-station walkthrough. See Edit SEO inline for the inline-edit mechanics.

2b. Check Event Logs for 404s.

Open Analytics → Event Logs. Set the type filter to 404. Any path appearing here is a broken URL your visitors hit during the last day. Cross-reference with your Redirects list — if a path has 3 or more hits and no redirect in place, add one.

See Find what visitors have been doing with Event Logs.

2c. Check Analytics Reports for top entry pages.

Open Analytics → Reports. Set event type to Page View and date range to Yesterday. The doughnut chart shows your top paths by volume. If a page that should be ranking is not appearing here, investigate its SEO title and index status back in the audit grid.

See Visualize traffic with Analytics Reports.

Run the weekly audit on every piece of new content published that week, and sweep for structural redirect issues.

3a. SEO audit on new content.

Any page or post published in the last 7 days should get a full audit row review in the SEO Manager. Filter by the Issues chip. Fix missing SEO titles and meta descriptions inline. If a post needs structured data — an article schema for a blog post, a product schema for a store item, a how-to schema for a guide — click the Schema cell in its row to open the Schema Editor.

Known caveat — Schema Editor. When you save structured data via the Schema Editor, the admin confirms the save. Always verify the data appears on the published page by viewing the page source and searching for application/ld+json. If you do not find the block, the structured data may not be rendering on the public page. Re-check after any SGEN update.

3b. Broken-link sweep.

Open Analytics → Event Logs, filter by 404, date range Last 7 Days. For every path with 5 or more hits in the week:

1. Check whether a page still exists at that URL. If it was moved or deleted, you need a redirect.
2. Open Redirects and create a 301 Permanent redirect from the broken path to the correct destination.

See Manage site redirects for the exact add-redirect steps.

3c. Redirect spot-check.

Open the Redirects list and look for three problems:

• 302 Temporary redirects older than 30 days — flip these to 301 if the destination is permanent.
• Redirect chains (A → B, B → C) — collapse to a single hop (A → C) so visitors and crawlers do not pay the extra round-trip.
• Redirect loops (A → B, B → A) — these break the page entirely for the visitor. Delete one leg.

3d. Blog archive SEO review.

Open SEO → Blogs SEO. After publishing new blog posts, confirm the archive SEO Title and Meta Description still reflect your current content focus. The archive page is often one of the highest-traffic pages on a site — it earns its own SEO treatment. See Set blog archive SEO defaults.

3e. Per-type SEO hub check.

If you added a new content type this week (a new event series, a product category, a custom post type), open SEO → Post Type SEO to confirm a SEO screen exists for it and archive defaults are set. See Find per-type SEO settings.

Once a month, step back from the daily and weekly maintenance and run the deeper checks that keep the site in good structural shape over the medium term.

4a. Full-site SEO audit — export and review.

Open SEO → SEO Manager. Remove all filters so you see every content item. Click Export to download the full CSV. Open it and scan for:

• Pages with duplicate SEO titles — two pages using the same title string compete against each other in search results.
• Meta descriptions over 160 characters — search engines truncate these, so your hand-written ending may never appear.
• Pages set to No-index that should be indexed — commonly happens when a draft was toggled no-index and never flipped back on publish.
• Pages indexed that have thin or no content worth ranking — candidates for consolidation or no-index.

Known caveat — duplicate title detection. The SEO Manager export surfaces most duplicate titles, but some near-duplicates (titles differing only in punctuation or trailing spaces) may not be flagged automatically. Do a manual visual scan of the exported title column sorted alphabetically.

4b. Google Search Console review.

Log into Search Console for your domain. Check three areas:

• Coverage — any pages newly excluded, errored, or listed as "Crawled — currently not indexed"?
• Performance — top queries and impressions vs. last month. Are rankings holding, improving, or slipping?
• Core Web Vitals — any regressions since last month?

Cross-reference any Coverage errors against the 404 log in Event Logs. If Google is hitting a 404 on a URL you care about, you likely need a redirect in SGEN.

4c. 404 trend analysis — log review.

Open Analytics → Event Logs, filter by 404, date range Last 30 Days, and export. Compare this month's 404 paths against last month's list. New paths that appear often indicate:

• A third-party site linking to an old URL that was not redirected.
• A blog post or product that was deleted without adding a redirect.
• A URL structure change that was not communicated to the SEO team.

For each new 404 path with 10 or more hits in the month, add a 301 redirect in Redirects.