Agency Operations

SEO project management for twenty clients, not one website.

SEO project management software built for a book of clients: a recurring work plan for every client, one screen showing which of them is owed work this week, and a planner that tells you when a client has quietly started eating twice the hours you sold them.

See a client work plan in the demo See pricing

Every SEO tool is built for one website. SEO project management starts at thirty.

The tools assume a single site and a single person looking at it. So the moment you have a book of clients, the actual job stops being SEO and becomes remembering: who is owed work this month, which account hasn’t been touched in three weeks, which one is eating hours nobody is billing for, and what exactly you promised to do every Tuesday for the client who signed in March.

That job usually lives in a spreadsheet, a project tool that knows nothing about SEO, and your head. The spreadsheet goes stale, the project tool never gets opened, and your head is the part that burns out.

AlmaSEO keeps the operational layer next to the work. The recurring plan lives on the client’s own profile, the hours you log against it feed the pacing math, and one screen at the top tells you which clients need you this week — built from the work you were already logging, not from a second system you have to maintain.

SEO client management for the solo operator with too many clients — and the agency with a team.

For the solo SEO running a full book

Nobody is going to tell you you’re overloaded.

You’re the whole delivery team. Nothing tells you which of thirty accounts is unprofitable, which one hasn’t been touched in three weeks, or which one is quietly consuming the month. You find out when a client asks — or when they leave.

Every client ranked by how far behind it is, most urgent first
Clients flagged when nothing’s been logged against them in ten days
Where the month lands if you carry on at the pace you’re keeping

For the agency with staff

You need people in the tool without handing over everything.

A contractor should see the two accounts they work on, not your whole client list, and definitely not your margins. Most platforms answer that with a single shared login and a promise that everyone will be careful.

Four roles, and per-client access you grant site by site
Analysts and viewers see only the sites you explicitly hand them
One feed of everything that happened, across the whole book

The SEO project management layer, tool by tool.

Everything here reads from work you already log against clients. None of it costs Data Credits.

The client list

SEO client management software in its plainest form — thirty accounts, and what each one needs, on one screen.

Every client, with its state visible: Activity in the last seven days, whether publishing is running, whether Search Console is connected, when it last published, and how many tasks are overdue — on the card, without opening anything.
Ordered the way you think: Drag the list into your own priority and it stays that way. Filter by type, search, or pull up just the build projects.
Web Vitals watched across the whole book: Every site’s loading performance is compared against its own previous reading, and the ones that got materially worse are counted and flagged. It’s the one health signal AlmaSEO tracks fleet-wide.

Plan Free on every plan.

Powered bySeven-day activityAutomation stateOverdue task countsCustom ordering

The All Sites dashboard: a Business Overview strip above a Portfolio Web Vitals table headed ‘3 sites monitored, average performance 73.3, 1 need attention’ — Every client and what it needs — with the fleet-wide Web Vitals check flagging the one that slipped. The **Business Overview** strip carries monthly revenue, average budgeted and actual hourly rate, utilization, hours logged against budget, and active client count. Beneath it a **Portfolio Web Vitals** table lists every client with its performance score, largest contentful paint, layout shift and interaction delay, headed **‘3 sites monitored, average performance 73.3, 1 need attention’** — with a red arrow beside the site that dropped. Below that, a card per client shows published and scheduled post counts, the most recent piece of work with its date, and a connected status.

Strategy Game Plan

The recurring work you promised each client, as a plan that recurs.

Real recurrence, not a repeating to-do: Once, weekly, every other week on the weeks you choose, monthly on the second Tuesday or the 15th. The plan matches how retainers are actually written.
Phases that switch the plan on and off: An onboarding phase and an ongoing phase, where tasks only count as due while their phase is active. A three-month campaign stops nagging you in month four.
Due across every client, in one line: How many strategy tasks are due this week and how many are overdue, across your whole book — each one linking straight to the client it belongs to.
Four playbooks to start from: Local SEO weekly, e-commerce monthly, content-heavy weekly, and backlink building fortnightly. Load one and edit rather than starting at a blank plan.

Plan Pro and up.

Powered byOn-hold toggleReminder daysCompletion criteriaStreaksPhase management

The Strategy Game Plan for a law firm client, with a banner reading 2 tasks remaining this week above the week laid out day by day — One client's recurring playbook — by day, by phase, with what recurs monthly held back until its week. Subtitled **‘Your recurring weekly & monthly SEO playbook’**, it opens on a banner reading **2 tasks remaining this week**, counters for total tasks, due this week, done this week and a **five-week streak**, and a milestone progress bar. Three phases are marked completed, active and upcoming. Then the week is laid out by day — a completed review-response task on Monday, a published blog post on Tuesday, a LinkedIn share on Wednesday, a Search Console check on Thursday — each tagged by category, priority and recurrence, with monthly tasks marked ‘not this week’ and two dated milestones listed at the bottom.

Daily Briefing

The screen you see before anything else.

Where you stand, the moment you log in: A once-a-day briefing opens on login — today’s target, hours left, your seven-day pace, and the soonest deadline. You start from where things are, not from a guess.
Your numbers, not the owner’s: Every personal metric — daily target, hours logged today, seven-day average, streaks, compression alerts — is filtered to you. A team member sees their own patterns, never the account owner’s.
The retainer stays a team number: Hours remaining is the whole team’s, because the client’s retainer is a shared obligation. Forty sold, thirty logged by you and five by a teammate — everyone sees the same five left.
Team Performance, at a glance: A contributions panel ranks each member’s last-thirty-day hours — biggest first, you highlighted — with the team total delivered. Who’s carrying the month stops being a guess.
It watches your headspace, too: The same briefing flags weekends worked and heavy-day streaks, so a pattern gets named while there’s still room to change it — then hands you straight to the Workload Planner to act on it.

Plan Pro and up. Team Performance appears once a second member is on the account — and Pro already includes the seats for it.

Powered byOpens once per loginPer-user personal metricsTeam Performance with 2+ membersOne click to the Workload Planner

The Daily Briefing that opens on login: a ‘Good evening’ header noting today’s 4.2h goal is out of reach this late and what to do about it; a stat row of 37.5h remaining, 9 workdays left, 3.1h my average per day and the soonest deadline; a Team Performance panel headed 58.5h total delivered with 3 members and 2 active today, and per-member bars — You 72%, Sarah 21%, Marcus 7% — each with hours over 30 days, 7 days and today; then two notes, one that two clients are ahead of pace and which to watch, one that two of the last four weekends were worked; and an Open Workload Planner button — The once-a-day briefing: your pace, the team’s contributions, and a weekend-work pattern named — with the planner one click away.

Workload Planner

The one that tells you things you would not otherwise find out.

The whole book’s hours, in one total: Every client’s remaining hours added up, turned into a per-day figure across your working week, and projected forward to where the month actually lands at the pace you’ve been keeping. Work Intelligence runs this same arithmetic for one client at a time, and carries the burnout read that goes with it; the planner is the version that spans all of them at once.
Scope creep, named: Any client consuming twice the hours they were allocated gets flagged as scope creep, and the client taking the biggest share of your month gets named. The account quietly swallowing your week stops being invisible.
The clients going quiet: An active retainer with nothing logged against it for ten days is flagged, and it escalates at fourteen and twenty-one. Silence is how retainers get cancelled.
Three versions of the month, to pick from: The daily target offered three ways — weekdays only, weekdays plus Saturdays, or all seven days — so the decision you’re making is which month you’re willing to have, rather than whether the number is bad.

Plan Agency. Needs retainer hours set on at least one client — the whole planner is built on the gap between hours sold and hours logged.

Powered byPer-client daily targetsCycles closing this weekOver-delivered clientsMomentum vs last monthUtilization and real hourly rate

Activity Feed

Everything that happened, everywhere, in order.

One stream across every client: Published articles, audits, rank checks, logged work, connections — every site you can reach, in one timeline instead of thirty tabs.
Filtered down to the question you have: By client, by category, by severity, by source, by date, or by search. “What happened on this account last month” takes one filter.
Or down to one person: Pick a team member and the stream becomes their week — every client they touched, in order. It’s the view you want the day before a one-to-one, and the one you want when a client asks who has been on their account. The dropdown only appears once there is more than one of you, so a solo account never sees a filter with a single name in it.

Plan Agency.

Powered byPer-site filterPer-member filterSeverity filterDate rangeFull-text search

Team and access

Agency time tracking, and people in the tool without handing over the whole book.

Four roles, with real teeth: Owner, manager, analyst and viewer. Managers can invite, but only analysts and viewers — they can’t mint another manager. An owner can’t walk out without handing the org to someone.
Access granted client by client: Owners and managers see the whole book. Analysts and viewers see only the clients you explicitly grant them — enforced on the data, not hidden in the interface.
Invites that expire: Emailed, and dead after seven days. Seats are checked against your plan when you send one — three on Pro, five on Agency, and on Agency it offers you another seat rather than refusing the invite. Further seats are $12 a month each.
Hours by person, not just by client: Every logged entry already records who logged it, so the team page adds them up per person: hours each, which clients they went into, and what kind of work it was — over the last week, month, quarter, six months, year, or everything. Owners and managers see it; an analyst sees the clients you granted them and not a colleague’s timesheet. People who logged nothing still appear, at zero — that is usually the row you opened it for. And it exports as a CSV, one row per entry with the date, person, client, category and hours, for payroll or the client who wants receipts.
Everything one person did, on one screen: Open a member and see every entry they logged — not just timed work, but every action — grouped by day, with the time each took and the client it was for, filtered by date range or category. It is the view for the one-to-one, and for the day a client asks who has been on their account. It works for people who have since left, too.
Timed work is never thrown away: System noise is cleared after ninety days. Anything with hours logged against it stays for good, so the year-old entry a dispute turns on is still there, and the all-time view actually means all time.
Leave the note on the work itself: Any entry can carry comments. Write one on a teammate’s work and it reaches them three ways — in the app, in Slack, and by email that names the entry — so the question about Tuesday’s three hours sits on Tuesday’s three hours, instead of in a message thread nobody will find in March. They answer in the same thread, and you hear about it the same three ways — whatever their role. Every member can open their own activity, so a thread is never more than one click from the person it is about.
Who’s buried and who’s free: A card per person for the current billing period: hours logged, what share of the team’s total that is, how many entries it took, and a bar per client showing where the time went. Anyone under an hour reads as idle and anyone over about two-fifths of the team total reads as heavy — which is the pair of facts you need before deciding who takes the new account.
Days nobody should be pacing against: Put your closures on a company holiday calendar — Christmas, the summer Friday, whatever your shop actually takes — and mark the ones that come round every year as recurring. Retainer workday maths then skips them, so nobody opens a client on the 27th of December and finds themselves apparently behind.
A record of who changed what: Every join, departure, removal and role change is written to a Team History timeline with who did it. When someone can suddenly see a client they couldn’t last week, the answer is a lookup rather than an argument — and if you have Slack connected, the owner is told the moment it happens. On a team of ten, searching the member list beats scrolling it.

Plan Pro and up — Pro runs a team of three. Agency raises that to five and lets you buy more at $12 a month each.

Powered byPer-site access matrixPending invitesRole changesMember searchTeam HistorySlack alerts on membership changesSeat limitsHours per memberPer-client splitCSV exportPer-member activityComments on work entriesCapacity per memberHoliday calendar

Website build projects

For the redesigns and builds, not the retainers.

Tasks with one level of subtasks: Statuses, priorities, due dates, and milestones you can filter to on their own. Subtasks collapse under their parent with a done-of-total count.
A timeline you didn’t have to build: Milestones and dated tasks plotted on a horizontal timeline with a marker on today, which turns vertical on a phone.
A 34-point launch checklist, pre-loaded: Pre-launch, DNS and hosting, SEO and analytics, content and QA, post-launch. It seeds itself the first time you open it, so nobody writes the list from memory at midnight.

Plan Free on every plan — on sites you add as a Website Build Project. Retainer clients use the Strategy Game Plan instead.

Powered byMilestone filterProgress barProject notes with pinningClient info readiness

Ownership Tracker

Where the client’s logins and registrar details actually live.

A spreadsheet, behind its own password: Multiple sheets, formatting, undo — locked with a separate password per client and unlocked only for that session. Knowing your AlmaSEO login isn’t enough to open it.
The questions you ask at 2am: Who owns the domain, where the DNS is, whose card renews the hosting. The answers live on the client’s profile instead of in an email from 2023.

Plan Agency.

Powered byMulti-sheetPer-client passwordEmail password resetSession-scoped unlock

Email Marketing

The newsletter you keep meaning to send — to your own list, and to your clients’.

Your list, and separately, each client’s: Two different jobs that get confused everywhere else. The account-level hub sends from your agency to your own subscribers — the marketing you never get round to. The per-client panel sits inside a client’s profile and sends to that client’s audience. Different Mailchimp connections, different lists, no chance of sending one to the other.
Your Mailchimp, not ours: You connect your own Mailchimp account with your own API key, from-name and reply-to address. The subscribers stay yours, the audience picker shows your real lists with their member counts, and nothing about the list ever lives here.
Built from blocks, drafted for you: Stack an algorithm update, an SEO tip, industry news, your own text and a call to action. AlmaSEO writes the algo-update and SEO-tip blocks so the newsletter starts at a draft instead of a blank page — then you edit every word before it goes.
Send, or don’t: Preview the whole thing in the branded template first, then send it or push it to Mailchimp as a draft and finish it there. Campaign history keeps what went out, with open and click rates beside each one.

Plan Per-client campaigns are Pro and up; the account-level hub for your own list is Agency. The AI-written blocks draw on your monthly AI actions — writing them yourself costs nothing.

Powered byOwn Mailchimp accountFive block typesBranded previewSave as draftOpen & click rates

What AlmaSEO watches across every client — and what it doesn’t.

Every platform with a client list claims it spots problems across your whole book. Here is exactly where that’s true here, and where it isn’t.

It does watch page speed across every site.

Each site’s performance reading is compared against its own previous reading, and the ones that dropped materially are counted and flagged on your client list. That’s a genuine fleet-wide check, and you don’t have to open a single account to get it.

It does watch your delivery across every client.

Hours, retainers, pacing, silence, scope creep, revenue and margin are all computed across your entire book at once. This is the deep end of the product, and it’s the reason the operations layer exists at all.

It does not claim to find SEO patterns across your clients.

There is no engine here that spots the same ranking drop on six sites and tells you they share a cause. Tools that imply otherwise are usually describing a dashboard that puts numbers side by side and lets you do the noticing. AlmaSEO would rather say plainly where the automation ends.

What SEO client management software costs, and which plan you need.

Nothing in this area spends Data Credits. It’s all built from work you log and clients you add — and it sits inside the same SEO dashboard software as the tracking and the reporting.

Free, on every plan

The client list with its live state, the fleet-wide Web Vitals check, website build projects with their timeline and launch checklist, and Alma, the assistant that can answer “which client have I neglected” out loud.

Pro

The Strategy Game Plan — the recurring work each client is owed, with the phases and recurrence rules that make a retainer run itself, and the weekly roll-up of what’s due across every account — plus the Daily Briefing that greets each member at login with their own pace and the team’s contributions, and email campaigns for each individual client.

Agency

The Workload Planner, the cross-site activity feed it lives on, team roles with per-client access, the Ownership Tracker, the Email Marketing hub for your agency’s own newsletter, and the money view — revenue per client, effective hourly rate, utilization, and which accounts carry the thinnest margins. The planner alone is the reason to be here — nothing else on the market will tell you a client has quietly doubled their hours.

One honest note on the build-project tools: Tasks, Timeline, Notes and the Launch Checklist appear on sites you add as a Website Build Project — they’re for redesigns and new builds. Ongoing retainer clients get the Strategy Game Plan instead, which is built around recurring work rather than a finish line.

SEO project management questions people actually ask.

Can I run recurring work for a book of clients?

Yes, and it is real recurrence rather than a repeating to-do. Once, weekly, every other week on the weeks you choose, monthly on the second Tuesday or on the 15th — the plan matches how retainers are actually written. Onboarding and ongoing phases switch parts of the plan on and off, so tasks only count as due while their phase is active and a three-month campaign stops nagging you once it ends.

Can I send email newsletters from AlmaSEO?

Yes, and there are two separate versions of it, which is worth being clear about. The account-level Email Marketing hub sends from your agency to your own subscribers — the marketing most agencies never get round to doing for themselves. That one is Agency. Inside an individual client's profile there is a second panel that sends to that client's audience instead, which is Pro and up. They use different Mailchimp connections and different lists, so there is no way to send one list's newsletter to the other. Either way you connect your own Mailchimp account with your own API key, from-name and reply-to, and the subscribers never live in AlmaSEO.

Do I have to build every client plan from scratch?

No. Four playbooks come ready to load and edit: local SEO weekly, e-commerce monthly, content-heavy weekly, and backlink building fortnightly.

What do I see when I log in?

A once-a-day briefing with today’s target, the hours left, your seven-day pace and the soonest deadline, so you start from where things actually are. Alongside it the client list shows each account’s state — activity in the last seven days, whether publishing is running, whether Search Console is connected, when it last published and how many tasks are open — and you can drag the list into your own priority and it stays that way.

Can I control which clients a team member sees?

Yes, client by client. There are four roles — owner, manager, analyst and viewer. Owners and managers see the whole book; analysts and viewers see only the clients you explicitly grant them, and that is enforced on the data rather than hidden in the interface. Managers can invite, but only analysts and viewers — they can’t mint another manager. Invites are emailed and die after seven days, and seats are checked against your plan when you send one. Every one of those changes — the invite, the role change, the removal — is written to an audit trail, so “who gave them access to that client?” has an answer rather than a suspect.

How many people can I put on the account?

Three on Pro, five on Agency, and on Agency you can buy more at $12 a month each up to 45 extra. The team page shows how many are in use; on Agency, an invite that would take you past the limit offers you the seat rather than just refusing, so nobody discovers the ceiling halfway through onboarding a new hire, and the account owner can move the number down again when someone leaves. Seats are the only part of Agency that scales with anything — sites, articles, audits and images are already unlimited.

Can I see who is overloaded before they tell me?

That is what the capacity view is for. For the current billing period each team member gets a card: hours logged, what share of the team’s total that represents, how many entries it took, and a bar for each client showing where their time actually went. Under an hour reads as idle, and a share of the team total above about two-fifths reads as a heavy load. It is a read of what has already happened rather than a plan — you cannot assign someone to future work or book time out — but it answers the question you have before handing out the next account, and it surfaces the person quietly carrying the month. Company holidays come out of the retainer maths too, so a closure week doesn’t read as everyone falling behind.

Can I export the team’s hours, or ask about a specific entry?

Both. The team page exports any date range — the last week up to all time — as a CSV with one row per logged entry: date, person, client, category, what was done, and hours. Timed work is never purged, so an all-time export really is all of it. And every entry can carry comments: leave a note on a teammate’s work and it reaches them in the app, in Slack if you use it, and by email naming the entry. Whoever it is about replies in the same thread and you are notified the same way. Owners and managers see everyone’s activity; every member can open their own.

Are personal metrics private from the rest of the team?

Your own numbers are yours — daily target, hours logged today, seven-day average, streaks and compression alerts are all filtered to you, so a team member sees their own figures rather than the owner’s. The exception is deliberate: hours remaining on a retainer is a team number, because the client’s retainer is a shared obligation. Team Performance ranks each member’s last-thirty-day hours with the team total delivered.

Will it tell me when a client is going wrong?

It names two failure modes directly. Any client consuming twice the hours they were allocated is flagged as scope creep, and the client taking the biggest share of your month gets named. Separately, an active retainer with nothing logged against it for ten days is flagged, escalating at fourteen and twenty-one days — silence is how retainers get cancelled.

Can I see everything that happened on one account?

Yes — published articles, audits, rank checks, logged work and connections across every site you can reach, in one timeline instead of thirty tabs. Filter by client, category, severity, source, date or search, so “what happened on this account last month” takes one filter.

Are tasks and timelines available for every client?

Not for every client, and this is worth being straight about. Tasks, Timeline, Notes and the 34-point launch checklist appear on sites you add as a Website Build Project — they are built for redesigns and new builds. Ongoing retainer clients get the Strategy Game Plan instead, which is built around recurring work rather than a finish line. Both kinds of client also get the encrypted per-client spreadsheet and the profile holding the answers you need at 2am: who owns the domain, where the DNS is, whose card renews the hosting.

See SEO project management across a real book of clients.

Open a client’s work plan in the demo, then look at the client list behind it — the same data the pacing math reads.

See a client work plan in the demo See pricing