Playbook 1: Kickoff and baseline

What we ask for first

Three things gate the start: a date for the kickoff session, who joins from the client's side and who has the final say, and read access to Google Search Console. The last one matters most. Search Console shows the queries a site already appears for, which is the only first-party evidence of how buyers phrase their problem.

The questionnaire we send

The questionnaire covers the strategy phase only. Design gets its own, shorter questionnaire once the structure is approved. Clients can answer in bullet points and leave blank anything they would rather discuss, because we go through every answer together at the kickoff. These are the questions we use, word for word.

Your company

In a few sentences, what does the company do, and who is it for?
How did it start, and how has it changed since?
Who is in the team, and who does what?
What do you do differently from others in your market?

Your customers

Who are your customers today? If there are distinct groups, describe each one.
Which type of customer would you like more of, and why?
Which enquiries are not a good fit for you?
What do people usually want to know before they commit?
Which worries or objections come up most often?
Where do enquiries come from today?

Your services

What do you offer? Please list everything, including the smaller things.
Which of these matter most to you commercially?
Is there anything you would like to do more of, or less of?
Walk us through what happens from first contact to completion.
What do you handle that customers often assume they have to do themselves?

Your market

Who are your main competitors? Links are helpful.
Why do customers choose you over them?
Is there anything a competitor does better, or that you would like to match?
Which areas or cities matter most to you now, and which would you like to grow into?

How your customers talk

In their own words, what do customers say they are looking for?
Which questions do you get asked over and over?
Are there terms you would want to be found for in Google or ChatGPT? Rough ideas are enough, the research is on us.

Proof

Which projects, clients or results are you most proud of?
Do you have reviews or testimonials we can use, and where do they live?
Any numbers worth stating? Years active, clients served, volume handled.
Any certifications, memberships, partnerships or accreditations?

Content and practical

Who on your side reviews and approves content?
Is there anything we should avoid saying, or be careful with?
Is any of your existing content worth keeping?
Do you have privacy, terms and cookie pages we should reuse?

Goals

What should the new site do that the current one does not?
What would make you say, a year from now, that this worked?

A ninth section is written per project, after rereading the proposal and the sales thread. We add it when the site serves more than one audience (the customer questions are repeated per audience), when the proposal leaves template slots undefined, when locations or cities need choosing, when the site is multilingual, when the client is rebranding, when an old site has a messy history, or when a certification carries commercial weight in their market.

Where each answer ends up

Question	What it becomes on the site
What do people want to know before they commit?	The sections of each service page, in the order buyers ask them
Which questions do you get asked over and over?	The FAQ, and the questions we track in AI assistants after launch
What do you handle that customers assume they do themselves?	Usually the most persuasive line on the service page
Which enquiries are not a good fit?	Qualifying copy and form fields that filter before the first call
Terms you want to be found for	A list we test against real search volume (Playbook 2)
What would make this a success in a year?	The measure the monthly report is written against

The baseline, captured in week one

Before anything on the old site changes, we export and store five things: Search Console queries and pages, a full crawl of the site, the backlink profile, the last twelve months of analytics, and screenshots of what AI assistants answer today when asked the buyer's questions without the brand name. The screenshots record who gets named and which pages get cited.

Once redirects deploy and the new site is live, the before picture is gone, and every later claim about improvement rests on it. On launch day we fill a baseline column in the keyword sheet with each target term's position, then add one column per month. The end-of-term assessment reads that baseline against month six.

The kickoff session

The kickoff turns answers into fixed choices, written down the same day. For a leadership coach and author, one session settled six of them: her own name is the brand and the company is the legal entity behind it, with the old company domain redirecting to the name domain; business clients come first and personal development gets its own zone with its own tone; the book links out to retailers with no checkout on the site; programmes become a CMS collection with paid signup or a waitlist; five self-assessment tests share one template; and she writes her own copy, so nothing is migrated from the old pages.

The follow-up email goes out within hours. It links the shared folder with everything discussed, lists at most three things we still need from the client, and says when the next deliverable arrives.