Most SEO tooling assumes one person and one site. Capital-region work is the opposite: several domains in two official languages, and people who join and leave on contract dates. This is about running that as a workspace, not a shared password.
Ask an Ottawa communications lead who works on their search programme and the answer is rarely one name. There is an in-house team of two or three, an agency of record whose analyst changes when the account rotates, a contract editor hired for the French site on a term ending in March, and whoever built the site three years ago.
That is the real operating structure, and what tools tend to ignore. The design question is not how to display a keyword table. It is who can see which domain, on what basis, and what happens the day their engagement finishes.
Who is actually in the workspace
Start by writing down everyone who touches your search data — not the org chart, the credentials. The list runs longer than expected: two in-house staff, an agency analyst and a backup, a French-language contractor, an external developer, and a manager who asked for access during a review and never gave it back.
Each is a different relationship with a different end date. In-house staff stay until they move roles, the agency renews with the fiscal year, and the contractor's access should expire when the invoice is final. Treating all six alike is how organisations end up unable to answer a plain question from their own privacy officer.
In-house communications
They own the programme, sit through the committee cycle, and carry the history nobody else has.
- Full portfolio view
- Access ends with the role
Agency of record
Engaged under a term contract, staffed by people who rotate. The organisation persists; the individuals do not.
- Access per named address
- Reviewed at each renewal
Contract specialists
A French-language editor, a consultant, a researcher hired for one programme. Their access has a defined last day.
- Scoped to one or two sites
- Revoked on schedule, not on request
Everyone else
Developers, a programme manager who wanted a number once, a board member preparing a deck. The category that quietly grows.
- Send a report instead
- No standing access
The panel's answer is multi-tenancy: linked Google account groups at the top, individual sites shared to named addresses beneath, and a tag layer across the portfolio. The rest of this article follows that structure.
My SEO Stream: the project feed and the work queue
Stream is the assistant inside the My SEO area, best understood as a project feed rather than a chat window. Everything the campaign generates lands in one chronological column: answers to questions, automatic reports, newly placed backlinks with the donor's domain rating and traffic, to-dos, and campaign news.
The value is not the artificial intelligence. It is that a colleague back from leave, or an analyst picking up an account mid-quarter, can scroll and see what happened in order without asking anyone. On a file that changes hands several times a year, that continuity outweighs any feature in it.
The project feed
One chronological record per project, readable by anyone holding access to that site.
- Everything in one column. Assistant answers, generated reports, backlink placements, to-dos and campaign news share a timeline instead of separate screens.
- Placements carry their evidence. A new backlink appears with the donor domain's rating and traffic, so the entry is reviewable rather than merely reassuring.
- Batch input. Stream accepts keyword and URL lists in bulk, which suits how the work arrives — a spreadsheet from a programme lead, not one term at a time.
- Searchable afterwards. Full-text search runs across every message, so a decision made in February is findable in September.
A chronological feed is readable and, left alone, becomes unmanageable. Four filters cut it: All, Links, Files and To-do. Links isolates backlink activity, which is what a manager checking delivery wants; Files gathers reports and uploads; To-do is the one most people use daily.
To-dos carry three states — active, deferred, dismissed — and the middle one fits this market. Dismissed means the recommendation was considered and rejected: a page that will not be rewritten, a term the organisation avoids, for reasons unrelated to search volume.
Deferred acknowledges how publication works here. A correct recommendation may be impossible before the next committee meeting, the official-languages review and, in regulated files, legal sign-off. Marking it deferred keeps it out of this week's queue without losing it down the feed.
| State | What it means | Typical trigger in a capital-region file | Review point |
|---|---|---|---|
| Active | In the current queue, expected to move | Metadata, internal links, technical fixes inside your own control | Weekly |
| Deferred | Accepted in principle, blocked on process | Body copy needing committee or official-languages review | Next cycle or fiscal quarter |
| Dismissed | Considered and declined, reasoning recorded | Terminology the organisation avoids; pages held by policy | Annually, or when policy changes |
Full-text search is where this pays off at handover. The incoming analyst needs no briefing call to learn why the certification page was left alone: they search the term, find the dismissed to-do, and read the reason as written at the time.
A router decides what the model is allowed to see
The assistant is not a general chatbot with your site's name typed into it. Every question first reaches a router model whose only job is to decide which project data blocks are relevant — Search Console, SERP, campaign, or custom data you supplied — and it loads zero to three of them.
Zero is a real outcome: ask what a canonical tag does and no project data is needed. Ask which French pages lost positions this month and the router pulls the Search Console and SERP blocks, so the answer rests on your figures rather than a plausible average — and a bounded set is easier to check afterwards.
Answers stream token by token, which has a practical effect: within a second you can see whether the model understood the question and rephrase, rather than waiting for a finished paragraph that misses. The conversation keeps up to twenty messages of history, so a follow-up like "and the same for the campaign domain" resolves normally.
Sharing a site, and ending that access
Here is what separates a workspace from a login. The panel is multi-tenant: you link Google account groups, each bringing the properties verified under them, then share individual sites to other email addresses. Sharing is per site, not per workspace, and goes to a named address rather than an organisation.
Both halves matter. Per site means the contractor hired for one campaign domain gets that domain, not the whole portfolio because it sat in the same account. Per named address means that when the agency's analyst changes you revoke one person and add another, rather than passing a credential down a chain.
Grant narrow, revoke on the date
How access should be structured when contracts, not calendars, decide who belongs.
- Linked Google accounts sit at the top. One consent flow covers Gmail, Search Console and Analytics, so a verified property enters the workspace once.
- Sites are shared individually. The unit is one site to one email address — the smallest grant that still lets someone work.
- Revocation is an ordinary operation. Access is removed the way it was given, from the same list, without involving the person who holds it.
- The grant list is the record. At any moment the panel states which addresses hold which sites, which is what an audit asks first.
Set revocation dates when you set the grant, not when you remember. Tie them to something already in the calendar: the contract end date, the fiscal-year turn in March, the standing-offer renewal. A quarterly pass through the sharing list takes ten minutes and is the highest-value habit here.
| Who | Sites granted | Basis for access | Ends when |
|---|---|---|---|
| In-house communications lead | All four domains | Owns the programme | Role changes |
| Agency analyst | Two main sites, certification domain | Named in the standing offer | Contract renewal, or staff rotation |
| French-language editor | French main site, French campaign pages | Fixed-term engagement | End of March |
| Programme manager | Certification domain only | Owns that programme | Programme closes |
| External developer | None; report sent instead | No standing need | Not applicable |
There is a quieter benefit. Because access is per site, a programme manager can watch his own domain without seeing the association's full numbers, and without asking you for a screenshot every second Tuesday. Narrow access reduces reporting requests.
Site tags, and why flat beats deep
Tags apply across the portfolio as a global filter: select one and every view narrows to the sites carrying it. The temptation is to build a taxonomy. Resist it. The scheme that survives a real organisation is flat, short, and marks a distinction someone actually filters on.
For a bilingual portfolio the productive axes are language, function and lifecycle. Language separates the English and French properties, the split that carries the analysis here. Function separates the main site from programme and campaign domains. Lifecycle separates what is live from what is winding down.
Flat and few
Six to ten tags along two or three axes, each answering a question someone asks weekly.
- en / fr
- core / programme / campaign
- active / sunsetting
Deep and clever
Nested schemes encoding the org chart. They go stale at the first reorganisation and nobody maintains them.
- Department hierarchies
- Owner names
- Anything with a colon in it
A flat scheme also makes shared access legible: when a contractor holds two sites carrying the same French tag, the scope of the engagement is visible at a glance. Three levels deep, nobody can state that scope without opening four screens.
Reporting for a room that did not attend the analysis
Every portfolio like this produces documents for people who never log in: a board, a committee, a departmental client. The export limits shape those documents, so learn them before promising anything.
CSV and JSON run to ten thousand rows — a full keyword set for a portfolio this size, and what you hand an analyst doing their own work. PDF is capped at two hundred and fifty rows and rendered server-side, which makes it a document rather than a data dump. That cap forces summarising.
The report builder is configurable and carries branding, your logo and colours. For an association sending the same monthly report to a board and to a departmental client, that matters less for appearance than for provenance: the reader can see whose analysis this is.
- Time series and metric cards. The two elements a committee actually reads, and the only ones that belong on the first page.
- Sortable, filterable tables. Paged at fifty to two hundred rows, for the working session rather than the paper.
- Sparklines. Compact trend beside a number, useful when a report lists twenty keywords and nobody will read twenty charts.
- Heatmaps, used selectively. The device heatmap earns its place; the country heatmap shows one dominant block and tells you little, because here the dividing line is language.
A week on a bilingual association portfolio
Take a national professional association headquartered in Ottawa. Four properties: the English main site, the French main site, a certification programme domain, and a public-awareness campaign domain launched last spring. Two in-house staff, an agency of record, and a contract French-language editor whose term ends in March — the only person working on the French site.
Monday, the in-house lead opens the portfolio with no tag filter and reads the numbers across all four domains. Background workers synced overnight, so nothing needs refreshing and the two-day lag in Search Console data is accounted for. Anything that moved sharply gets ten minutes.
Tuesday, she filters to the fr tag and reads the French properties on their own. This is a separate reading, not a subsection of the English one, and it produces to-dos the French editor can see, because his access is exactly those sites. He works Wednesday, closes two items and defers one pending official-languages review.
Thursday, the agency analyst — who holds the two main sites and the certification domain, but not the in-house campaign domain — reviews placements under the Links filter and checks donor ratings against what was agreed. Friday, the monthly report generates with the association's branding for a board that reads three charts.
At the end of March three things happen together: the fiscal year turns, the campaign domain is tagged sunsetting, and the French editor's access is revoked because his contract ended. Nobody had to remember it; the date was set when the grant was made. If he returns in April, the grant is reissued in a minute and his history is still there.
None of this is exotic; it is the ordinary rhythm of a bilingual organisation in a procurement town. The campaign automation in My SEO runs at 149 USD monthly per domain for AutoSEO and 500 USD for FullSEO, so per-domain pricing is worth planning around at four properties. Our services page maps that onto a retainer.
Frequently asked questions
Can I give an external contractor access to only the French site?
Yes — that is what per-site sharing is for. You share the individual site with the contractor's email address, and they see that property and nothing else. If the engagement later covers a second domain, you add it as a separate grant rather than widening the first.
What happens to their work in the feed when access is revoked?
The record stays with the project. Removing access ends what a person can see; it does not remove the to-dos they closed, the reasons they wrote, or the reports produced during their term. An April handover should not lose what was decided in February.
Does the assistant see data from sites a person cannot access?
The assistant works within a project. The router loads between zero and three data blocks belonging to that project — Search Console, SERP, campaign or custom — and builds the answer from those. Check any figure that will be quoted onward against the underlying view.
How many tags should a portfolio of four or five sites have?
Six to ten, in one flat layer. Language, function and lifecycle cover almost every filter a bilingual portfolio needs. Wanting a hierarchy usually means you are encoding an org chart, which changes more often than your domains do.
Can a committee paper be produced straight from the panel?
Partly. The configured report gives you the charts, the metric cards and up to two hundred and fifty rows in PDF, rendered server-side with your branding. What it cannot supply is the paragraph explaining why the numbers moved and what you propose to do — the only part the committee will discuss.
Where the automation stops
It is worth being exact about the boundary, because the tooling is capable enough to make overclaiming easy. Data collection, synchronisation, ranking history, placement records, report rendering, export and access administration are mechanical; no one should spend a Thursday afternoon on them.
Four things remain human. Prioritisation: choosing which of eleven correct recommendations gets the one review slot before the fiscal year turns. Cause-finding: knowing the French page dropped because a department reorganised its own site and changed a link. Goal-setting: agreeing what the certification domain is for, a board conversation with a search consequence. And client communication: telling a departmental contact the number went down, why, and what happens next.
What a shared workspace does is clear the ground in front of that work. When data is current without anyone refreshing it, history is searchable by whoever holds the file this month, access ends the day the contract does, and the report goes out without a scramble, the remaining hours go to judgement. The portfolio and sharing controls buy that time; they do not replace the person spending it.
To see this against your own properties, connect a verified site and open the workspace — the Google consent flow covers Search Console and Analytics in one step. The rest of this series is on our blog.