Most Manitoba companies running three domains do not have three people looking after them. They have an owner, whoever answers the phone, and a web contractor who shows up twice a year. This is what a shared SEO workspace has to do to be worth anything to those two and a half people — and the four decisions it will never make for them.
"Team" in SEO writing almost always means a department. Drive out to a carrier on Oak Point Highway or a food plant off Dugald Road and that arrangement does not exist. What does exist is more domains than people. A trucking company has the main site, a second one for its brokerage division because the brand was bought rather than built, and a driver recruiting site somebody stood up during a hiring push. Nobody chose a portfolio. It accumulated.
The problem is not that these owners cannot read a chart. They read rate sheets and fuel surcharges. The problem is that the last real decision about the recruiting site was made in an email in March, in a thread that also held an invoice, and nobody can find it. Meanwhile the contractor who rebuilt the main site in 2022 still has an account on everything, because removing it was never anyone's task. In the Semalt workspace the numbers, the conversation about them and the resulting task sit in one place.
A team of two and a half people
Before any tool question, write down who touches the websites. On most Winnipeg accounts the list runs to three names, none of whom were hired for this.
The owner
Second or third generation. Watches the P&L weekly and the website twice a year.
- Decides what gets funded
- Reads one page, never a dashboard
The office coordinator
Takes the enquiries, knows in one sentence whether a caller is a real shipper, and got the CMS login by default.
- Best read on lead quality in the building
- Free between calls, never on a schedule
The web contractor
A freelancer or two-person studio, engaged per project. Quick when handed a specific list, invisible in between.
- Executes, does not decide
- Access should end when the engagement does
The next person
Whoever inherits this in eighteen months, without a handover meeting.
- Gets whatever was written down
- Re-argues whatever was not
Three requirements come out of that roster. Work has to be recorded where the next person will look, not in a mailbox. A question has to be answerable in the five minutes somebody actually has. And a supplier's access has to end on the day the invoice is paid.
Stream: the feed that becomes the record
My SEO Stream is a conversational feed, one per project. Its value is not that you can chat with it. Its value is that events which normally scatter across email, a spreadsheet and somebody's memory land in one chronological column with dates attached.
The project feed
Everything that happened on this domain, in order, in one place.
- Assistant answers. What you asked and what came back, kept in place rather than in a browser tab you closed.
- Automatic reports. Summaries drop in on their own, so the record does not depend on anyone remembering to run one.
- New backlinks. Each placement arrives with the donor's Domain Rating and traffic — the only way a non-specialist can judge whether a link was worth having.
- To-dos. Tasks raised by the system or by you, carrying a state that survives the week.
- Campaign news. What the automation did on your behalf, dated, so the contractor's next visit starts from fact.
Placements come from a partner network of more than 230,000 sites, and watching each one land with its own figures turns link building from an invoice line into something checkable. Stream also takes lists in bulk — paste a column of keywords, or a set of URLs after a rebuild, and it accepts them as a batch.
Zero to three data blocks per question
The assistant inside Stream is bound to your project's real data, and the binding is deliberate rather than total. A router model reads each question and decides which data blocks to load — Search Console, SERP, campaign state, custom data — loading zero to three of them by relevance.
That range is the design. A question about how a page ranked gets ranking data. A question about what a term means gets nothing loaded, because pulling ninety days of impressions into a definition only makes the answer vaguer. Loading everything every time is not thoroughness; it is noise.
| What you ask | Blocks the router is likely to load | What comes back |
|---|---|---|
| "Which terms did the recruiting site lose this month?" | Search Console, SERP | Named terms with position movement, not a general trend |
| "What has the campaign placed since April?" | Campaign | Placements with donor DR and traffic, dated |
| "Is a 301 the right redirect here?" | None | A straight technical answer, immediately |
| "Why might our brokerage pages be flat?" | Search Console, SERP, campaign | Candidate explanations tied to your figures |
Answers stream token by token, which sounds cosmetic and is not. When a reply starts appearing in under a second, the coordinator with four minutes between calls reads it. After fifteen seconds of blank screen she switches tabs, and the question goes unasked for another month.
The conversation keeps up to twenty messages of history — enough for a follow-up without restating the situation ("and the same for the careers domain" works), short enough that it never becomes a transcript nobody rereads. The archive is the feed itself.
Active, deferred, dismissed — and why the middle one matters
A chronological feed becomes unusable around the two-hundredth entry unless you can cut it down. Four filters sit over the stream: All, Links, Files and To-do. Links gives you placement history alone, Files the exports and documents, To-do the work queue — the only view the contractor needs before a visit.
| State | Meaning | What it prevents |
|---|---|---|
| Active | Agreed, not done, still owned by someone | Work quietly falling off the list |
| Deferred | Consciously postponed, with the reason attached | The same item being re-raised every quarter |
| Dismissed | Considered and rejected on purpose | A rejected idea returning as a fresh recommendation |
Deferred is the state most tools refuse to offer, because postponement looks like failure on a progress bar. Where the contractor is booked twice a year, postponement is the normal case: twelve items may be correct and only three possible before the fall freight season. Marking the other nine deferred, each with a sentence saying why, is the difference between a plan and a wish list.
- Defer with a date or a condition. "After spring break-up" and "once the brokerage domain is decided" are usable. "Later" is not.
- Dismiss properly rather than ignoring. An item you scroll past costs attention weekly. Rejected in writing, it stops costing anything.
- Filter to To-do before the contractor's window. The active list is the brief; the rest is context they do not need.
- Let the automatic reports pile up under Files. They answer "what did this look like in the spring" without anyone rebuilding it.
Over all of it runs full-text search across every message, and this is the feature that quietly replaces the email archive. Search "recruiting" and you get the March exchange about job-location pages, the decision that came out of it, and the placements that followed.
Linked accounts, shared sites, and taking the keys back
The workspace is multi-tenant in a practical sense rather than an enterprise one. Google accounts are linked in groups, so one sign-in reaches every verified property, and a single OAuth2 consent — one of the eleven integrations wired into the panel — covers Gmail, Search Console and Analytics at once.
Individual sites are then shared to specific email addresses — not the whole workspace, one site to one address. The contractor engaged to rework the recruiting domain gets the recruiting domain, and nothing about the brokerage or the main site.
- Share per site, not per company. The instinct is to hand over everything because it is quicker. Quicker now, awkward later.
- Revoke on the invoice date. Ending access belongs to closing the engagement, not to a quieter week that never comes.
- Audit once a year regardless. Read the list of who can see what. On most accounts that has never been done.
- Revocation disturbs nobody else. Removing a supplier is one action on one site. It does not change a shared password and lock the office out of its own CMS.
Tags for a carrier, a division and a careers site
Site tags are a filter that applies workspace-wide. Set a tag and every view afterwards — analytics, rank tracking, reporting — respects it. That is why tagging belongs in the first fifteen minutes, not after a month of reading numbers you cannot group.
Flat tags beat a hierarchy, and the reason is arithmetic. A tree forces one path per site, so the moment you want the two domains that share an audience but sit in different branches, you have to rebuild the tree. Flat tags combine: six to ten of them, in overlapping sets, express more than any folder structure.
What the domain is for
The clearest split on a freight portfolio, because three domains speak to three different readers.
- main-site
- brokerage
- careers
Who you are trying to reach
Driver recruitment is a real second audience with its own vocabulary and seasonality.
- shippers
- drivers
- partners
What is actually being worked on
Half a portfolio is usually parked. Saying so stops parked domains distorting every average.
- active
- maintenance
- parked
How far the market extends
A Winnipeg carrier sells into Saskatchewan, Ontario and the northern states, so regional and national work should not share one number.
- regional
- national
- cross-border
The careers domain deserves particular care. Recruiting behaves nothing like freight sales: different terms, competition from job boards rather than carriers, demand spiking on a hiring cycle. Averaged into a portfolio total it makes the main site look worse in January for reasons belonging to neither. The same holds for a food processor's co-packing division or a printer's trade-only site.
Reports, exports and what the pictures are for
Analysis that stays in the panel reaches one person. Everything that has to move — to the owner, to a lender, to two brothers who share the company — leaves as a file, and the limits are worth knowing.
Two formats, two audiences
Data leaves as CSV or JSON; documents leave as PDF, and the difference is not a technicality.
- CSV and JSON up to 10,000 rows. For anything that will be sorted, pivoted or joined to your own data — even when the analyst is the owner's spreadsheet.
- PDF up to 250 rows, rendered server-side. For reading. The cap admits that nobody reads a thousand rows of keyword data on paper.
- Configurable report builder. Decide once what a recurring report contains, so producing it later is not a monthly act of assembly.
- Branding with your logo and colours. Matters when the document goes to a customer or a shareholder outside the business.
The visualisations are chosen for reading speed. Time series show whether a line moves. Metric cards carry the few figures somebody checks without scrolling. Tables are filterable and sortable at fifty to two hundred rows a page, which is where the work happens. Sparklines put a shape beside a number. Heatmaps for countries and devices answer where the demand is and on what — for a carrier whose freight moves south, a question with money attached to it.
Which campaign tier sits underneath is a separate decision: the choice between AutoSEO and FullSEO comes down to how much manual control you want over keyword selection and link placement. The workspace and the feed are the same either way.
What this looks like in March
Three domains, two and a half people, no marketing budget beyond the campaign itself.
| When | Who | What happens | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | Coordinator | Opens Stream on the main site, reads what accumulated, asks one question about a page that dropped | 10 min |
| Tuesday | Coordinator | Filters to To-do across all three domains, defers two items until after break-up with the reason written in | 10 min |
| Wednesday | Nobody | Background workers keep syncing; automatic reports land unread, which is fine — they are the record, not the reading | 0 min |
| Thursday | Contractor | Opens the shared careers domain, works the active list, closes four items, sees nothing about the other two sites | 3 hrs |
| Friday | Owner | Reads the branded PDF: one page per domain, one recommendation, no tables | 6 min |
| Month end | Coordinator | Exports a CSV of driver-recruitment terms for whoever is running the hiring push | 5 min |
Total human attention: under an hour, plus the contractor's booked afternoon. The point is not the hour. It is that in eighteen months, when somebody new asks why the brokerage pages were never rewritten, the answer is in the feed with a date on it. If you would rather have a portfolio reviewed first, that is part of what we do.
Common questions
We have three domains but only care about one. Is a shared workspace overkill?
Probably not, because the two you ignore still shape what your company looks like in search. The argument is not that you will work all three equally; it is that the parked ones can be tagged as parked and then ignored legitimately rather than guiltily.
Our contractor works two weeks a year. Do we give them a permanent account?
No. Share the specific site at the start of the engagement and revoke at the end, as part of closing the invoice. The feed keeps the record of what they did, so the next engagement starts from what happened. Permanent access for occasional work is how a 2022 rebuild still holds keys in 2026.
Can the assistant just tell us what to do next?
It will produce a defensible list. It cannot rank that list against your business, because it does not know that two items collide with your busiest month or that a third depends on a rebrand still being argued about. Take the list as candidates, not instructions.
Why keep only twenty messages of conversation?
Because a working conversation and an archive are different objects. Twenty messages covers three or four follow-ups without repeating yourself, and keeps the thread about what you are deciding now. The permanent record is the feed, and full-text search over it reaches further back than any chat window.
Does the 250-row PDF limit mean we cannot report properly?
It means a PDF is a document and a CSV is a dataset. Two hundred and fifty rows is already more than an owner will read; if a report needs more, what you want is the export in a spreadsheet. A 900-row PDF is not thoroughness, it is a way of not being read. More on structuring these sits on our blog.
That list is not a disclaimer bolted on for balance. It is where the remaining work is. Collection, aggregation and monitoring have moved to machines. What has not moved is anything requiring knowledge of your own company: which fight is worth picking, why the number moved, and how to say so to the person who hoped for better.
Against that division a shared workspace earns its place for one reason. It compresses the mechanical half far enough that a coordinator with four spare minutes and an owner with six can hold three domains together, and it leaves a record so decisions get revisited rather than re-argued every time somebody leaves.
To see it against your own domains, open a workspace and link the Google account that holds your verifications, then spend the first fifteen minutes on tags before reading a chart. Tagging is the step everyone skips and the one that decides whether everything after it is legible.