A dentist and a trail-shoe store sign in the same week, and a new account manager asks whether the process changes. Mostly it doesn't: audit, keyword map, calendar and reporting run the same for both. What does change is a short list of deltas per client type, and writing those deltas down as playbooks is what lets a generalist team serve specialist clients without relearning each one from scratch.
The shared spine runs first
Every client gets the same spine: onboarding, audit, keyword strategy, content calendar, monthly report. That spine is what you productised in the first chapter, and it's the reason a small team can run many accounts at once.
The mistake to avoid is rebuilding the process per vertical. A separate "local SEO process" and "e-commerce process" drift apart within a quarter, and soon nobody is sure which improvements apply where. A playbook is not a second process. It's one page of differences laid on top of the spine: what changes at each stage, what gets added, and what the report should show instead.
The local playbook: the contest splits in two
For a client who serves a place, one ranking contest becomes two. There are the ordinary organic results, and there's the map pack, and Google's own guidance on improving local ranking says local results are weighed by relevance, distance and prominence. Distance you can't move. The other two you can, which is where the deltas come from.
Keyword strategy becomes a grid of services against locations, and only the cells with real demand earn a page. The Google Business Profile becomes the single most valuable asset on the account: its categories, reviews, photos and accuracy do work no website page can do, so the playbook makes managing it a standing monthly task rather than a setup step. Content means service pages and location pages that read as genuinely local, never one template with the town name swapped, because thin near-duplicates are exactly what gets filtered.
Reporting changes last. A dentist doesn't bank positions; they bank booked appointments, so the report leads with calls, direction requests and website clicks from local results. When a local client signs, hand whoever runs the account the local track of this academy, starting with How local search works.
The e-commerce playbook: the page type decides
For a store, the first question about every keyword is which kind of page should catch it. Category searches belong to collection pages, specific product searches to product pages, and question searches to guides, and a store that answers a category search with a product page loses to one that doesn't.
So the keyword map gains a column for page type, and most pages-to-create turn out to be collections rather than blog posts. The audit gains a platform layer: store platforms generate duplicate URLs through variants, filters and tag pages, so canonical tags and crawl decisions matter more here than on any other client type. Product structured data joins the standing checklist, because Google's structured-data gallery lists Product markup among the types that still earn a rich result, which is where price, availability and review stars in search results come from.
Reporting follows the money again: organic sessions tied to orders and revenue, not rankings alone. And the handover reading for the team is the e-commerce track, starting with Why some stores rank and yours doesn't.
Write the delta, not a second process
Each playbook fits on a page, ordered by stage. Onboarding: the extra access this client type needs, a Business Profile or a store platform login. Keywords: the grid or the page-type column. Content: what gets produced instead of standard articles. Reporting: the metric this client actually banks. A new account manager reads the spine once and then one page per client type, which is a far shorter path than shadowing someone for a month.
The playbook also prevents a quiet failure: the store that gets a local-shaped strategy because the last five clients were local. When a stage's delta is written down, skipping it is a visible decision instead of an accident. And when a third client type keeps showing up, a SaaS company, a law firm, it earns its own page the same way, built from the deltas you noticed while serving the first few.
What to take away
- The delivery spine stays identical across client types; a playbook is a one-page delta on top of it, never a second process.
- Local clients fight two contests, the map pack and local organic, and Google's guidance weighs relevance, distance and prominence, which makes the Business Profile the most valuable asset you manage.
- E-commerce keywords are assigned to page types first, collections versus products versus guides, and the audit gains the duplicate URLs the platform itself creates.
- Report the metric each client type actually banks: calls and directions for local, orders and revenue for stores.
Next
The next chapter turns strategy into output: The content production pipeline sets out the stages from brief to published page and who owns each one.