You already have a website. It might be ranking, it might not, but it is built and live. That changes where you start. You are not building from nothing, you are working out what you have, what the market actually wants, and the difference between the two. That difference is the work.
The site already has a host and a domain, so there is no setup to do there. You start by getting the picture.
First, connect the plugin and pull what you already rank for
Install the Xagio plugin on your existing site and connect it to your account, then open the Project Planner. Two buttons there give you your baseline, and they pull different things (full walkthrough here):
Import My Pages. This reads your live WordPress site and pulls in every published page and post, along with each one’s current URL, H1, SEO title, and meta description. It is the map of what you have actually built and how each page is optimized right now. It does not pull any ranking data, and it does not cost Xags. Think of it as the structural picture: here is my site, page by page.
Import My Rankings. This runs an audit on your domain and pulls the keywords you genuinely rank for, drawn from live ranking data. You can filter it by position (say, only the keywords sitting in the top 100) and by search volume, so you are not buried in noise. This one uses Xags, because it is pulling real ranking data, not just reading your site. It is the performance picture: here is what Google already gives me.
Together those two are your honest baseline. Pages shows what you built; Rankings shows what is actually working, including the terms you did not realize you rank for and the ones you wish you did not. Before you change anything, you need both. They are the “before” every later improvement gets measured against.
What your site ranks for today is its history. It is not the same as what your market is actually searching for. That gap is what the next step uncovers.
Then build the full keyword plan from your competitors
Open the AI Wizard, enter your niche and location, and it pulls the top-ranking sites for that term. It tags each one: the recommended results are real local business homepages worth analyzing, and the ones it flags as not recommended are directories like Yelp and Angi. You pick the competitors you want to learn from, and the Wizard pulls the keywords those sites actually rank for into the same project as your baseline.
That last part is the point. Your current keywords tell you what you already cover. Your competitors’ keywords tell you what the whole market searches. Pulling them into the same project lays the full demand for your niche right on top of what you already have. Keep “must contain city” on so the plan stays local and does not fill up with national noise. Then cluster those keywords by exact intent, one searcher need per group, so each maps cleanly to a page.
Now you have two pictures in one project: what you rank for, and what the market actually wants. The plan is the difference between them.
Then fix the live site against the plan
With the plan in hand, every keyword group gets a verdict, and you act on it:
Gaps: demand with no page. The market searches for something you have no page for. That is a page to create, the clearest win on the list.
Overlaps: pages competing with each other. Two or more of your pages target the same intent, so Google does not know which to rank and splits the signal. Consolidate them, or re-point each to its own distinct intent.
Matches that need work: a page that fits but is not optimized. You already have the right page for a group, it is just not optimized for it. Re-optimize the title, meta, and H1 and the content to match the demand.
Pages with no demand behind them. A page targeting something nobody searches. Leave it, fold it into another page, or repurpose it. Do not spend optimization effort where the market is silent.
The site ends up matching what the market actually wants, not the way it happened to get built.
Add your keywords to the tracker before you start
Once the plan is set, select your target keywords and add them to the rank tracker, with your search engine and location, before you touch a single page. This registers them so Xagio records where you stand right now.
Do this first for a reason: the baseline only exists if you capture it before the work. Every movement afterward is then attributable to what you did, not guesswork. If you are doing this for a client, that recorded before-and-after is exactly what makes the improvement visible and worth paying for.
Work the plan into your live site
You make the changes in the plugin, page by page, keeping your existing site and its design intact: create the pages the gaps call for, re-optimize the ones that match, and consolidate the overlaps. Xagio’s tools handle each step, AI-assisted content and schema included, applied to your own design. The one rule that does not move: a keyword group has to be clustered and optimized before its content and schema get written, because that is what they are written from.
After the changes go live, check that Google ranks the page you intended for each group. If a different page shows up, that is a signal to merge or re-optimize.
Doing this for clients
Everything above is the fulfillment work, and it is identical whether the site is your own or a client’s: pull the baseline, build the plan from competitors, fix the gaps. For client and agency work there are two more pieces on either side of it, and they run on the same feature.
Reporting: the white-label shared report. Any project in the Project Planner can be shared as a report. You flip sharing on and Xagio generates a public link (no login needed) that shows the keyword groups, the pages, and the rankings, with your own company branding at the top: your logo, name, and contact details, not Xagio’s. The client sees your work under your brand. You can turn the link off any time. Because rank tracking was running from before the work, the report shows the baseline and every move since, which is what keeps a client paying: the progress is visible, not a vague monthly “we did SEO.”
Prospecting: the same report, used earlier. That shared report is also how you win the client in the first place, and this is the part people miss: a project does not need you to have access to the site. You can build a plan for any domain, a prospect’s or their competitor’s, from the public ranking data alone. So you research a prospect’s market, see exactly where they are weak and where a competitor is eating their lunch, and send them a branded report that shows it. Prospecting and reporting are the same tool at two moments: one shows a prospect what they are missing, the other shows a client what they are gaining.
A few rules that hold for client work specifically: price per SEO page, start rank tracking before the work so the baseline is on record, and never guarantee rankings, because nobody owns Google. Sell the process and the transparency, not a position.
Where to go deeper
This is the overview. When you want the exact steps for pulling rankings, the three-pass research method, and the cluster-by-intent rules, the step-by-step guides take it from here.
Starting a brand-new site instead? That path begins differently, with the domain, the hosting, and a build from scratch. That walkthrough is here. Or head back to the start to pick your path.