Clients ask the same questions between reports. How are we ranking? Did the new page get any traffic? Did that review get answered? An SEO client portal gives them a place to look for themselves, which saves your team the emails and shows the client that work is happening every week, not just on report day.
The risk with a portal is giving clients too much: draft reports with half-written notes, settings they can change, tools that confuse them, or a glimpse of your other clients. RankThat’s portal is built around a narrow, read-only view. This article covers how invitations work, exactly what a client sees, how to give your own team access across many sites at once, and the limits worth knowing.
Three roles, two different jobs
Every person on a site has one of three roles.
| Role | Who it’s for | What they can do |
|---|---|---|
| Client (view only) | The business owner, their marketing manager | Read finished reports, rankings, analytics and reviews for their own sites |
| Editor | Your SEO team, freelancers | Use every tool, run audits, write and publish content, apply fixes |
| Admin | Account leads | Everything an Editor can do, plus manage who has access |
The person who created a site always keeps Admin. The server enforces these roles, so a client can’t change anything even by poking at the app. Every write needs Editor or above.
Inviting a client to one site
- Open the project and go to Project Settings › Team & client access.
- Type the client’s email, choose Client (view only) and click Invite.
- If the client already has a RankThat login (for example, they’re a client on another of your sites), they get access straight away and an email letting them know.
- Otherwise they get an email titled “[Your agency] invited you to see [site]‘s SEO results” with a Create your login button.
The invite link works for 14 days and only for that email address. If your account can’t send email, RankThat shows a link you can copy into your own message instead. Pending invites can be resent or withdrawn. Accepting one invite accepts every open invite for that email, so a client with three locations clicks once.
The invite page shows your agency’s logo or name. It also carries a small “Powered by RankThat” line, which is worth knowing if you are aiming for a fully white-label experience.
What a client sees after logging in
A client’s menu shows only these pages for their sites:
- Dashboard, a simplified client version (below)
- Rank Tracker
- Search Performance
- Local Rank Grid, without the scan and edit controls
- Reviews
- AI Visibility
- Monthly Report, finished reports only
- Google Analytics
The client dashboard
The dashboard is written for an owner, not an SEO. The header reads the site address and “prepared by” your agency. Four tiles follow: Visits from Google and Times seen in Google (the last 28 days against the 28 before), Keywords on page one and Leads this month. Below them are the client’s top 25 Google rankings, the list of monthly reports with View and PDF links, their Google reviews, and where this month’s leads came from.
Notice the language. “Times seen in Google” means impressions, “visits from Google” means clicks. Clients understand it without a glossary.
What clients never see
- Draft reports. The server treats an unfinished report as if it doesn’t exist for a client. Only approved and sent reports appear.
- Your other clients. A client sees only the sites they’ve been invited to.
- Settings, billing and tools. No audits, no content tools, no keyword research, no page header buttons.
- Alerts. Ranking drops and audit alerts go to your team, not the client. You decide how to explain a drop.
The portal experience
Someone who is a client on every site they can open becomes a “portal user”, and the app reshapes itself around them. The sidebar shows your agency’s name and logo. Their main menu is just their own sites. There is no billing page, no feedback button, and Settings has only their profile and password. To them, it looks like your agency’s client area.
One detail: the agency name shown in the sidebar comes from the branding of the client’s first site. If you run several agency brands, keep each client’s sites under the same one.
Giving your own team access in bulk
Agencies add people to many sites at once, so RankThat has a separate place for that: Settings › Team.
- Enter the person’s email and choose their role.
- Choose All sites, including new ones or Choose sites (with a filter and select all).
- Click Give access.
“All sites, including new ones” is the important option. A new SEO hire set up that way automatically gets access to every client you add later, so onboarding a new client doesn’t mean updating five people’s permissions.
For each person, you can change their role everywhere with Apply to all sites, stop adding them to new sites, remove them from every site at once, or adjust single sites from a list. When someone leaves, Remove from all sites takes one click.
A worked example: Brightside Dental’s office manager
Brightside Dental has three locations, each set up as its own site in RankThat. The agency invites the office manager as Client (view only) to all three from Project Settings on the first site, then the other two. She gets one email, clicks Create your login, and the other two invites are accepted at the same time.
On Monday she logs in and sees the Round Rock location’s “Visits from Google” up 18% on the previous 28 days. She opens the Local Rank Grid, sees the map has more green dots in the northern suburbs than last month, and checks Reviews: two new five-star reviews waiting for a reply. She drafts a reply with Draft a reply, tweaks it and pastes it into Google. (Drafting a review reply is the one thing a client can do, with a sensible rate limit.)
Meanwhile the agency’s new account manager was added through Settings › Team with “All sites, including new ones”, so she already has Editor access to Brightside and to the dentist group the agency signed last week.
When the monthly report is approved and sent, it appears in the office manager’s dashboard with a PDF link. She never sees the draft, which had an internal note about a missed citation that the team fixed before approving.
A setup checklist for each new client
| Step | Where | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Set your agency branding once | SEO Audits › Agency branding | The portal and reports carry your name and logo |
| Connect Search Console and GA4 for the site | Settings, then Project Settings | The client dashboard’s tiles come from these |
| Track the client’s main keywords | Rank Tracker | Their “Your Google rankings” table needs data |
| Link a grid tracker to their Google listing | Local Rank Grid | Reviews and map results need it |
| Approve and send the first report | Monthly Report | Clients only see finished reports |
| Invite the client as Client (view only) | Project Settings › Team & client access | One email, one login, all their sites |
Doing the invite last is deliberate. A client who logs in to an empty dashboard rarely logs in again.
Plans and limits
Clients count as members of their sites, so they count toward your plan’s team members per project: three on Professional, unlimited on Enterprise (pricing). Your agency branding appears in the portal and reports from the Professional plan.
What the portal doesn’t do:
- Clients can’t edit anything. No settings, no keywords, no notes on reports.
- No alerts for clients. That’s by design.
- “Powered by RankThat” stays on the invite page.
- One agency brand per client. The name shown comes from their first site.
When to use Editor instead
Some clients want to do more than look. A client with an in-house marketer who writes their own blog posts can be given Editor on their own site, so they can use the content tools and see audits. Editors can change things, so agree who does what first. A common split: the client’s marketer edits and publishes content, the agency handles technical fixes and reports.
How the portal connects to the rest of RankThat
The portal shows the client-friendly side of tools your team already uses. Reports come from Monthly Reports. Rankings come from the Rank Tracker. Search figures come from Search Console and GA4. Map results and reviews come from Local SEO, and AI answers from AI Visibility. Nothing is entered twice.
For a wider view of how agencies organize many clients, see the agencies page, and for the idea behind branded reporting, white-label reporting.
Tip: invite the client before the first report is sent, and walk them through the dashboard on a call. Clients who log in once in the first month tend to keep logging in.