SEO for a new website: what to do in the first 90 days

SEO for a new website comes down to three jobs in the first 90 days: make the site easy for Google to crawl and understand before it launches, get it indexed and connected to the free Google tools in launch week, then spend months one to three publishing useful pages and earning your first few genuine links. Expect searches for your own business name to work within days or weeks. In our experience, competitive non-branded searches take four to twelve months, and longer in the most crowded markets. Nothing you can buy shortens that by much, and plenty of things sold to new businesses do not shorten it at all.

This guide is for a new site on a new domain. If you are replacing an existing website that already ranks, the priorities are different and our website migration SEO checklist is the one to follow, because your first job is not to lose what you have.

How long SEO for a new website takes, and why

Until June 2026, Google’s page on hiring an SEO said results typically take four months to a year from the time you start making changes. Google has since removed that line and no longer gives a figure, but the range still matches what we see on new domains. People sometimes talk about a “sandbox” that holds new sites back. Google has denied having one as such, and you do not need one to explain the delay. A new site has three things to prove, and each takes time.

• It has to be found and crawled. Google says crawling a new site can take from a few days to a few weeks, and it does not promise to index every page.
• It has no history. There are no links from other sites, no record of people searching for the brand, and no track record of searchers clicking a result and staying.
• Everyone above it has a head start. The firms on page one for “accountant Bristol” have years of content, reviews and links. You are not being penalised. You are at the back of a queue.

Treat the table as a typical pattern and not as a promise. A dog groomer in a small Welsh town can be on page one within weeks because few competitors have tried. A new personal-injury solicitor in Manchester faces years of work.

Before launch: the foundations

Most of the SEO value in a new site is decided before anyone sees it. Retrofitting structure later costs more than building it in.

Decide which searches each page is for

Write a list of what customers would type: each service, each product category, and the questions they ask on the phone. Give every distinct intent one page. A plumber who lists “boiler repair, bathrooms, drains” as bullet points on a single Services page has nothing that can rank for any of them. Our guide to writing service pages that rank has the page structure and title formulas, so we will not repeat them here.

For a new domain, favour specific phrases over broad ones. “Emergency boiler repair Stockport” is winnable in the first six months. “Plumber” is not.

Get the technical basics right once

• One version of the site. HTTPS, with www and non-www settled and the other redirecting.
• Short, readable URLs that you will not need to change: /boiler-repair/, not /services-2/page?id=14.
• A unique title tag and meta description on every page, and one H1.
• An XML sitemap and a robots.txt that does not block anything important.
• Canonical tags pointing each page at itself.
• Structured data: Organization or LocalBusiness on the site, plus Product markup where it applies. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results in May 2026, so FAQ markup no longer earns anything extra in Google’s results.
• Mobile first and fast. A new site has no excuse for being slow. Our explainer on Core Web Vitals covers the targets.
• Internal links. Every page should be reachable within two or three clicks of the homepage, with descriptive link text.

Set up the free tools before you need them

• Google Search Console. Verify a Domain property with a DNS record. It covers every version of the address and survives any future rebuild.
• Analytics. Install it with consent handled properly and enquiry forms and phone clicks tracked as conversions from day one. Our GA4 set-up guide walks through it.
• Google Business Profile. If you serve customers at a location or within an area, start verification early, because it can take anything from minutes to a couple of weeks. Our Google Business Profile guide covers the details.
• Bing Webmaster Tools. Ten minutes, and you can import the site from Search Console. Bing’s index is also what Microsoft Copilot draws on, so it is worth being in it.

Write the pages that matter before launch

Launch with fewer pages done properly. Eight good pages (home, about, contact and five services with real detail, prices or price guides, photos and FAQs) beat thirty pages of two paragraphs each. Thin pages do not help, and because Google also uses site-wide signals, a lot of them can count against the rest of the site.

While the site is being built, keep the staging copy password-protected and set to noindex. Then put “remove noindex” at the top of the launch list. A new site launched with the WordPress “Discourage search engines” box still ticked is the most common reason we are asked why a site “is not on Google” three weeks in.

Launch week

1. Confirm the site can be indexed. No noindex tag, no password, robots.txt open. Check with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.
2. Submit the XML sitemap in Search Console and in Bing Webmaster Tools.
3. Request indexing for the homepage and your five or six most important pages through URL Inspection. There is a daily limit, and asking repeatedly does not speed anything up.
4. Point your existing profiles at the site. Business Profile, social accounts, any trade-body or marketplace listings, and your email signature. These are your first links and they cost nothing.
5. Check name, address and phone number are identical everywhere, character for character.
6. Test every form and phone link on a phone, and confirm the conversion appears in analytics.
7. Record a baseline. Note the 20 or so searches you most want to appear for and where you stand today, which will be nowhere. You will want that note in month three.

Then leave it alone for a few days. Checking “site:yourdomain.co.uk” every hour changes nothing.

Month 1: get indexed and read Search Console properly

The first month is about indexing. In Search Console, the Page indexing report (listed as Pages in the menu) tells you which URLs are in Google’s index and why the rest are not. On a new site, most of the statuses that worry people are normal.

The newest performance data is only a few hours old and is marked as preliminary, so it can still change, and average position is close to meaningless while volumes are tiny: one impression at position 80 drags the whole figure down. Look at which queries you appear for at all. If Google is showing your boiler-repair page for boiler-repair searches, even on page five, it has understood the page.

Also in month one: finish your Business Profile, ask your first few real customers for reviews (never offer an incentive: it breaches Google’s review rules, and under UK consumer law an incentivised review that hides the incentive is a banned practice), and fix anything the crawl turned up.

Month 2: content and your first links

Content for a brand-new domain

The useful question is “what would a customer need to read before they ring us?” Write those pages. In practice:

• Cost and “how long” pages. In our experience, prices are among the first things customers look for, and many competitors do not publish them.
• Comparisons and choices you explain every week on the phone.
• Problems and fixes, written from jobs you have done, with your own photos.
• A proper FAQ on each service page.

Two solid pieces a month is a pace most small businesses can keep up, and steady output matters more than volume. Mass-produced AI articles are a poor investment: Google’s spam policies target content produced at scale to manipulate rankings, however it is made, and unedited generated text gives a reader no reason to choose you. Use AI to draft if it helps. Add what only you know.

Links for a brand-new domain

Links from other websites are still one of the ways Google judges whether a site is trusted, and a new domain has none. You need a handful of real ones, not hundreds.

• People you already do business with: suppliers with a stockists or partners page, clients who credit their suppliers, your accountant’s or landlord’s directory.
• Bodies you belong to: trade associations, accreditation schemes, the local chamber of commerce.
• A short list of established directories: the well-known UK ones and any that are specific to your trade. Half a dozen is plenty.
• Local and trade press: a new opening, a notable job, a charity partnership or a useful piece of data can all earn a mention.
• Sponsorships and community groups you would support anyway.

Never buy link packages. Paid links breach Google’s spam policies, the cheap ones come from networks Google already discounts, and a brand-new domain with 300 links in its first month looks exactly like what it is.

Month 3: review and improve

By now there is enough data to work with. Open the Search Console Performance report, set it to the last 28 days, and sort queries by impressions.

1. Find queries where you sit between positions 8 and 20. These are closest to paying off. Improve the matching page: a clearer title, a section that answers the query directly, an FAQ, a couple of internal links from related pages.
2. Find queries you did not expect. If people are finding you for something you only mention in passing, it probably deserves its own page.
3. Find pages with impressions and a very low click rate. Rewrite the title and meta description so the result is worth clicking.
4. Find pages with no impressions at all. Either nobody searches for that topic or the page is too thin. Merge or rewrite.
5. Compare enquiries, not only traffic. Twenty visits and three enquiries beats two hundred visits and none.

Then set a routine you can keep: two new pages a month, a review request after each job, one new link opportunity followed up, and half an hour in Search Console.

Local or national targeting in the UK

Decide which game you are playing, because the work differs.

A business with a .co.uk or .uk domain is already signalling the UK to Google, so there is no country setting to configure. Plenty of firms are both local and national: an Edinburgh joinery that fits kitchens locally and ships made-to-order shelving UK-wide needs local signals for the first and category and guide content for the second. Our local SEO guide uses Hertfordshire for its examples, but the ten steps apply in any county.

What not to waste money on

• Guaranteed first-page rankings. Nobody can guarantee them, and Google says so itself.
• Link packages and “500 directory listings”. Covered above.
• Bulk AI content. A hundred generated posts will not out-rank ten good ones.
• Expensive SEO software in year one. Search Console is free and is all the data a new site has anyway.
• Chasing third-party scores. “Domain authority” and similar numbers are made by tool vendors. Google does not use them.
• A long retainer with no named deliverables. If you pay monthly, the invoice should say what was written, fixed or earned.
• Keyword-stuffed domain names and meta keywords. Neither has mattered for years.
• Redesigning in month two because the rankings have not arrived. They were never going to by then.

If you need enquiries before organic search can supply them, paid search is the honest bridge. A small Google Ads campaign pointed at one well-built page will bring visitors from day one, and it shows which searches convert before you commit months of content to them. Our guide to landing pages that convert covers the page itself.

What the set-up costs: a worked example

The ongoing work (writing, reviews, links) is mostly your time. The technical set-up is a one-off. For an illustrative new ten-page WordPress site for a Cardiff physiotherapy clinic, charged at our WordPress development rate of £50 an hour through hourly hire:

10 hours × £50 = £500. Booking 10 hours earns a 5 % volume discount, so £500 − £25 = £475. Add VAT at 20 % (£95) and the total is £570. When we build the site ourselves, most of the technical items are part of the build and not an extra.

The 90-day checklist

Before launch

• One search intent per page, mapped in a spreadsheet
• Unique titles, meta descriptions and H1s
• HTTPS, one canonical host, clean URLs
• XML sitemap, open robots.txt, structured data
• Fast on a phone
• Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and analytics ready
• Business Profile verification started
• Staging hidden from search

Launch week

• Noindex removed and checked
• Sitemap submitted, key pages requested
• Profiles, listings and signatures linked to the site
• Forms and call links tested, conversions recording
• Baseline noted

Months 1 to 3

• Page indexing report reviewed weekly, then fortnightly
• First reviews requested
• Two useful pages published each month
• Five to ten genuine links earned
• Month-three review of queries, titles and thin pages
• A monthly routine written down

We are based in London and build and launch websites for businesses across the UK, with this groundwork included. If you have a new site going live soon, or one that launched a few months ago and is not showing up, send us the address and we will tell you what we would check first.

Photo: Markus Spiske via Unsplash