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SEO GEO 700

Your First 90 Days: A Working Plan for a New SEO Hire

Appendix A
How to use this

Print this on day one. Every step names the tool, the artefact it produces, and what the output should tell you. Treat the sequencing as the point: the first month buys credibility with quick wins, the second builds the machine, the third proves it worked.

This is the plan you tape to your monitor in week one. Nothing here requires budget approval, and nothing here assumes anyone has briefed you properly.

Days 1–7: Learn what you inherited

Day 1 — Get access to everything before you form an opinion

  • Request accounts: Search Console (full), GA4 (editor), Ahrefs or Semrush, Tag Manager, the CMS or Shopify admin, and read-only CRM access.
  • Confirm the unglamorous prerequisites: a VPN for checking results in the target country, a paid Screaming Frog licence, and whatever content optimisation tool the team already pays for.

Days 2–3 — Technical triage

  • Crawl the whole site and export the problem list: 404s, redirect chains, duplicate titles, missing alt text, pages with no H1.
  • In Search Console, read Pages, Core Web Vitals, Manual Actions, and Security Issues — in that order. Manual Actions first if there are any.
  • Run PageSpeed Insights on the homepage and three money pages, mobile and desktop.
  • Verify robots.txt and the XML sitemap resolve correctly.
  • Use URL Inspection on five important pages and read the rendered HTML, not the source. Confirm the main content is actually present after rendering.

Days 4–5 — Traffic and keyword baseline

  • Export sixteen months of Performance data, split by query, page, country, and device.
  • In GA4, establish the organic trend, the top landing pages, the conversion path, and which attribution model the company actually trusts.
  • From Ahrefs or Semrush, record domain rating, referring domains, the count of keywords in the top ten, and how traffic distributes across pages.
  • Flag the pages carrying the top fifth of organic traffic. They will usually account for most of the revenue, and they are the ones you must not break.

Days 6–7 — Competitors and people

  • Run a content gap against three competitors, plus a top-pages comparison.
  • Thirty minutes with product: what the product does, who buys it, who we lose to.
  • Thirty minutes with sales: the ten questions prospects always ask, what closes deals, why deals die.
  • Thirty minutes with support: what customers complain about, and which help articles they search for and fail to find.

Days 8–14: Quick wins, paid for with evidence

The goal for week two is measurable improvement without writing a single new article. You need credibility before you need budget, and existing pages are where credibility is cheapest.

  • Rewrite titles and descriptions on pages that already rank. Filter Search Console for positions 3–15, click-through under two percent, and meaningful impressions. Add the current year, a number, and a concrete promise. This is usually the fastest visible movement available to a new hire.
  • Recover dead pages that still have links. Open the Best by Links report, filter to 404, and redirect anything with referring domains to the closest live equivalent. Every one of these is authority you are currently throwing away.
  • Add internal links from your strongest pages. Take the five highest-traffic pages and link from them to the pages that actually convert, with anchors that describe the destination rather than repeat a keyword.
  • Fill in structured data. Product markup with price, availability, and rating on commercial pages; Article markup with author and date on editorial pages; FAQ markup where the page genuinely answers questions.
  • Compress and rename images. Export the full image list, convert to WebP, add descriptive filenames, and write alt text that describes what is in the picture.
  • Fix mobile usability. Check font sizes, tap-target spacing, and interstitials in device mode at 390px wide, not at desktop width with the window dragged narrow.

Days 15–30: Build the keyword system

Week three — research and calendar

  • Build the keyword universe in four passes: expand from seeds, clean out irrelevant and branded terms, classify by intent, then cluster by topic and map each cluster to one URL.
  • Shortlist twenty winnable terms — real volume, weak competition, and a first page containing forum threads or thin pages rather than established brands.
  • Shortlist ten commercial terms where the searcher has budget and urgency.
  • Build the first month’s calendar from those thirty, weighted toward the winnable set.
  • Write full briefs for the first ten: target term, outline, required sections, internal links, competitor references, and the information-gain answer.

Week four — production and refresh

  • Distribute the briefs, with delivery dates and an explicit definition of done.
  • Refresh five existing articles sitting at positions 11–20: update the data, add the current year, add a FAQ block, strengthen internal links, rewrite the title.
  • Stand up the keyword map and a content tracker the whole team can see.
  • Request indexing for every page published or materially changed.

Days 31–60: Build the machine

The second month is about repeatability. One good article is an accident; a pipeline that produces four a month is an asset.

  • Content pipeline. Hold a steady two to four publishes a week through a defined sequence: topic, brief, draft, SEO review, edit, design, publish, distribute. Name the owner of each step.
  • Link acquisition. Claim the brand profiles that also function as citation sources — G2, Capterra, Trustpilot, Crunchbase, LinkedIn. Start the first outreach round. Register with a journalist-request service and answer two queries a week.
  • GEO baseline. Run a fixed set of fifty real customer prompts across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI surfaces and record where the brand appears. Allow the AI crawlers you want in robots.txt, publish llms.txt, verify the site in Bing Webmaster Tools, and enable IndexNow.
  • Monitoring. Build one automated dashboard that covers rankings, organic sessions, conversions, and AI referral traffic. Set an alert for a sudden organic drop, because the first hour matters more than the first week.
  • Content audit. List every page with no traffic and no links over the past twelve months, and decide per page: update, merge, or remove. Most sites are carrying a third of their weight in pages nobody wanted.

Days 61–90: Prove it, then ask for more

The third month converts activity into an argument. You are not reporting effort; you are reporting movement and its cause.

  • Compare against your own baseline. Organic clicks, keywords in the top ten, click-through on the pages you rewrote, and organic conversions — measured from your start date, not from last quarter.
  • Attribute honestly. Which change produced which movement? Title rewrites move click-through within days. Refreshes move position over weeks. New content shows up in long-tail queries first. Links move domain-level metrics last. If you cannot separate the effects, say so.
  • Cut what failed. Double down on the formats and clusters that responded, and stop the ones that did not. Ninety days is enough to see which half of the plan is working.
  • Ask for the next quarter properly. One page: the trend lines, the milestones hit and missed, what competitors did, the proposed objectives, and the specific resources required. Requests for headcount or budget land when they follow evidence, and get ignored when they follow enthusiasm.