How to do SEO for a new website comes down to four phases: before launch, launch week, the first 30 days, and days 30 to 90. That is the structure of Semrush’s sequencing guide for a new website’s first 90 days, by Carlos Silva, and the order is the point. In the guide’s words, “doing SEO in the right order from day one can be the difference between an afternoon of work and months of headache.”
This page is the hub. Each step links to the post where we cover it properly, so use it as a checklist and follow the links when you reach each stage.
How to do SEO for a new website: the four phases
| Phase | What gets done | Full guide |
|---|---|---|
| Before launch | Technical foundation, architecture and URLs, keyword research, core pages | Technical SEO checklist |
| Launch week | Search Console, GA4, sitemap, site audit, confirm indexing | How to get indexed by Google |
| First 30 days | First content cluster, steady publishing, fix crawl issues | Pillar pages |
| Days 30–90 | Authority building, AI visibility, early ranking signals | How long to rank a new website |
Before launch: the decisions that are expensive to change
Everything in this phase is cheap now and costly later. Site architecture, URL patterns and where each section lives are much harder to change once pages are indexed and linked, because every change means redirects and a period of re-evaluation.
Decide early whether a blog, shop or tool lives on a subdomain or in a folder; our guide to subdomain vs subfolder covers the trade-off. Check that robots.txt will not block anything you want crawled, especially if the staging site used a blanket disallow; see robots.txt for SEO. Then run through the technical SEO checklist before the first page goes public.
Keyword research belongs here too, not after launch, because it decides which core pages and categories exist. Semrush suggests new domains target keywords with a difficulty under 20 on its own PKD% scale, with 100 or more monthly searches. Treat both as a starting filter. Difficulty scores differ between tools, which our guide to keyword difficulty explains, and a strict volume floor will discard long-tail queries that tools under-report.
The research then turns into core pages: the homepage, the main category or service pages, and the pages that explain who runs the site. Each should target a distinct topic, so two core pages are never competing for the same search. Write them before launch, so the first crawl finds a site that already says clearly what it is about.
Launch week: confirm Google can see the site
Launch week is verification, not publishing. Set up Search Console and GA4, submit the XML sitemap, run a site audit, and confirm that pages are actually being indexed. The last step is the one that gets skipped, and it is the one that catches a leftover noindex or a blocked directory before weeks are lost.
New sites often wait a while for their first pages to be indexed, and that is normal. The practical steps to speed discovery are in how to get indexed by Google. Semrush also suggests keeping title tags under about 550 pixels so they display fully; titles are also worth writing for the click, not just the width.
Treat launch week as the start of your baseline, too. Analytics and Search Console data only begin once they are installed, and every later decision about what is working will be judged against these first weeks. A site that adds tracking a month after launch has lost the one period it can never measure again.
The first 30 days: one cluster, published steadily
The common mistake in month one is breadth: twenty unrelated articles across every topic the site might one day cover. Semrush’s sequence puts a first content cluster here instead, which means one topic covered in depth with a hub page and supporting articles that link to each other. Our guide to pillar pages covers how to structure it. Choose the cluster topic from your keyword research, not from what feels most important: the first cluster should sit where the results pages show sites of your size can already compete, because early wins there are what make later, harder topics reachable.
A single, well-linked cluster gives a new domain a clear topic and gives crawlers a reason to return. Publish on a steady rhythm rather than in one burst, and keep watching Search Console for crawl issues as the page count grows. Fixing them while the site is small is quicker than fixing them across hundreds of pages. Watch in particular for orphan pages: new articles published without a link from the hub or from each other are the most common crawl gap on a young site.
Days 30 to 90: authority and early signals
Only now does link building come to the front, once there is content worth linking to. Semrush’s guide puts authority building, AI visibility and early ranking signals in this window. Early signals means impressions and long-tail positions in Search Console, not top rankings for your main keywords; those take longer.
Authority building at this stage should be modest and earned. Links from sites in your topic that have a reason to reference your content are worth more than volume, and a new domain gains nothing from shortcuts that risk being discounted. AI visibility sits in the same window in Semrush’s plan: whether AI answers mention or cite your site when people ask about your topic. It is a newer signal, and the same foundations of clear structure, specific content and earned mentions apply to it.
Here is the limitation. A 90-day plan sets the order of work, not the speed of results. Nothing in it guarantees rankings by day 90, and the time a new site takes to rank depends heavily on its niche and the strength of the sites already ranking. Our guide on how long it takes to rank a new website sets realistic expectations. Use the first 90 days to remove every reason not to rank; the ranking itself arrives on its own schedule.
That is also the case against the received wisdom that a new site should publish as much as possible as fast as possible. Volume without structure produces pages that are hard to crawl, hard to link and hard to rank. The order in this plan costs nothing extra; it only asks you to do the foundation first. More guides sit in the strategy archive.
Frequently asked questions
What should I do first for SEO on a new website?
Settle the technical foundation, site architecture, URLs and keyword research before launch. Those are the decisions that are hardest to change later.
What keywords should a new website target?
Semrush suggests keywords under 20 on its own difficulty scale with 100 or more monthly searches. Treat that as a starting filter, and check who actually ranks.
What should happen in launch week?
Set up Search Console and GA4, submit a sitemap, run a site audit and confirm that pages are being indexed.
When should a new site start link building?
In Semrush’s sequence, authority building comes in days 30 to 90, after the first content cluster is published.
The takeaway Foundation before launch, verification in launch week, one cluster in the first month, authority after that. The order costs nothing and saves months.
