SEO for a New Website: A Realistic Plan for the First 90 Days

Picture a tiles showroom in Lahore, three weeks after its new website went live. The owner types the showroom name into Google and gets its Facebook page, an OLX listing and a business directory. "Where is my site?" The site looks lovely. Google simply has not been told much about it yet, and part of what it has been told is wrong.

That is the normal starting point for SEO for a new website. A new domain has no history, no links and no proof that anyone finds it useful. The first 90 days are not about ranking for big keywords. They are about getting every important page found, understood and trusted, so rankings have something to grow from. Below is the plan we follow, split by day ranges, with what you should have in hand at the end of each one.

Days 1 to 7: make sure Google can reach every page you care about

Before writing a single blog post, check the plumbing.

We learned this on our own website. For a while Google kept us around position 70 for searches we should have been competing on. The problem was that our canonical tags and our sitemap pointed Google to URLs that redirected somewhere else. So we were telling Google "this is the main version of the page" and then sending it to a different address. Fixing those two things came first, before any content, and it is now the first thing we check on every new site.

A canonical tag, in plain words, is a line in the page code that says "this is the official address of this page". A sitemap is a file that lists the pages you want Google to know about. Both should point to the final, live address of each page: the one that loads directly with no redirect, with the same https, the same www or no www, and the same trailing slash habit everywhere.

Your do-it-today list

1. Open Google Search Console, add your site as a Domain property and verify it through your domain's DNS settings. If you have never touched DNS, ask your developer or hosting support. It takes about ten minutes.
2. Find your sitemap. It is usually at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml. Open it and click five random links. Each one should open the page directly, not bounce to another address.
3. Submit that sitemap in Search Console under Sitemaps.
4. Open your home page and two service pages, right click, choose View page source, and search for "canonical". The address there must match the address in your browser bar exactly.
5. Type your main domain four ways: with and without www, with http and with https. All four should land on one single version.
6. Check that your robots.txt file (yoursite.com/robots.txt) is not blocking the whole site. Developers sometimes block Google while building and forget to undo it.
7. In Search Console, run URL Inspection on your home page and press Request Indexing.

Also check for a "noindex" setting left on from the test version, which tells Google to stay away. On WordPress it is the "Discourage search engines" box under Settings, then Reading.

By day 7 you want: Search Console verified, a clean sitemap submitted, one version of your domain, and no page accidentally hidden.

Days 8 to 30: give every service its own page that answers one question

Now look at what Google finds when it arrives. A lot of small business sites have a home page, an about page, a contact page and one Services page that lists eight things in eight lines. Google cannot rank one page for eight different searches.

Give each main service, or each main product category, its own page. A clinic in Karachi should have separate pages for dental implants, braces and teeth whitening, not one page called Treatments. Each page should say clearly what you offer, who it is for, which areas you serve, roughly how it works, and how to contact you. Write it the way you would explain it on WhatsApp; that plain language is close to what people type into Google.

Then check the basics on each page:

• Title tag: the blue headline in Google results. Put the service and the city in it, for example "Teeth Whitening in Clifton, Karachi | Clinic Name". Every page needs a different one.
• Meta description: the two lines under the headline. A clear one gets more clicks.
• One main heading on the page that matches what the page is about.
• Real photos of your work with short descriptive file names, compressed so the page still loads quickly on mobile data.

Two mistakes show up in this stage again and again. The first is copying a competitor's service text and changing the name. Google has already seen it, so yours adds nothing. The second is creating twenty city pages where only the city name changes: "Plumber in Lahore", "Plumber in Islamabad", the same paragraph underneath. Unless each city page has something specific, like areas covered or a local job, one strong page beats twenty thin ones.

If customers mostly find you on Google Maps, set up your Google Business Profile alongside this and link it to the site. We cover that side in our guide to local SEO and Google Maps in Pakistan, so we will not repeat it here.

By day 30 you want: one page per main service, each with its own title, and those pages showing as indexed in Search Console under Pages.

Days 31 to 60: write the articles your customers already ask you about

The usual wrong move here is publishing generic posts like "10 benefits of digital marketing" because a tool said the keyword has volume. Your buyers do not search that, and a new site has no chance on it anyway.

Instead, open your WhatsApp chats and your call notes. Write down the questions customers ask before they buy. A furniture maker in Faisalabad might get: "Sheesham or engineered wood for a bed?", "How long does a custom sofa take?", "Do you deliver to Islamabad?" Each of those is an article. Together they show Google that your site knows one subject well. That is all people mean by topical content: depth on one subject instead of a little bit on everything.

A realistic pace for a small business is one good article a week, so four to six in this phase. Each article should:

• Answer the question in the first few lines, then explain.
• Use your own experience: prices you have actually quoted (framed as examples), photos of your own work, what usually goes wrong.
• Link to the service page it relates to, using words that describe that page, such as "custom sofa orders", rather than "click here".

That last point is internal linking, and it is the cheapest SEO work there is. Your service pages are the ones you want to rank. Your articles bring in readers and pass them, along with Google's attention, toward those pages. Link from your home page to your most important services too. A page that nothing else on your site links to is a page Google treats as unimportant.

The same question-first writing also helps with AI answers; see our post on getting cited by AI search tools.

By day 60 you want: four to six real articles live, each linked to a service page, and no page left without internal links.

Days 61 to 90: read Search Console like a shop ledger and act on it

By now Search Console has data. Go to Performance, then Search results, set the date range to the last 28 days and tick Average position. Then open the Queries tab.

You will usually see searches where you appear on page two or three, positions 11 to 30, with some impressions and almost no clicks. Impressions means your page was shown in results; clicks means someone chose it. These middle positions are your best opportunity. Google already links your page to that search; it is just not convinced yet.

For each of those queries, open the page that is ranking and ask:

1. Does the page actually answer this exact search, or only mention it in passing?
2. Is the search term, or something close to it, in the title and main heading?
3. Is there a short section a person could read in thirty seconds and get the answer?
4. Do two or three other pages on the site link to it?

Improve the page, then use URL Inspection and Request Indexing again. Do not rewrite the page every two days. Give each change two to four weeks before you judge it.

Check the Pages report for anything marked "Crawled, currently not indexed" or "Duplicate without user-selected canonical". The first often means the page is too thin for Google to bother with. The second usually points back to the canonical and redirect problems from the first week, which is why we start there.

This is also the stage to earn a few real links from other websites. For a small business that means your trade association, suppliers who list stockists, local news and real partners. Do not buy packages of hundreds of links from a "backlink seller" on Facebook; at best they do nothing.

What 90 days honestly gets you

After 90 days of doing this properly, a new site typically has its key pages indexed, starts ranking for its own brand name and for some specific, longer searches, and may get its first handful of enquiries from Google. It does not usually reach page one for broad, competitive searches like "best dentist in Lahore". That tends to take six to twelve months or more, depending on how many established competitors you face and how steadily you keep adding useful pages.

Anyone who promises you first position in a month is either guessing or planning something risky. Google decides rankings, not your agency. What you control is whether your site is technically clean, clearly organised and genuinely helpful.

One more thing quietly undoes all this work: redesigning the site in month two and changing every URL without redirects. If you must change URLs, map each old one to its new one with a 301 redirect (a permanent forward), then update your sitemap and canonical tags to the new addresses only.

If your site is already live and going nowhere

Already launched? Start with the Days 1 to 7 list anyway, because a stuck site is often a case of technical confusion, not a lack of content. When we take on SEO work for a new site, the first thing we hand over is always that technical check: canonicals, sitemap, redirects and indexing status, followed by a page plan. If the site itself needs rebuilding, that is a web development job first, and our guide on website cost in Pakistan explains what to budget for.

If you would like a second pair of eyes before you spend on content, request a website audit and we will tell you, in plain language, what is holding Google back. Or simply send us your site address and ask.

Further reading

See how this looks in practice across our AI automation, custom CRM and lead generation services, or tell us the outcome you need.