Days 1 to 30: foundations

You've worked through the earlier chapters and you're holding a list of things to improve, long enough to be paralysing. The first thirty days aren't about ranking anything. They're about making sure the site can rank at all, writing down what the numbers look like before you change them, and choosing the searches the next sixty days get built around. Do those three in order and everything you publish later lands on a site Google reads fully, against a baseline you can measure.

Why the first month is for fixing, not building

Every page goes through the same pipeline: Google finds it, stores it, then ranks it, as How Google ranks a page explains. A new page on a site with a stray noindex, a broken sitemap or a slow template inherits every one of those problems. Fixing them once, before the content work starts, is cheaper than fixing them under twenty new pages.

The baseline matters for a duller reason: in three months you'll want to know whether the work made a difference, and you can only answer that if you wrote down where things stood first. Reading rank movements honestly needs a day-one snapshot.

Keywords come before writing because writing first is how a site ends up with four pages chasing the same search. Thirty days is four working weeks plus a couple of spare days for whatever slips.

Week 1: audit and take the baseline

Three jobs, in this order.

1. Get your measurement in place. Verify the site in Google Search Console and make sure GA4 is collecting, following Google Search Console essentials and GA4 for SEO. If either already exists, check it covers the whole site, www and non-www.
2. Write the baseline. One sheet: pages Search Console reports as indexed, clicks and impressions for the last few months, the top twenty queries and pages, and where you rank for the searches you care most about. Add an AI row: ask ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity what a customer would ask and note whether you're named, using Measuring your AI visibility.
3. Find the blockers. Run The 30-minute quick-wins audit and check the plumbing in Sitemaps, robots.txt and indexing: robots rules, noindex tags, the sitemap, redirect chains, canonicals, broken pages, and speed on the templates that matter.

In place by day 7: Search Console and GA4 collecting, a baseline sheet, and a blocker list.

Week 2: fix the blockers in order

Fix in order of what stops Google seeing a page, not what's easiest.

1. Anything that blocks crawling or indexing: robots rules, noindex tags, sitemap errors, and redirect chains or loops on money pages.
2. Duplicates and canonicals: parameter URLs, trailing-slash variants and near-identical pages that each need one canonical.
3. Titles and meta descriptions on your most important pages, using URLs, titles and meta descriptions. Missing and duplicated ones first.
4. Speed on your key templates. Core Web Vitals explained covers the fixes; web.dev's Core Web Vitals thresholds count a page as good at a Largest Contentful Paint of 2.5 seconds or under, an Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or under, and a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or under, measured from real visitors.

Most of these are small developer tasks, not a redesign. Write each up with the URL, the problem and the fix, hand it over with a date, and keep cosmetic requests off the list.

In place by day 14: every page you care about crawlable and indexable with one canonical URL, and a dated list of anything still with the developer.

Week 3: choose the keywords you'll build around

Follow Keyword research from scratch to get from your services to a long list, then cut it. Two lessons do the cutting: Search intent tells you which searches your kind of page can satisfy, and The buying-intent ladder sorts them by how close the searcher is to paying. The free Keyword intent checker runs that sort on a pasted list.

Finding competitor keyword gaps then shows the searches your rivals rank for that you don't, where the early wins usually sit.

Keep the shortlist to what you can serve in sixty days. A hundred keywords you never write for is a spreadsheet, not a plan.

In place by day 21: a keyword shortlist, each entry with an intent and a rough sense of difficulty, grouped by subject.

Week 4: map keywords to pages and start the clock

Use Mapping keywords to pages to give every page one primary keyword and to split the shortlist into pages that exist and pages you'll need to create. Site architecture and internal links decides where the new ones sit and which hub links to them.

Then start the three routines that run for the rest of the plan:

• Add the shortlist to rank tracking now: history starts the day you add a keyword, and a trend needs a starting point.
• Put a weekly review in the diary, using A weekly SEO review with Claude as the format.
• Draft the calendar for days 31 to 60, ordered by the buying-intent ladder and grouped into the subjects Topic clusters will turn into clusters.

In place by day 30: a keyword map, rank tracking running, a dated calendar for the next eight weeks, and a weekly review slot.

What to take away

• The first month fixes the pipeline and records the baseline, because every later result depends on both.
• Fix blockers in order of what stops Google seeing a page: crawling and indexing first, then duplicates, then titles and speed.
• The keyword shortlist should be small enough to serve in sixty days and sorted by intent, not volume.
• By day 30 you have a keyword map, tracking with a starting point and a calendar: everything the content engine needs.

Next

Days 31 to 60: the content engine turns the keyword map into published pages, one cluster at a time.