SEO checklist for a brand-new website: the first 30 days

A new site starts with no history, so the goal of the first month is simple: make sure search engines can reach every page, understand what each page is about and have a reason to trust it. Rankings come after that. This is the order we follow on our own sites.

Week 1: foundations

• Pick one canonical address (for example https://example.com) and redirect the other version (www or non-www) to it.
• Serve everything over HTTPS.
• Publish a sitemap.xml with every page you want indexed, and a robots.txt that points to it.
• Verify the domain in Google Search Console, ideally as a Domain property with a DNS TXT record, then submit the sitemap.
• Import the property into Bing Webmaster Tools. It takes a minute and covers Bing and other engines that use its index.
• Check that no page still carries a noindex tag from the development stage. This is the most common reason a new site is invisible.

Titles, descriptions and headings

Search engines and people read these first.

• One unique title per page, roughly 50 to 60 characters, with the main topic near the start.
• One meta description per page, roughly 150 to 160 characters, written as an invitation to click rather than a keyword list.
• Exactly one H1 per page that matches the page topic, then H2s for sections.
• Descriptive image alt text and file names.

One topic per page

Write down the 5 to 15 phrases your customers would type, then give each phrase to one page. When two pages target the same phrase they compete with each other.

• Match the intent: a person searching for a price wants a pricing page, not a blog essay.
• Answer real questions on the page, in plain language, in the order a visitor would ask them.
• Link related pages to each other with descriptive link text, not "click here".

Speed and mobile

Most visits are on phones. Google measures real-user performance with Core Web Vitals.

• Largest Contentful Paint (loading) under 2.5 seconds.
• Interaction to Next Paint (responsiveness) under 200 milliseconds.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (visual stability) under 0.1.
• Compress images, use modern formats, set width and height, avoid heavy scripts and page builders.

Structured data

Structured data (JSON-LD) tells search engines who you are and what a page is. It does not guarantee a special result, but it removes ambiguity.

• Organization and WebSite on every page, BreadcrumbList on inner pages.
• Article for guides, SoftwareApplication or VideoGame for products, Service for service pages.
• FAQ markup is still valid, but Google now shows FAQ rich results only for a small set of sites, so write the FAQ for readers first.
• Validate with the Rich Results Test and fix warnings.

Multilingual sites

If you publish in more than one language, give every language its own URL and link them with hreflang tags, including an x-default. Translate the page properly instead of auto-switching on the visitor’s location.

Off-page: earn trust honestly

• Complete real profiles for your business: Google Business Profile if you serve a local area, social accounts, relevant directories and your product listings.
• Get links from places that would genuinely mention you: partners, customers, communities, press.
• Never buy links or use link networks. It can lead to a manual penalty.

Measure and be patient

• Search Console shows which queries and pages get impressions and clicks. Check it every week in month one, then monthly.
• Use the URL Inspection tool to request indexing for key pages, but only a limited number per day.
• Technical fixes can show results in weeks. Competitive rankings usually take three to six months of steady work.

Common mistakes

• Leaving noindex or a blocking robots.txt rule from staging.
• Duplicate pages on www and non-www, or with and without a trailing slash.
• Content that only appears after JavaScript runs and is never rendered for crawlers.
• Publishing thin pages just to have more pages.

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