The first 90 days of an SEO consulting engagement
What happens in each of the first three months of an SEO engagement: access and measurement, diagnosis, prioritisation, and the first implementation wave.
By Roozbeh Nazari · CEO
In SEO consulting the first three months determine how the rest of the work will go. Because what gets done in that period is mostly invisible, the client's feeling that "nothing has happened yet" and the consultant's feeling that "we are doing the real work now" are experienced at the same time. This article is about what fills the first 90 days, and what should concretely be in hand at the end of each stage.
We describe the working model itself on our approach page and the scope headings in our services. If you are still at the stage of choosing a consultant, the list of 12 questions to ask comes before this article.
The first 30 days: access, measurement and the current state
The first month's work is not analysis, it is groundwork. Every analysis made before access is granted is a guess. What has to be completed at this stage is limited and clear: access to Search Console and the analytics accounts, access to server logs or at least to crawl data, access to the content management system, and learning who runs the publication process and under whose approval.
On the measurement side the first question should not be "what is our ranking" but "is the data we hold reliable". Are conversion events defined correctly, is internal traffic excluded, can the language versions be separated. In multilingual setups that last item alone can take a week; we described the setup in GA4 locale-based funnels.
What should be in hand at the end of the month is not a report but a baseline: an agreed set of numbers describing the state today, and a note recording where those numbers came from.
Days 31-60: diagnosis and prioritisation
The second month is the diagnosis month. The technical audit, the content inventory and the map of the demand side are produced here. The output of the audit is a findings list; but a findings list alone is not a plan, and this month's real work is putting the list in order.
The ordering criterion is three questions. What changes if this finding is fixed, whose work does fixing it fall to and how long does it take, and what do we lose if it is not fixed. The third question usually goes unasked, and that is why the list ends up sorted easy-to-hard rather than important-to-unimportant.
The thing that creates the most tension on the client side this month is that nothing has gone live. The way to head that off is to ship a small, reversible wave of fixes mid-month; before you start paying down technical debt you have seen that the system actually works.
Days 61-90: the first implementation wave
The third month is the implementation month. Two parallel tracks run here: shipping the technical fixes in priority order, and starting on the first content cluster. Running both at once is not compulsory, but holding one back entirely is not right either; if the technical side does not move at all, publishing content is wasted, and if content never starts, the payoff of the technical improvement is invisible.
What to expect at the end of this month is not a jump in the ranking table. What to expect is this: confirmation that the changes have gone live, measurement that has become able to distinguish those changes, and the next quarter's list ready with reasons attached.
Who does what
The place that most often jams in the first 90 days is not technical, it is responsibility. The consultant produces the finding, but getting the finding shipped is another team's job in most organisations, and that team has its own priority list. If this relationship is not put in writing at the start, what you have in the third month is an unimplemented list.
In practice three roles need to be clear from the outset. Who decides: there should be a single name who approves when scope and priority change. Who implements: there should be a team name against each finding, not a general label such as "development". Who verifies: it should be clear who confirms that a change has gone live, and by what method.
When those three are written down the rhythm of the first 90 days settles on its own; when they are not, every item turns into a separate negotiation and the consultant's time goes into defending the order of the work rather than the work itself.
Three common mistakes in the first 90 days
The first is spending month one writing a report. A comprehensive kickoff report looks good but nobody reads it twice; the same effort spent completing access and fixing measurement pays back far more.
The second is doing three months of diagnosis without shipping anything. Whether the publication pipeline actually works is learned only by pushing a small change through it, and learning that in the third month is expensive.
That second mistake has a quiet cost too: when the blockage in the publication pipeline is noticed late, the implementation wave planned for the third month slides into the fourth, and there is no concrete output to show at the end of the first quarter.
The third is starting to report on rankings in the first quarter. Ranking movements in this period are largely noise, and putting them at the centre of the report pulls both parties' attention away from the work being done. What should be reported in the first quarter is the work itself and how reliable the measurement has become.
What is not promised
It is worth being open at this point. Google's dedicated documentation writes it directly: nobody can guarantee a number one ranking on Google. An offer that guarantees one, implies a special relationship with Google, or keeps its method secret should be eliminated before it becomes a contract.
The same document also lists, among the questions to ask a consultant, what results to expect and in what timeframe. The honest answer to that question is not a date but a range and a reason. The timeframe varies with the sector, the current state of the site and the publication speed; anyone who states it as a single number is stating something they have not measured.
The first 90 days deliverables list
- All access, and a written description of the publication process
- An agreed baseline with a known source
- A technical findings list ordered with reasons
- A first wave of fixes shipped, and its verification
- The plan for the first content cluster and its first pieces started
- A prioritised list for the next quarter
If all six are not in hand, the third month is not complete; having five means "on track". Reviewing the list together at the end of the quarter is the calmest way to discuss why any item is missing.
It also needs saying that this calendar does not run identically at every organisation. The size of the site, the speed of the publication pipeline and the capacity of internal teams change the length of the stages; at a small site the first month can come down to two weeks, while at an enterprise completing access alone can take a month. What does not change is the order: diagnosis does not happen before measurement is reliable, and implementation does not happen before diagnosis is prioritised. On projects that break that order, the end of the third month leaves a lot of work and few results.
If you would like to talk through this calendar for your own situation, write to us from the contact page.