Starting an SEO campaign without wasting the first quarter

The first quarter of an SEO campaign is usually spent on work that could not have paid off. The decisions that determine whether it pays were never made. Two of those decisions come before anything gets written.

Decision one: which queries you are actually competing for

Not the head term. The head term is a report line, and it will not convert anyway. The question is which specific searches are made by someone who has the problem you solve and the budget to fix it.

Write the list down as questions a person would type. Then search each one and read what ranks. If the first page is entirely comparison articles by publications, that query belongs to publishers and you will spend a year losing to them. If the first page is competitors’ service pages, the query is commercial and winnable.

That triage is the whole exercise. Do it for thirty queries, keep the ten that are both winnable and worth winning.

Decision two: one page per intent

Two pages targeting the same question compete with each other, and search engines pick one, usually the weaker one. Assign each query on your list to exactly one page. Write down which page owns which query.

That document is worth more than a keyword volume export, because it is the thing you check every time someone wants to add a page.

Then fix what is broken

Before writing anything new, confirm the site can be crawled and served.

Check that the pages you care about return 200 and are not excluded in Search Console. Check there is one canonical per page and it points at itself. Check that your most requested URL does not redirect twice. Check the site works on a phone at the network speed your audience actually has.

This takes a week and it is not optional. New content published onto a site that cannot be indexed is content published into a drawer.

Then write, in the order of commercial value

Start with the pages that sell. A service page that answers the buying question is worth more than an informational post that gets ten times the traffic. It is usually easier to rank, because fewer people write it well.

Then write the supporting pieces that answer the questions someone asks on the way to that decision, and link them to the page that sells.

How to tell in week eight whether it is working

Rankings move before traffic does, and impressions move before rankings do. In Search Console, the early signal is a page appearing for queries it was not appearing for at all. That happens well before the position is good enough to earn clicks.

Say a new page has no impressions for anything after two months. It is not being indexed, or it is not on topic for anything people search. Both are fixable, and both are invisible if you only watch traffic.

What to stop doing

Publishing on a schedule without a target query. Chasing volume on terms your buyer does not use. Rewriting the homepage a fourth time. Adding a blog post about industry trends because the calendar said Tuesday.

Every one of those consumes the budget that the ten winnable queries needed.

If you want the triage done with you, that is the first phase of our SEO work. It produces the page-to-query map before any writing starts.