SEO for a new website: what to do in the first 90 days

A new website starts with no pages in Google, no links pointing to it and no history. Nothing you do on launch day makes it rank. What you do in the first weeks decides how fast Google finds it, which pages it keeps, and which searches it can win a few months later.

This guide puts that work in order, for the first 90 days. The numbers come from our own launch: submitium.com went live on October 21, 2026, and we tracked what Google did with it, and with 30 directory listings of another product of ours.

• Google finds a new site through links. A sitemap and Search Console help, but Google calls a sitemap "merely a hint".
• Eight days after launch, Google had 39 of our pages. Our sitemap lists 210. Our first blog post was in Google the day after we published it.
• A link counts once Google has seen the page it is on. Of 30 directory listings that went live between October 21 and 25, 11 were in Google on October 29.
• A low difficulty score is not enough. "seo for startups" scores 8 out of 100, and its first results are Salesforce, PostHog and Semrush. Read the results page before you choose a search.
• Judge a change after a few weeks. Google says crawling a page can take "anywhere from a few days to a few weeks".

What Google does with a new website#

Google works in three steps. It finds a page (crawling), stores it (indexing), and shows it for a search (ranking). A new site goes through the first two before the third can start.

Google finds most new pages by following links. Its SEO starter guide (opens in a new tab) says it "primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled." A sitemap tells Google which pages exist, and Search Console lets you ask for a crawl, but neither one makes Google index a page. A new site that no other site links to can wait a long time.

That makes three kinds of work, in this order:

1. Before launch, make every page easy to crawl and to understand.
2. In the first week, tell Google and Bing that the site exists, and get the first links.
3. From then on, publish pages for searches you can win, and get more links.

Before launch: the setup#

Each step below takes minutes on a new site. Fixing it later takes longer, because Google has to crawl the pages again to see the change.

One address for each page#

Choose one host, with or without www, and send every other address to it with a permanent redirect (301). Do the same from http to https. You can check a redirect from a terminal:

curl -sI http://www.example.com/pricing

The answer should be 301 Moved Permanently, with a Location on your main address, in one step. During our first week, http and www answered with a 302, a temporary redirect. We changed them to 301.

Each page should also name its own address in a canonical tag:

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/pricing" />

A robots.txt that blocks only private pages#

robots.txt tells crawlers which paths to skip. Two mistakes are common on new sites:

• The test server's file goes to production. Disallow: / is right on a test server. On the live site, it blocks every page.
• A rule blocks more than you meant. A rule matches every path that starts with it: Disallow: /app blocks /app/settings, and also /apps and /apple-icon.png. We made this one. Our rule for the dashboard also blocked /apple-icon.png, the logo our structured data gives Google. The fix is the final slash: /app/.

Our file today:

User-Agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /app/
Disallow: /admin
Disallow: /design

Sitemap: https://submitium.com/sitemap.xml

A sitemap#

A sitemap lists the pages you want in Google, each one at its final address: no redirects, no pages blocked by robots.txt. Name it in robots.txt with a Sitemap: line, as above, and submit it once in Search Console. Most tools make it for you: Next.js from an app/sitemap.ts file, WordPress at /wp-sitemap.xml.

Titles and descriptions#

Google shows a page's title as the link in its results, and cuts long titles. Give each page its own title, about 60 characters at most, starting with the words people search. Our home page title started as a slogan. It is now "Directory submission service, done by hand", the search we want it to answer.

The meta description is the text Google often shows under the link. Write one plain sentence or two, under about 155 characters, that says what the page contains.

Text in the HTML#

Google can run JavaScript, but rendering can come later than the first crawl. A page whose text is in the HTML your server sends can be read right away. Check with your browser's View Source, not the inspector: the headline and the main text should be there.

Use one <h1> per page, headings in order, and links written as <a href> with words that say where they go.

Structured data#

A few lines of JSON-LD tell Google the name of your site and your logo. WebSite data on the home page gives the site name Google shows above your results; Organization data gives the logo. Add other types only on pages that show that content.

Private pages#

Dashboards, account pages and admin areas have nothing for people who search. Block them in robots.txt, or mark them noindex. Not both on the same page: Google has to crawl a page to read its noindex, and robots.txt stops it from crawling.

Speed and stability#

Pages should load fast on a phone and keep still while they load: give images a width and a height, and load fonts in a way that does not move the text. Google measures this with its Core Web Vitals, and Search Console reports them once your site has enough visitors.

Week 1: tell Google and Bing#

Google Search Console#

1. Add your site as a Domain property. It covers http, https, www and every subdomain. Google gives you a TXT record to add where your domain's DNS is managed.
2. Submit your sitemap once, in Sitemaps.
3. In URL Inspection, enter your home page and two or three main pages, and choose Request indexing. Only those: Google limits these requests (opens in a new tab), and asking again for the same page doesn't make it faster.

Bing Webmaster Tools#

Bing Webmaster Tools (opens in a new tab) can import your site from Search Console, so this takes a few minutes. Bing also supports IndexNow (opens in a new tab), a way to tell it about new or changed pages. Naver, Seznam, Yandex and Yep support it too. Google does not. IndexNow tells search engines about a page; each engine still decides whether to index it.

What not to do#

• Google's Indexing API is for job postings and livestream videos only, as its documentation (opens in a new tab) says.
• Services that promise instant indexing. Some work by creating links to your pages on other sites. Google's spam policies (opens in a new tab) count links made by "automated programs or services" as link spam.

What Google did with our own site#

submitium.com went live on October 21, 2026, with 208 pages in its sitemap: 9 main pages (home, pricing, the list of directories, the blog and legal pages) and 199 pages about directories. Two blog posts were added on October 28. The sitemap is named in robots.txt, as shown above.

On October 29, eight days after launch, a site:submitium.com search on Google returned 39 pages:

• 5 of the 9 main pages, the home page and pricing among them.
• 31 of the 199 directory pages.
• The first blog post, the day after it went up. The second, published a few hours later, was not in yet.
• 2 pages that are not in the sitemap, sign-up and sign-in. Google found them through links on our pages.

Two things to take from it. Google indexes a new site in parts: some pages first, more each time it comes back. And a new page that other pages link to, like a blog post linked from the home page and from the blog, can be in Google within a day.

A site: search gives an estimate. The Pages report in Search Console gives the exact count.

Choose searches a new site can win#

A new site will not rank for "backlinks" (4,400 searches a month in the US, difficulty 69 out of 100) or "backlink checker" (49,500 searches, difficulty 93) in its first months. It can rank for more specific searches whose first results are weak.

Difficulty scores help you sort, but they are an estimate. Read the first page of results yourself. These are the searches we compared before we wrote this article:

Searches: a month, in the US. Searches and difficulty from SE Ranking's US database, October 2026.

"seo for startups" has the lowest score and the strongest first page. "how to increase domain authority" has Moz, the company that makes the score, in second place. "seo for new website" has two Quora threads and general pages about SEO in its first results: no page there answers the question step by step, with numbers. We chose it.

What to look for in the first results:

• Forums and Q&A sites, like Reddit or Quora. Google found no page that answers the search well.
• Pages that answer another question, like a general "what is SEO" page for a specific search.
• Old pages, with a past year in the title or old screenshots.
• A question you can answer better, with your own data, tests or product.

Write one page for one question. "seo for new website", "seo for new websites", "new website seo" and "seo for a new website" each get about 590 searches a month in the US, and they ask the same thing. One page answers all four. Four pages would compete with each other.

Pages to publish first#

1. The pages that sell: the home page, pricing, and one page for each main use of your product. Each one answers what a buyer searches, like "directory submission service" for our home page.
2. Pages that answer your buyers' questions: guides, comparisons, "alternatives to" pages. Write them with something only you have: your data, your tests, screenshots of your product.
3. Pages made from data, if you have data people search for. Each of our 199 directory pages shows what we checked on one directory: its link, its Domain Rating, its wait and what it asks for in return.

Be careful with the third kind. Google's spam policies call it "scaled content abuse" when many pages are made "for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users." One page per city or per keyword with the same text and one word changed is that. One page per item, with facts found nowhere else, is not. Once you have published a set of these pages, wait until Google has indexed most of them before adding more. Eight days after launch, 31 of our 199 were in.

Get the first links#

Links do two jobs for a new site. They lead Google to it, and they are one of the signals Google uses to rank pages. A new site has none.

Where the first links come from, from the least work to the most:

1. Your own profiles and sites: GitHub, your social accounts, your company's site, your other products. Even when these links are nofollow, they help Google find you.
2. Launch platforms publish a page about your product on the day you launch. We checked 72 of them in Product Hunt alternatives: 34 give a free dofollow link. Among them are Fazier (DR 84), Findly.tools (DR 82, run by the team behind Submitium) and DailyPings (DR 65, also run by our team).
3. Directories of software, SaaS, AI tools and startups. We checked 199 in Directory submission in 2026: 121 give a free dofollow link, most of them in exchange for their badge on your site. Twelve Tools (DR 83) and Neeed Directory (DR 74) publish within three days.
4. Integrations and marketplaces. If your product works with another tool, that tool's integrations page or app marketplace often links to you.
5. Pages people cite: your own data, a free tool, a template.
6. Podcasts, interviews and guest articles in your field. More work, and the link comes with readers.

What to stay away from, from Google's spam policies (opens in a new tab):

• Buying links that pass ranking credit. A paid link is allowed when it is marked rel="sponsored".
• Packages of hundreds of links for a few dollars, made by "automated programs or services".
• Low-quality directories and bookmark sites, which accept every submission and publish pages nobody reads.

A link counts once Google has seen it#

A backlink counts once Google has crawled the page it is on. A listing that went live today is on a page Google has not seen yet.

We measured how long that takes. ToolRoots, another product of our team, got 30 directory listings that went live between October 21 and 25, 2026, each one confirmed by the directory, by email or on a published page. On October 29, we searched Google for each listing page with a site: search.

• 11 of the 30 listing pages were in Google, four to eight days after going live.
• Listings that had been live longer were in more often: 9 of the 14 from October 23, none of the 5 from October 25.
• The directory mattered too. Six of the 11 are on six directories built on the same software, all live since October 23.

We left out 14 more listings that we saw on the directory's site without any confirmation from the directory. Some directories show the page of a product that is still in review, and that page may never be published.

What it means for you:

• Do not judge a directory, or any link, in its first week.
• Search Console's Links report shows the links Google has found to your site. A link appears there some time after Google has crawled it.
• A listing that also appears on a directory's home page or category pages gives Google more ways to find it.

How long SEO takes for a new website#

Google gives no single delay. Its starter guide says some changes "might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months," and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging a change. This is what to expect in the first 90 days, and what to do at each step:

What to measure#

• Search Console, Pages. How many pages are indexed, and why the others are not. "Discovered – currently not indexed" means Google knows the page but has not crawled it yet. "Crawled – currently not indexed" means Google read it and did not keep it, for now.
• Search Console, Performance. Impressions come before clicks. A page with impressions and no clicks needs a better title, or ranks too low for now.
• Search Console, Links. The sites that link to you, as Google sees them, with a delay.
• Domain Rating (Ahrefs) or Domain Authority (Moz). These scores are made by those companies, not by Google. They move slowly, and they measure the links Ahrefs or Moz have found.

Where Submitium fits#

Submitium does one part of this guide: the first links from directories. We submit your product by hand to directories and launch platforms that give a free dofollow link, keep their badges in one badge wall on your site, and check the link on each live listing six times over 90 days. A directory costs $0.99, less from the 51st, and a first order starts at 30 directories. See the pricing and the full list of directories.

Questions#

How do I do SEO for a new website?#

In this order: make the site easy to crawl (one address per page, a robots.txt that blocks only private pages, a sitemap, a title for each page, text in the HTML); add it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools; get the first links from your own profiles, launch platforms and directories; then publish pages for specific searches whose first results are weak.

How long does it take for a new website to show up on Google?#

From a few days to a few weeks. Google says crawling can take "anywhere from a few days to a few weeks". Eight days after launch, Google had 39 of our pages, and our first blog post was in the day after we published it.

How do I get my website on Google?#

Check that robots.txt does not block it, add it to Google Search Console, submit your sitemap and request indexing for your home page. Then get links from other sites: Google finds most new pages through links from pages it already knows.

Can a new website rank on the first page of Google?#

For specific searches whose first results are weak, yes, within a few months. For broad searches where the first results are large, well-known sites, it takes much longer.

Does a new website need backlinks?#

Yes. Links are how Google finds a new site, and one of the signals it uses to rank pages. A few links from sites in your field do more than many from sites that have nothing to do with yours.

How many backlinks does a new website need?#

There is no number. Start with the links you can get where your buyers already look: launch platforms, directories in your field, the tools you integrate with. Stay away from packages that sell links by the hundred.

Should I pay for SEO for a new website?#

You can do the setup in this guide yourself, in a day. What takes time is writing pages and getting links. If you pay someone, ask what they will do each month. Google's page on hiring an SEO (opens in a new tab) says no one can guarantee a first place in its results.