New Website SEO Checklist: The First 30 Days

For a new website, the first 30 days of SEO are about one thing: getting your real pages crawled and indexed cleanly, with no duplicate versions and no technical blocks. Rankings come later. Do the pre-launch checks, verify the site in Search Console on launch day, submit a sitemap, earn a few genuine links, and then use the Page indexing report to fix whatever Google tells you is wrong.

The checklist below is in the order I would do it. Each part explains why, so you can adapt it to your stack.

Before launch: get the foundations right

These are cheap to fix now and painful to fix after Google has crawled the wrong thing.

Pick one canonical version of the site

Your site can answer on four origins: http://, https://, with www and without. Pick one (HTTPS, and either www or non-www) and 301 redirect the other three to it, path for path.

http://example.com/page      -> 301 -> https://www.example.com/page
http://www.example.com/page  -> 301 -> https://www.example.com/page
https://example.com/page     -> 301 -> https://www.example.com/page

Test all four with the Redirect Checker. Each should reach the final URL in one hop. Also decide on trailing slashes and stick to it.

Settle the URL structure

Changing URLs later means redirects and a period of re-indexing. Decide now:

• Short, lowercase, hyphenated slugs: /guides/xml-sitemaps, not /Guides/XML_Sitemaps?id=42.
• A shallow hierarchy. Two or three levels are enough for nearly every site.
• No dates in URLs unless the content really is date bound.

Keep staging out of Google, and do not ship the block

Protect the staging site with HTTP authentication (a password prompt). That is safer than robots.txt or noindex, because there is nothing to forget to remove on the live site.

If your staging setup does use noindex or a Disallow: / robots.txt, put "remove staging blocks" at the top of your launch runbook. On WordPress, that means unticking Settings > Reading > "Discourage search engines from indexing this site".

Every page needs the basics

Element	Requirement
<title>	Unique per page, describes the page, front-loads the main topic
Meta description	Unique, written for the searcher, roughly one to two sentences
<h1>	One clear main heading that matches the page topic
Canonical tag	Self-referencing absolute URL on every indexable page
Status code	200 for real pages, real 404 for missing ones
Mobile layout	Same content and links as desktop, since Google indexes the mobile version
lang attribute	Set on <html>

Check a few templates with the Meta Tags Analyzer. For guidance on writing the first two, see title tags and meta descriptions.

Build a real 404

Request /this-page-does-not-exist and confirm the response code is 404, not 200. Single page apps and some hosting setups return 200 for everything, which produces soft 404 errors at scale.

Create robots.txt and the XML sitemap

A sensible starting robots.txt for most new sites:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/
Disallow: /cart
Disallow: /search

Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Do not block CSS or JavaScript. Google needs them to render the page.

The sitemap should list only canonical, indexable URLs that return 200, with a truthful lastmod. Most CMSs generate one. If yours does not, the XML Sitemap Generator builds one from a URL list. The XML sitemap guide covers the details.

Launch with finished pages

Google forms its first impression from whatever it crawls first. Empty category pages, "coming soon" posts and near-identical location pages are poor material. Ten finished pages beat a hundred placeholders. Publish the rest as they are ready.

Day 0: launch day

Work through this in the first hour.

• Open https://yoursite.com/robots.txt. Confirm there is no Disallow: /.
• View source on the homepage and two inner pages. Search for noindex. There should be none.
• Check response headers for X-Robots-Tag: noindex with the HTTP Headers Checker. CDNs and hosting presets sometimes add it on preview domains and keep it.
• Confirm canonicals point to the live domain, not to staging.
• Confirm the sitemap lists live domain URLs, not staging URLs.
• Run the homepage through the Indexability Checker for a combined verdict.

Set up Search Console

1. Go to Search Console and add a Domain property (example.com). It covers every protocol and subdomain in one property. Verification is by a DNS TXT record at your registrar or DNS host.
2. If you cannot edit DNS, add a URL-prefix property for the exact canonical origin and verify with the HTML file or HTML tag method.
3. Go to Sitemaps, enter your sitemap URL, submit. The status should become "Success" once it is fetched. "Couldn't fetch" on a brand-new property often clears by itself within a day or so. If it does not, test the sitemap URL with the XML Sitemap Validator.
4. Inspect your homepage with URL Inspection, click Test live URL, and if the test says the URL is available to Google, click Request indexing.

The full tour of the tool is in the Search Console beginner's guide.

Set up Bing too

Bing Webmaster Tools can import your verified sites from Search Console in a couple of clicks. Bing also supports IndexNow, a protocol that lets you push new and changed URLs to participating engines (Bing, Yandex, Naver, Seznam and others). Google does not take part in IndexNow. See the IndexNow guide.

Install analytics

Any privacy-compliant analytics tool will do. You want a baseline from day one so that later changes can be measured.

Days 1 to 7: discovery

Get the first links

A new domain has no links, and links are how Google discovers and prioritises sites. You do not need a campaign, you need a few legitimate mentions:

• Link to the site from profiles you already own: company social accounts, GitHub, your existing sites.
• Create or update your Google Business Profile if you serve customers locally.
• Ask real partners, suppliers, clients or associations to list you.
• Submit to the small number of directories that people in your industry actually use.

Do not buy links or mass-submit to directories. Google's spam policies cover link schemes, and a new site has no history to cushion it. More on what links do and do not do in do backlinks help indexing.

Request indexing for your key pages

The Request indexing button has a daily limit per property (Google does not publish the number, and it is small). Spend it on the pages that matter: homepage, main category or service pages, best content. Requesting the same URL repeatedly does nothing. Google says so in the tool's help page.

Check what Google sees

For each main template (home, category, product or article), run a live test in URL Inspection, open View tested page and look at:

• HTML: is your main content in there? If the site is client-side rendered and the HTML is an empty shell, fix that now. See JavaScript SEO.
• Screenshot: does the page look complete?
• More info > Page resources: are important scripts or stylesheets blocked?

Be patient with the reports

The Page indexing report takes a few days to show anything on a new property. An empty report in week one is normal. URL Inspection is live, so use that for spot checks.

Days 8 to 14: structure and content

Tighten internal linking

• Every page reachable within three clicks of the homepage.
• Every page linked from at least one other page. No orphan pages.
• New content linked from the homepage or a hub page on the day it goes live.
• Descriptive anchor text.

Add structured data where it fits

Start with the types that match your pages: Organization on the homepage, BreadcrumbList on inner pages, Article for posts, Product for products, LocalBusiness for local firms. Generate the JSON-LD with the Schema Markup Generator and validate with Google's Rich Results Test. Structured data does not get a page indexed. It makes indexed pages eligible for rich results. Details in structured data basics.

Publish on a steady schedule

Google learns how often a site changes and adjusts crawling to match. A site that adds a couple of solid pages a week gets revisited more often than one that launches and goes quiet. Each page should target one topic and say something a searcher cannot get from the ten existing results. Pages that exist only to hit a keyword are the ones that end up as "Crawled - currently not indexed". See thin content and indexing.

Check page speed basics

Run your main templates through PageSpeed Insights. You are looking for glaring problems: multi-megabyte hero images, render-blocking scripts, slow server response. Core Web Vitals are a modest ranking signal and not an indexing requirement, but a slow server does reduce how fast Google crawls. See Core Web Vitals and indexing.

Days 15 to 30: read the data and fix

By now Search Console has data. Open Indexing > Pages.

Compare indexed against submitted

Use the dropdown at the top of the report to filter by All submitted pages. That limits the report to URLs in your sitemap, which are the ones you care about.

What you see	What it means	Action
Most submitted pages indexed	Healthy	Keep publishing
Many "Discovered - currently not indexed"	Google knows the URLs and has not crawled them	Normal for a new site. Improve internal links, earn a few more external links, check server speed
Many "Crawled - currently not indexed"	Crawled and not selected	Look hard at content quality and duplication
"Excluded by 'noindex' tag" on real pages	A leftover staging setting or plugin default	Remove the noindex, then Validate fix
"Duplicate without user-selected canonical"	Several URLs serve the same content	Add canonicals, fix redirects for URL variants
"Page with redirect", "Not found (404)" in submitted pages	Your sitemap lists the wrong URLs	Fix the sitemap

Each status is explained in the Page indexing report guide.

Look at the first performance data

In Performance > Search results, enable average position. In month one, expect small numbers. What you want to see:

• Impressions for your brand name. If your own name does not bring up your site, check for indexing problems on the homepage first.
• Impressions on long, specific queries that match your content. That tells you Google understands what the pages are about.

Do not rewrite titles and content in a panic because of two weeks of data. Make notes and revisit at day 60 and 90.

Check Crawl stats

Settings > Crawl stats shows requests per day, average response time and host status. On a new site the volume will be low. You are checking that there are no spikes of 5xx or DNS errors and that response time is steady.

Things not to do in the first month

• Do not change URLs or domain. Every change restarts part of the process.
• Do not publish hundreds of AI-written or templated pages at once. Google's spam policies cover scaled content abuse, and a new site with a sudden flood of low value pages is exactly the pattern they describe.
• Do not block pages in robots.txt to "save crawl budget". A new small site has no crawl budget problem. Google says crawl budget is mainly a concern for very large sites or sites with rapidly changing content.
• Do not hammer Request indexing. It has a quota and repeated requests for the same URL do not help.
• Do not judge by site: searches. Google says they are not a complete list. Use URL Inspection.

Automating the boring part

Checking index status URL by URL gets old quickly. TurboIndex, free for one site, does the routine work: it imports your Search Console properties, reads your sitemaps, submits new URLs within Google's daily quotas, pushes them to Bing through IndexNow and tracks real index status with the URL Inspection API (2,000 inspections per day per property). To be clear about limits: Google's Indexing API is officially for JobPosting and BroadcastEvent pages, the default quota is 200 requests per day per Google Cloud project, and no tool can guarantee indexing.

The 30 day checklist, condensed

Before launch

• One canonical origin, the other three 301 to it
• Final URL structure
• Unique title, description, H1, self-canonical on every page
• Real 404 status for missing pages
• robots.txt and XML sitemap ready
• Only finished pages go live

Day 0

• No leftover Disallow: /, noindex or X-Robots-Tag
• Search Console Domain property verified, sitemap submitted
• Homepage inspected and indexing requested
• Bing Webmaster Tools and analytics set up

Days 1 to 7

• First genuine links in place
• Key pages requested
• Rendered HTML checked for each template

Days 8 to 14

• Internal linking tightened, no orphans
• Structured data added and validated
• Publishing schedule started

Days 15 to 30

• Page indexing report reviewed for submitted pages
• Issues fixed and validation started
• Crawl stats checked
• Baseline performance numbers recorded