The 90-Day SEO Plan for a Brand-New Website (Do It in This Order, Please)

Your new website is a restaurant with no sign, no menu and zero customers. Everyone wants to skip straight to "get customers." Surfer Academy's 90-day plan says the order matters more than the hustle.

So we're doing this in order. No skipping. Yes, you.

One honest note first. Surfer's video gives you an order of work, not a day-by-day calendar. We are not going to invent dates and pretend they came from the video. Start at step 1, work down, and treat the 90 days as the frame. It is also a product video from an SEO tool company, so judge the advice, not the sales pitch.

Quick words (one line each):

• Search Console (GSC) and Bing Webmaster Tools: free dashboards where Google and Bing tell you how they see your site.

• GA4: Google's free analytics, which counts visitors.

• Entity: one distinct thing, such as a service, a product or a place. Surfer's rule is that one page covers one entity.

• Money page: a page that explains something you sell.

Step 1: Turn on the dashboards

Set up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools first, then GA4 (Surfer, Sept 30, 2026). Surfer says Bing's tool includes AI citation reporting and competitor backlink data.

You can't improve numbers you aren't collecting. Boring? Yes. Skippable? No.

Step 2: Map your customer's journey

Write down how a buyer goes from "I have a problem" to "I'm buying." Cover what they want, what they need to know, what stops them, and what they search at each stage.

Surfer puts the prompt he uses in the video description and says even 80% right is a good start. So don't wait for perfect. Write it down.

Step 3: Build the core money pages first

Build one page for each thing you sell or serve, before keyword research. Surfer's list:

• Software: each feature, audience or use case.

• Local: each service and service area.

• Lawyers: each practice area.

• E-commerce: each product.

Step 4: One page, one entity

If a page covers more than one idea, split it. Think of it as one job per page. Surfer's reasons: cleaner keyword targeting, topic clusters, and AI questions are specific.

His example is a vendor with both a feature page and an industry page showing up first in ChatGPT for a specific "best [product] for [industry]" question.

Step 5: Study the right competitor pages

Before writing, compare against competitor pages of the same type. In his tool, Surfer unchecks listicles and homepages that aren't the same kind of page. Then outline your page to cover the entities the top pages include.

Compare apples to apples. Nobody wins by studying a rival's homepage to write a pricing page.

Step 6: Build the technical basics in from the start

Surfer's checklist:

• pages that Google can index

• fast pages

• no broken or insecure links

• images saved as WebP, with alt text (a short text description of the image)

• a crawl of your site with a tool such as Screaming Frog to catch problems

Add one more from Victorious (Oct 1, 2026): put your company name and a short description near the top of every page, so each page stands alone. Then run our bot access check so you know the robots can read it all.

Step 7: Follow your buyer off your site

Your buyer reads Reddit threads, Trustpilot and review sites before they buy. Surfer says go where they go, finish your profiles there, and be present. Gotch agrees reviews come first among off-site work (Oct 19, 2026).

Your customer is already hanging out there. Go say hi.

Step 8: Find where your competitors get mentioned

Use the free Google trick from Surfer: competitor -site:competitor.com, then add -yourbrand. That shows pages that mention a competitor and not you. Our mentions gap list post walks through the whole method.

Step 9: Write comparison and "best X for Y" pages

Surfer says vendor comparison pages and "best X for Y" pages are good for AI visibility when people compare vendors in ChatGPT. For a new site with little Search Console data, he says to start with topic research plus your journey map.

Step 10: Link sideways and down the funnel

Link sideways to related pages in the same topic cluster, and down the funnel to the money page (Surfer). Your pages become a path, not a pile.

Where the experts split

• Staying narrow. Gotch says pick one category to win (Oct 19, 2026), and Neil Patel says stay in your lane. Kasra Dash rates topical focus D tier in his own ranking. Surfer's one-page-per-entity rule sits with the first two. Choose one category for your first 90 days and review the result.

Heads-up

• The plan is Surfer's. The side notes come from the other videos, each named above.

• Surfer's own order, in short: tracking, journey map, money pages, bottom-of-funnel content and off-site profiles, comparison pages, then topic clusters with internal links.

Do this today

1. Set up Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and GA4.

2. Write your buyer's journey in 5 lines.

3. List every service, product or area you need its own page for.

4. Pick the first money page and start it.

Sources

• Surfer Academy ? The 90-Day SEO Plan For A Brand New Website (Google + AI Search) (2026-09-30)

• Candour Agency with Nathan Gotch ? AI search with Nathan Gotch... (2026-10-19)

• Victorious (The Search Signal) ? Technical SEO for AI Search - What to Keep, Start, and Stop Doing (2026-10-01)

• Neil Patel ? The 5 Rules of AI SEO for 2027 (2026-10-08)

• Kasra Dash ? I Ranked 32 AI Search Factors S to F (2026-10-20)

Don't worry if this seems like it's a pain in the ass for someone who doesn't build websites. That's because it is. The good news: just click the link below, pull the trigger, and we'll take care of the rest.