Every website is different, but most SEO work follows the same cycle: understand the situation, fix what's broken, build what's missing, measure the results and repeat. Knowing this cycle helps you plan in-house work, judge an agency's proposal and set expectations with stakeholders. This lesson walks through each phase, typical timings, and the myths that most often derail projects.

Phase 1: Discovery and audit (roughly weeks 1–4)

Good SEO starts with understanding, not activity.

Goals and access

Agree the business goal and KPIs (see the previous lesson), then get access to the tools that hold the evidence: Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, analytics (usually GA4), the website's content management system, and Google Business Profile for local businesses. Access should be granted through user permissions, never by sharing passwords.

Technical audit

A crawl tool (such as Screaming Frog, Sitebulb or a cloud crawler) fetches the site the way a search engine would. Combined with Search Console data, it reveals:

  • pages blocked by robots.txt or carrying unintended noindex tags;
  • broken links, redirect chains and 404 errors;
  • duplicate content and canonical problems;
  • missing or duplicate titles and headings;
  • slow templates and Core Web Vitals issues;
  • JavaScript content that search engines may not see;
  • orphan pages and poor internal linking.

Content audit

List every indexable page with its traffic, conversions, links and purpose. Then classify each page: keep, improve, merge (with a 301 redirect) or remove. It's common to find that a small share of pages earns most of the traffic, while many old posts or near-duplicate pages add little.

Keyword and competitor research

Find what customers search for, the intent behind it, and who currently wins those searches. This becomes the keyword map that guides the content plan.

Output

The discovery phase should end with a prioritised plan: what to fix first, what to build, expected impact and effort, and who does what.

Phase 2: Fix the foundations (roughly months 1–3)

Technical and structural fixes often produce the earliest gains because they let existing content perform. Typical priorities:

  • remove accidental blocks (robots.txt, noindex) and fix server errors;
  • fix broken internal links and collapse redirect chains to single hops;
  • consolidate duplicates with redirects or canonicals;
  • improve titles, headings and internal links on the most important pages;
  • address major speed and mobile problems on key templates;
  • submit a clean XML sitemap.

Example: a Perth law firm's site had three versions of each practice area page (with and without trailing slashes, plus an old /services/ path), all indexed. Consolidating them with 301 redirects and updating internal links concentrated signals on one URL per topic. Within two months, the main practice area pages moved from page two to page one for several target queries, with no new content.

Phase 3: Build (ongoing)

Once the foundations are sound, growth comes from content, authority and, for local businesses, local presence.

  • Content: create and improve pages mapped to real search demand and intent, such as service pages, category pages, guides, comparison pages and tools. Prioritise topics with business value.
  • Internal linking: connect related pages so important pages are easy for people and crawlers to reach.
  • Authority: earn mentions and links through genuinely useful assets (data, tools, guides), partnerships, sponsorships, PR and industry participation, never through paid link schemes.
  • Local presence: keep Google Business Profile complete and accurate, add photos and posts, and ask every customer for an honest review (without incentives or filtering who is asked).

Phase 4: Measure and iterate (monthly and quarterly)

Report against the baseline using the KPI ladder, explain what changed and why, and adjust priorities. Search engines update their systems many times a year (Google lists major core, spam and other updates on its Search Status Dashboard), and competitors keep improving. SEO is ongoing maintenance as much as a project.

A simple cadence:

  • Monthly: work completed, KPI movement, issues found, next month's priorities.
  • Quarterly: deeper review of strategy, content performance and competitor changes.
  • Annually: revisit goals, budget and the overall plan.

Special projects: migrations and redesigns

Website redesigns, platform changes (for example moving to Shopify) and domain changes are among the riskiest moments in SEO. Traffic can drop sharply if URLs change without redirects, content is removed, or the new site launches with noindex still on. A migration plan includes a full URL inventory, a one-to-one redirect map, pre-launch testing on staging (blocked from search engines), and post-launch monitoring of crawl errors, indexing and rankings. Involve SEO before the redesign is designed, not after it launches.

Myths that cause trouble

  • "We guarantee first place." No one controls rankings. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO warns against anyone who guarantees a number one ranking or claims a "special relationship" with Google.
  • "Submit your site to hundreds of search engines." Discovery happens through links and sitemaps; mass submission services add nothing.
  • "More pages always means more traffic." Thin or duplicated pages can drag down how a site is perceived and waste crawl resources.
  • "SEO is a one-off job." Gains fade as content dates and competitors improve.
  • "The meta keywords tag helps ranking." Google has ignored it for many years.
  • "Word count is a ranking factor." Pages need to be as long as is useful for the topic. Padding hurts readability.
  • "Social media likes boost rankings." Social activity can help people discover content, but likes and shares aren't a direct Google ranking factor.

Who does the work

SEO touches many skills: technical (developers), content (writers and subject experts), design and UX, analytics, PR and local marketing. Small businesses often combine an agency or consultant with in-house knowledge. Whoever does the work, the business must stay involved: answering questions, supplying expertise and examples, and approving changes quickly. Slow approvals are one of the most common reasons SEO under-delivers.

A sample first 90 days

For a mid-sized service business with an established website, a realistic first quarter might look like this:

  • Weeks 1–2: access set up, goals and baseline agreed, crawl and Search Console review completed.
  • Weeks 3–4: audit findings presented; prioritised plan agreed; quick technical fixes started.
  • Month 2: redirect and duplicate clean-up; titles, headings and internal links improved on the top 20 pages; Google Business Profile completed.
  • Month 3: first new or rebuilt priority pages published; review process for customers set up; first quarterly report against the baseline.

Each item has an owner and a due date, and the business knows what it must provide (approvals, expert input, photos, developer time).

How to tell a project is on track

  • Health issues found in the audit are being closed, not just listed.
  • Priority pages are improving in impressions and position before traffic follows.
  • Reports explain work done and its effect, including what didn't work.
  • The plan changes when evidence changes, rather than repeating the same tasks every month.

In-house, agency or both?

There is no single right model. Small businesses often hire an agency or freelancer and keep one person internally responsible for approvals and information. Larger organisations often build an in-house team and use specialists for technical audits, migrations or digital PR. Whatever the model, keep ownership of accounts and data in the business, document what changes were made and why, and make sure knowledge stays with the business if a supplier changes. A shared change log (date, page, change, reason) is a simple habit that makes later analysis much easier, especially when traffic moves and someone asks "what did we change?"

Key takeaways

  • SEO follows a cycle: discover, fix, build, measure, repeat.
  • Discovery ends with a prioritised plan, not a list of every possible issue.
  • Foundational fixes often produce the earliest gains.
  • Growth comes from content, internal links, earned authority and local presence.
  • Migrations need a redirect map and SEO involvement from the start.
  • Beware guarantees, mass submission, meta keywords and other myths.