How to Create an SEO Strategy: A 90-Day Plan
The short answer
To create an SEO strategy, start from how your business earns money. Write down what you sell and who buys it, list the searches those buyers make, and check which of them your website already wins. Then rank the possible work by what it could bring in, and commit to the top of the list for 90 days.
Key takeaways
- An SEO strategy is a short written decision about which searches you will go after, with which pages, in what order.
- Start from what you sell and who buys it. A keyword list is an input, not a strategy.
- Score every possible job by what it could bring the business and how much work it takes, then do the top few.
- Plan in 90-day blocks, because Google says some changes show within hours and others take several months.
- Agree how enquiries and sales from search will be counted before the work starts.
In this guide
This guide shows owners and marketing leads how to create an SEO strategy, or how to judge one an agency hands them. It walks through six steps, a one-page template and a 90-day plan, using Google's free tools and Google's own guidance. If you would like the plan built for you, see our SEO strategy service.
What is an SEO strategy?
An SEO strategy is a written decision about which searches your business will try to win, which pages will win them and in what order the work gets done. It fits on a page or two. A list of 200 website errors is not a strategy, and neither is a spreadsheet of keywords. Both are inputs.
SEO (search engine optimization) is the work of helping search engines understand your pages and helping people find and choose them. Google's own starter guide says there are no secrets that will automatically rank a site first. So a strategy is not a trick. It is a choice about where to spend limited hours.
How to create an SEO strategy in six steps
Work through the steps in order. The first three collect facts. The last three turn the facts into decisions.
Six steps to a written strategy
- Write down how search should earn you money
List what you sell, which lines earn the most and what a new customer is worth. Then name the action you want from a search visitor: a call, a booking, a quote request or an order. Example: a roofing company earns most from full roof replacements, so replacement enquiries are the goal, not visits to its blog.
- List the searches your buyers make
For each thing you sell, write the words a customer would type. Google's advice is to think about the words a user might search for, and it notes that people who know a subject well use different words from people new to it. Add the questions customers ask on the phone. Our guide on how to do keyword research shows how to pick the ones worth a page.
- Record where you stand today
Open the Performance report in Google Search Console, a free Google service. It shows how often your site appeared in search (impressions) and how often people clicked, for the past three months by default. Note the totals, and the searches and pages that bring the most clicks. If Search Console is not set up yet, do that first.
- Match each search to one page
Put the searches from step two next to the pages you have. Each important search should have one page that answers it. Where two pages chase the same search, pick one. Where no page does, that is a page to build. What search intent is explains how to tell what kind of page a search calls for.
- Score the work and put it in order
List every possible job: pages to fix, pages to write, technical problems, reviews and mentions to earn. Give each one two scores from one to three, for what it could bring the business and for how much work it takes. High value and low effort goes first. The scoring is our method, not a Google rule. Its job is to make everyone argue about value before the work starts.
- Agree how you will count results
Decide which calls, forms and orders count, and who records them, before the work begins. Otherwise the first report will be about rankings, because nothing else was measured. How to know if SEO is working lists the numbers to watch.
An SEO strategy template you can copy
A working strategy has six parts and fits on one page. The example column is made up, for a dental clinic with one location.
| Part | What to write | Example: a dental clinic |
|---|---|---|
| Goal | The action you want from search visitors | More booked consultations for implants and whitening |
| Customers and searches | Who buys, and the ten to twenty searches they make before buying | Adults in the town searching for dental implants, teeth whitening and an emergency dentist |
| Where you stand | Clicks, impressions and top searches from Search Console, and the pages that bring enquiries today | Most clicks come from the clinic's name, few from treatment searches |
| Page plan | One page for each important search: keep, fix or build | Fix the implants page. Build a whitening page and an emergency page |
| Order of work | The jobs for the next 90 days, scored by value and effort | Treatment pages first, Business Profile and reviews second, blog later |
| Measures and review date | What counts as an enquiry, who records it and when the plan is reviewed | Booked consultations by source, counted monthly, reviewed at day 90 |
For a longer worked example, see our sample 90-day search growth roadmap.
What does a 90-day SEO plan look like?
Ninety days is long enough to finish real work and short enough to change course. A typical first plan fixes what you have in month one, builds what is missing in month two and earns attention in month three.
| Month | Main work | What you can check |
|---|---|---|
| Month 1 | Fix the pages that already sell: clear titles, one page for each service, a clear next step. Remove anything that stops Google reading the site. | The changes are live on your website |
| Month 2 | Build the missing pages from the page plan, starting with the searches closest to a sale. | The new pages exist, and whether Google has indexed them |
| Month 3 | Earn reviews and mentions, answer the questions buyers ask, and link the new pages together. | Impressions and clicks against your starting numbers |
Google's SEO Starter Guide says some changes might take effect in a few hours and others could take several months. That is why the plan checks completed work in the first weeks and results later.
Source1Google Search Central
Day 90 is a checkpoint, not a finish line. How long SEO takes sets out what to expect after it.
How does an SEO plan for a small business differ?
It is shorter, and one person can carry it out. A small local business competes with a handful of nearby companies for a short list of searches, so the six steps still apply, but you list ten searches instead of a hundred.
Google says that if you run a small local business you can probably do much of the work yourself. Our plan for doing SEO yourself covers the first three months with free Google tools.
What should you leave out of an SEO strategy?
Leave out anything Google says does not matter, and anything that breaks its rules. Four items turn up in plans again and again.
- Word-count targets. Google says it has no preferred word count.
- The keywords meta tag. Google Search does not use it.
- Bought links. Google lists buying or selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, and sites that break its spam policies may rank lower or not appear at all.
- A promised position. Google says no one can guarantee a number one ranking, so a plan built on one is built on a guess.
When should you review the strategy?
Review it every 90 days, and sooner if something big changes: a new service, a new competitor, a redesign or a sudden drop in visits. At each review, compare the numbers with your starting point, take finished jobs off the list and score what is left again.
Put any planned rebuild into the strategy before it starts. Google says a great time to bring in SEO help is when you are considering a redesign, the earlier the better.
Taskcover works this way too: discovery and an audit in the first two weeks, the written plan by week three, then 90-day sprints with a reset every quarter. Plans start from $2,500 a month, and the pricing page lists each one.
Related serviceAn SEO strategy built around what brings you customers
A 90-day plan and a 12-month view, a map of what your buyers search for and an agreed way to count enquiries and sales.
See the serviceOur services for this
Questions people ask about SEO strategy
How long does it take to write an SEO strategy?
A small business can draft one in a few days with the six steps above. At Taskcover, discovery, the audit and the written plan take about three weeks, and the first 90-day sprint starts in month one.
Do I need an SEO audit before a strategy?
Yes, in some form. Step three is a small audit: it records where you stand, so the plan starts from facts. A large or older website needs a fuller check first. What an SEO audit is explains what one should include.
How much does an SEO strategy cost?
It depends on the size of the site and the market. As one reference, Taskcover's Search Growth Audit, a one-time review that ends in a priority roadmap, starts from $1,500. Ongoing strategy starts from $2,500 a month on the National SEO Foundation plan. Every plan is on the pricing page.
Does an SEO strategy need a separate plan for AI search?
No. Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and that the best practices for SEO remain relevant. Plan for clear facts and pages worth quoting as part of the same strategy.
Who should own the SEO strategy?
One named person inside the business, even when an agency does the work. Google says a site owner is ultimately responsible for the actions of any company it hires. That person approves the order of work and sees the numbers every month.
See what a plan for your business would look like
Send us your website and we will show you where you stand and what we would do first, at no cost.
The authors
Who wrote and checked this guide
Written by
Jamiez Nguyen
Founder & CEO
Jamiez Nguyen founded Taskcover and leads strategy and client growth. He started it in 2017 as a team doing search work behind the scenes for other agencies, then opened it to businesses in the USA, Canada and Australia.
Reviewed by
John Edward
CTO
John Edward leads the technical side of Taskcover: how sites are built, how fast they load, and how search engines read them.
Updated Fact-checked About the people at Taskcover
Sources
Where the facts in this guide come from
Facts last checked on October 12, 2026.
- 1Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter GuideGoogle Search CentralChecked on October 12, 2026
- 2Do you need an SEO?Google Search CentralChecked on October 12, 2026
- 3About Search ConsoleGoogle Search Console HelpChecked on October 12, 2026
- 4Performance report (Search results): Overview and basic setupGoogle Search Console HelpChecked on October 12, 2026
- 5Creating helpful, reliable, people-first contentGoogle Search CentralChecked on October 12, 2026
- 6Spam policies for Google web searchGoogle Search CentralChecked on October 12, 2026
- 7AI features and your websiteGoogle Search CentralChecked on October 12, 2026
