For businesses whose site went live in the last few months
A new site starts with nothing behind it, so the order the work happens in decides how long the quiet part lasts.
A report on your own site, showing what to do first and in what order while the site is still new.
By Reece Rainer
spareday, Newcastle NSW
Last updated
13 September 2026
Read time
2 minutes
Since it went live my phone hasn’t stopped ringing.
He created a stunning website for us that captures and nurtures leads with an automated email marketing system, which has filled a huge gap in the business and saved a lot of time (and money!).
Reece has been generous, reliable and knowledgeable in creating an online presence for our sporting club. He is good to work with and has good technical abilities.
SEO for a brand new website is a different job to SEO for an old one, because a new site has nothing behind it yet. No visitors, nobody linking to it, and no history with Google.
That is not a problem to be fixed quickly. It is the reason the order of the work matters more here than anywhere else.
It can rank for its own business name almost straight away, and for narrow searches that hardly anybody is competing over. The broad money terms take months, and nothing shortens that.
Google has no evidence about a new site yet. Older sites in the same market have years of visits, reviews and other businesses referring to them. That evidence is what a broad search result is built on.
Narrow searches are the way in. Somebody typing a specific job in a specific suburb is a search almost nobody has written a page for, and a new site wins those in weeks.
The free Google listing, not the website. It shows a new business on the map long before the site ranks for anything, and it costs nothing to set up.
A listing carries the name, the hours, the photographs and the reviews, and it can appear on the map within days of being verified. The site is what somebody reads after they tap it.
Reviews do the same job twice. They move the listing. They are also what a first-time customer reads before ringing a business nobody has mentioned to them.
Changing the address of a page after it has been published, and buying links to hurry the process along. Both set a new site back further than doing nothing.
Page addresses are the first one. Every time a page moves, Google starts again on it, and a new site has no credit to spend on starting again. Settle the structure before launch and then leave it.
Bought links are the second. A site with no history and a sudden pile of links pointing at it is the clearest possible signal that somebody paid for them. Undoing that takes longer than the wait it was meant to avoid.
A new site is quiet for a while whatever anybody does. The businesses that come out of it fastest are the ones that spent the quiet months on the listing, the reviews and the pages, rather than waiting to see what happened.
Related reading from us: the four things that actually decide it.
Its own name, within weeks. Narrow searches with little competition, a couple of months. The broad terms an established competitor holds take a good deal longer.
Ads bring enquiries while the site is still invisible, and the listing work happens underneath at the same time. Plenty of new businesses run both.
Yes, and for a new business it does more. The listing can appear on the map within days, while the site is still waiting to be trusted.
Pages about the jobs you are paid for come first. A post about how something works reaches somebody who is reading rather than buying.
One monthly fee covering everything, month to month, with no lock-in contract. What it comes to depends on the business, so the number gets given on the call.