Your guide to the first 90 days in a new SEO job
- Debbie Chew
- Jul 14
- 10 min read
Updated: Jul 28
Author: Debbie Chew
First off, congrats! You aced your interview and landed an offer. Your experience is what got you the new gig, but this is just the beginning of the journey. Knowing what to focus on during your first three months is crucial to success in your new role, especially now that SEO is in the midst of an overhaul. New SEO hires are now being looked at from a different lens in the age of conversational search.
Although this guide will be written for someone starting a new in-house role, most of the concepts mentioned are relevant to SEOs experiencing leadership or organizational changes, joining a new agency, or consultants taking on a new client. Or, if your responsibilities are shifting because of LLMs, this guide can help you approach your “newly updated” role.
The general framework discussed in this post is based on the book The First 90 Days by Michael Watkins, a professor and advisor experienced in leadership development, but I revised it through the lens of an SEO practitioner. If you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend reading it as a supplement to this post.
Before your start date
During your interview process, you should have come away with a general sense of the company’s needs, the level of buy-in for SEO, what your responsibilities will be, and how your role is expected to contribute to the company’s goals. Most importantly, how will your success be measured? This needs to be clear, as your first 30-60 days will be exploring the “how.”
If some (or all) of these are fuzzy, that’s totally fine! Once you start having conversations with your new colleagues, you may find out that certain aspects of the company or role are different from your initial impression, so don’t worry, and be open to adjusting your expectations.
Your first 90 days in a new SEO job
Instead of talking about your first 90 days as a whole, I’ll break it down into 30-day chunks. The table below is an overview of what I’ll cover in the remainder of the post:
Day 1-30 | Days 31-60 | Days 61-90 | |
Theme | Observe and absorb | Prioritize | Execute and share |
Priorities |
|
|
|
Feel free to jump forward to the timeframe most relevant to you:
Your first month: observe and absorb
Your first week will likely be filled with loads of HR paperwork, trying to remember everyone’s names, and back-to-back onboarding sessions. Now that you’re getting the insider’s perspective on your new company, it’s time to listen and start taking notes.
First, you’ll want to understand the company at three altitudes—bird’s eye view, street view, worm’s eye view—and in that order.
The bird’s eye view of the company is to learn and understand the product (what’s being sold) and its users (who’s buying). Understanding the products and users helps you build a user journey map and evaluate the existing gaps on the website, which will later inform your SEO strategy.
Street view is about figuring out how the company operates (how things get done). Why are certain roads curved when they could have been straight?
You’ll need context to do this, which you typically will get from your manager and cross-functional partners. Knowing how to navigate these streets is crucial to being able to execute your plan, so we’ll focus on what these conversations should cover in the next two sections.
Lastly is the worm’s eye view. Given the learnings from the first two views, you can then focus on figuring out the details of your SEO strategy and what direction you’ll start inching towards. Make sure you’re tying things back to the company and team’s goals, utilizing the context you have from the bird’s eye and street view. This includes considering how your team is resourced and if you have the tools you need.
Keep in mind that one of the biggest mistakes you can make is to assume you can just copy and paste your last SEO playbook.
For example, the CMS the team is using may be different from what you’ve used before. Or, SEO sits in the marketing org when in your previous role, SEO was in product. These factors can completely overthrow your previous playbook, so approach it as if you’re building a custom playbook for the nuances of your new company.
This is even more true now that the SEO industry is rethinking which KPIs we should focus on due to the impact of LLMs on organic traffic and user behavior.
One-on-ones with your manager
Although you probably have had one-on-ones with a manager before, the ones you have in the first 90 days of your new role should look different from a manager you’ve built rapport with.
If your new manager hasn’t already set expectations on one-on-ones, such as frequency and how they should be structured, and how what you’ll typically discuss (compared to other forms of communication), you can initiate the conversation so that you both are aligned.
After you’ve established the basics, work on making sure that your KPIs (key performance indicators) are clear and how they ladder up to the greater company’s goals.
Toward the end of your first month, once you’ve become more familiar with the company’s products, discuss ideas you have for “small wins” and build momentum for bigger wins. A small win could be as simple as removing a noindex tag on a key page.
For future one-on-ones, I’d recommend quarterly check-ins to get feedback from your manager. This is a good time to discuss what’s working, what’s not working, and how you’re tracking toward your goals.
One-on-ones with cross-functional partners
Aside from regularly meeting with your manager, your first month should be focused on having one-on-ones with folks in adjacent teams. Discuss with your manager to get a list of key partners within areas like content, engineering, demand generation, and growth. You should also find time to meet with your skip-level (your manager’s manager).
Going back to the analogy earlier, these meetings help inform your “street view” of the company. You want to come out of those meetings with a better understanding of processes, pain points, and constraints throughout the different teams and levels within the organization.
As you have these conversations, another crucial area to focus on is learning how to get buy-in within the company. Chances are, part of your responsibilities will include proposing SEO initiatives. You’ll want to identify who are the key decision makers and how to convince them. Be sure to observe and learn from individuals who are good at getting their ideas above the line.
As you have meetings with the above groups, you should get a sense of the communication style as this is also an important aspect of being able to convince others about your idea. Communication styles can be broken down into different dimensions, such as:
Async vs. sync
Written vs. verbal
Memo vs. presentations
Story-oriented vs. factual
Remember that what your immediate team prefers can be different from what the greater marketing or product team prefers. At large enterprises, what the executive leadership team prefers can also be completely different.
Getting the full picture
No matter if you’re meeting with your manager or cross-functional partners, what I’ve found most helpful is to anchor your questions to help you understand these three areas:
What’s the past/present/future state of SEO look like at this company?
How do things get prioritized and worked on?
Are there any constraints or (potential) reasons for pushback?
Another framework that I find really helpful is to understand the SEO maturity of the company. I recommend using the framework and free template that Petra created to help you identify where your company sits in the Organizational Maturity Graph (OMG for SEO).
Your second month: prioritize
Since you’ve done a lot of the groundwork, your strategy should be coming together. As you take stock of the aspirations that people have for SEO and start making progress, it’s important to avoid spreading yourself too thin. This means staying away from shiny object syndrome and focusing on the wrong things. That’s why the main theme for your second month is prioritization.
To do this, it’s helpful to first diagnose the company against Watkins’ STARS framework.
The STARS framework
STARS stand for the five different scenarios that companies (or teams) can be grouped into based on the current state of the affairs:
Startup
You’re at a company that has never had an SEO hire. Your focus areas should include aligning with leadership on what SEO is at a high level, forecasting the TAM (total addressable market) for SEO, advocating for headcount, and mapping out the IA (information architecture) of the site for future-proofing.
Turnaround
The company’s organic traffic has been declining. You’ll need to figure out what happened and why, which may be through conducting a technical SEO audit, investigating if content needs to be pruned, or auditing backlinks to reverse a penalty.
Accelerated growth
The SEO program has had some notable wins and are beginning to expand their team and reach. This could mean investing resources into running tests to improve visibility and citations or improvement sentiment for your brand in AI search. It could also mean leaning into areas like international SEO and programmatic SEO to build on a solid foundation of the existing website.
Realignment
Right now, many companies or teams may find themselves at this stage. Since SEOs are seeing organic traffic plateau or decline across different industries, it’s important to realign expectations with stakeholders to build a path forward. This means reevaluating key levers that have historically performed well. Focuses include talking to customers to understand how they’re now searching for your product or service, adjusting existing SEO processes such as content optimization, cross-team collaboration, and revisiting KPIs.
Sustaining success
You’ve joined a SEO team that has a strong track record of success in organic search. At this point, the focus is on scaling the team, operationalizing processes and automation (probably with AI), and taking on riskier SEO projects. Think: “high risk, high reward” experiments.
Review each of them to identify which scenario best matches the situation your new company is in. This helps align your priorities with the most urgent needs.
Building out your roadmap
Now that you understand the product/service, the team, its resourcing (or maybe even lack thereof), and other constraints you need to work with, it’s time to start creating a sketch of your roadmap. At this point, you can audit the site as you normally would.
Start categorizing what you should focus on in the next few weeks vs. months vs. quarters. Though tempting, don’t try to do everything immediately, because small things can add up. This can detract from the bigger picture, and may not contribute directly to your KPIs.
And as you follow through with what was discussed in those 1:1s with either your manager or cross-functional partners, make sure to mention this to them to help build rapport. It might sound like this: “Remember when you mentioned that we should document our SEO QA process? I’ve started one and wanted to get your feedback.”
Your third month: execute and share
Regardless of whether or not you’re a people manager, it’s important to recognize the importance of managing up and across. Managing upward means aligning on expectations with your manager (and those above your manager in the company hierarchy) about your short and long-term priorities. Managing across is to do something similar but for cross-functional partners, with a focus on collaborating on projects and making sure everyone is on the same page.
Managing up
At the three-month mark, you should have a few small wins you’ve completed that you can share with your manager while highlighting the impact of that work. Discuss what types of wins are worth sharing broadly with the team and what the best format is. This helps maximize the visibility of your work as well as the contributions of the SEO team.
As you become more seasoned, it’s helpful to understand:
When you should ask your manager something versus when to figure it out yourself
The key priorities you need to focus on now versus later
Managing across
Managing across can be tough due to different processes and varying goals. The larger the organization, the more difficult this becomes. This was something I had to quickly learn about enterprise SEO: bigger companies mean bigger budgets but with higher complexity.
And when resources are tight, competing goals can slow down progress. Be careful about trying to please every stakeholder and keep in mind that every decision has tradeoffs. Therefore, it’s important to choose your battles and manage your energy wisely. Let’s say you’re creating category pages for the blog and the team is adamant on certain nomenclature for the URL slug that might be a bit long or unnecessary from an SEO point of view. If the decision isn’t going to have a significant impact on SEO performance, and if there are other more important issues to align on, then you’ll need to decide if this is something worth sliding on despite best practices.
What I’ve found helpful is to carve out time to reflect and seek feedback after a project is completed. The “start, stop, continue” framework is really useful to help you do this: what should you start/stop/continue to do? Reflect on the answers to these questions yourself, then get feedback from your manager, colleagues you’ve collaborated with, and any other relevant stakeholders to get a thorough retrospective. Then, take these learnings and apply them to your future projects.
Planning your next 90 days
As you reach your first 90 days, it’s time to start planning out your next 90 days. Continue to have one-on-ones with your manager (ideally weekly). For cross-functional partners, mutually agree about meeting on a monthly, quarterly, or ad hoc basis.
When you’re in the weeds of executing on SEO projects, it may be easy to lose sight of the bigger picture. Every quarter or half, add a reminder on your calendar to reflect on the following areas:
What seeds do you need to sow today so that your initiative will be in a mature state a few months from now so that you can execute on it then?
What are key initiatives that will move the needle in a way that aligns with your success metrics?
What projects do you need to say “no” to? What are the tradeoffs? How will you communicate this?
Do you need to reevaluate where the company falls in the STARS framework? How does this affect your KPIs?
Thriving in your new role
Your first 90 days sets the stage for how you and your work is perceived at the company. Focus your time on observing in the first month, prioritizing in the second month, and then executing (as well as iterating and planning) in the last month and beyond.
Although this isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, having some structure can guide you and help reduce feelings of overwhelm when you start a new role. The first 90 days aren't about surviving or proving yourself, it’s about learning the ropes to thrive in your role and make an impact.
Debbie Chew is an SEO manager at Stripe and an organic growth consultant with over 10 years of experience in digital marketing. She specializes in content and link building, and she's passionate about sharing her learnings with other marketers.
