The first 90 days of SEO, and what the numbers will look like
You cannot tell whether your first three months are going badly or going exactly as they should.
Days 1 to 30: instrument, then build
Analytics installed in week six cannot explain week one. Get Search Console, a second engine and behavioural analytics running before there is anything to measure, then ship entry points. Expect double-digit clicks and do not read anything into them.
Days 31 to 60: keep shipping, start the slow channel
Volume of entry points is what compounds. Simultaneously begin the work that takes months to pay: directory listings, profiles, anything that makes you a known entity. It will feel unproductive because it is invisible for a quarter.
Days 61 to 90: read patterns, not totals
You now have enough data to see which page types work, and none to see which individual pages will win. Judge templates, not pages. This site's first quarter ended at roughly 1,500 clicks a month, about a tenth of where it was five months later.
Days 1 to 30: make one page that deserves to rank
Not ten pages. One, aimed at a query you have actually seen a human ask, answering it more completely than anything currently on page one. Get it indexed, get it linked from your homepage, and confirm in Search Console that it is collecting impressions. If one page cannot get impressions, ten will not either, and you will have wasted the month finding that out expensively.
Days 31 to 90: publish, measure, cut
Add pages in small batches and check each batch against the previous one before shipping the next. The number you are watching is impressions per new page. When it falls, stop adding and fix what is there. This site ended with 160 pages of which 93 of 160 earned under 10 clicks, which is the cost of learning this lesson slowly.
Measured, not asserted
First three months here: 31 clicks, 346, 1,131. The fourth was 2,052 and the eighth was 16,410. Nothing in the first quarter identified which pages would carry the site.
Free tool for this: Search Console Analyzer. No account, nothing uploaded.
Where this goes deeper
Every number on this page comes from one complete dataset: one product taken from zero to 100K+ users on search alone, with nothing spent on advertising. The full argument is Chapter 2 of the book. Five chapters are free to read.