Decided to do my own SEO — what order should I tackle things in during the first 3 months?

First things first: head straight to the "Index Coverage" or "Pages" tab in the official console. If you see pages listed as "Crawled - currently not indexed", "Redirect error", or "404", clean those up first. If search engines can't crawl your site cleanly, nothing you write is going to matter.

on wordpress don't get obsessed with turning every light green in the seo plugins. just focus on your titles and descriptions add proper alt text to your images and you're good... the rest falls into place over time.

I took the exact same approach on my own site. Spending 6-7 hours a week for 3 months, I focused purely on optimizing my existing 25 pages and posting one detailed case study to the blog each week. By the end of month four, our monthly organic unique visitors went from zero to 1,400, and we finally landed our first form submission.

Furniture photos are notoriously heavy. If you're uploading 5-10 MB raw camera shots straight into WordPress, your pages will take 8-10 seconds to load on mobile. Convert everything to WebP format and cap the max width at 1920 pixels. Improvements in page load speed feed directly into better rankings.

Whatever you do, do not buy those cheap "100 backlink packages" you see online. For a small local business, the most valuable external signals are an accurate local map listing, mentions in local business directories, and natural links from your suppliers. Artificial backlinks will only tank your site.

Can you ship products across all of Turkey, or do you only deliver and assemble within Ankara? Your geographic reach completely changes your content strategy; if you're strictly local, you need to double down on maps and district-level keywords.

My traffic finally started growing the day I stopped writing convoluted nonsense just to hit a 100 score on my SEO plugin. Write for humans; Google gets it anyway.

could you elaborate on that? like when making decisions write down the worst-case scenario too not just the best.

peoople defend habits, not processes. resistance comes from there and if you have questions write them; I'll answer as best I can.

Three different views emerged they all complement each other. When you try to change everything at once nothing settles.

If you post the result here, it will help others too.

Thanks for writing this, that's the right way. If it's your first time, start small; scaling comes later.

If it's your first time, start small; scaling comes later. I'm also curious if anyone does it differently.

The most overlooked point about how to do SEO is this: A page with low traffic might be reaching the right people. Look at where sales come from.

Thanks for posting. Ranking is the result search intent is the input. Look at intent first.

If you have questions, write them; I'll answer as best I can.

we experienced almost the exact same thing last year... mistakes made on the how to do SEO side are usually reversible but expensive.

Thanks, this was very helpful. Any comment made without a control group is just a guess.

If you have questions, write them; I'll answer as best I can.

Absolutely. If I were to add anything: Solutions that work at a small scale collapse when you grow; I learned this late.

Mistakes made on the how to do SEO side are usually reversible but expensive. Just leaving this note, it might be useful.

I disagree with you on this point. A page that answers one question works better than one touching on five topics.

There is something to watch out for. Most time waste accumulates in tasks waiting for approval.

If you post the result here, it will help others too.

I'm writing this so you don't make the same mistake. Everyone rushing into how to do SEO gets stuck at the same point.

This is my opinion I'm not claiming it's absolute truth.