Your first 30 days, day by day

You've seen every part of SEODojo on a real site. This lesson puts it in order, as a plan for your own site, about 30 to 60 minutes a day.

It's the plan we're following with ieltsbandlift.com. We'll be honest about one thing: for this course we did most of the first two weeks in one very long day, to get the screenshots. Don't do that. The plan below spreads the work out, and leaves time for the parts that can't be rushed: reading drafts properly, and waiting for Google and AI engines to notice.

Before day 1: your scorecard

Write these down. You'll fill in the same table on day 30.

Week 1: Set up and look honestly (days 1–7)

Day 1: Set up. Connect Search Console, pull your data, crawl your sitemap, and fill in your brand card (lesson 1.4). Fill in the "day 1" column of your scorecard.

Day 2: Check the basics AI needs. Read your robots.txt and make sure answering and search bots aren't blocked. Generate an llms.txt (lesson 5.3). If you're on Cloudflare, connect AI crawlers (lesson 5.4) and check the verified percentage before believing any number.

Day 3: Find the questions. Suggest prompts, add a few in your customers' own words, and keep the 5 that a good answer could include you in (lesson 2.5). Add 3 competitors.

Day 4: Measure AI visibility. Track those 5 prompts weekly (lesson 7.1), or check them by hand on Free. Write down the baseline, even if it's zero. Ours was.

Day 5: Keyword research. Set the market to where your customers are, run one broad search and a few specific lookups, and shortlist 3–5 keywords you can rank for, that want what you offer (lesson 2.1).

Day 6: Competitors. Research one competitor and run a keyword gap (lesson 2.3). Add the good, easy, nearby keywords to your shortlist.

Day 7: Plan the month. Build a content plan for your main topic, split clusters by intent (lesson 2.4), and pick four articles for the month: one per week.

Week 2: Write the first article properly (days 8–14)

Day 8: Read page one for article 1 and write the four-line brief, ending with what you'll add that page one doesn't have (lesson 2.2).

Day 9: Draft. Generate the full draft (lesson 3.2).

Day 10: Check it. Run the fact check and the originality check, and look for clichés with the Humanizer. Then do your own five-minute read for precise-sounding claims nobody can source (lesson 3.4). Ours had three.

Day 11: Make it yours. Rewrite the opening to answer first, add lists and a short FAQ (lesson 3.3), and add the one thing only you could write.

Day 12: Connect your CMS and test it (lesson 4.1).

Day 13: Review and publish. Title under 60 characters, a real meta description, every paragraph read (lesson 4.2). Publish article 1.

Day 14: Fix what's already there. Audit your best existing page (lesson 5.1) and fix its biggest gap. Old pages with impressions often move faster than new ones.

Week 3: Get found (days 15–21)

Day 15: Internal links. Pick one hub page and link it to the orphans that matter. Link article 1 to and from related pages (lesson 5.2).

Day 16: Sources. Open Sources, sort the cited sites into three piles, and pick 3–5 list articles to pitch (lesson 7.2).

Day 17: Outreach. Draft emails for the best prospects, rewrite each one so it's about their page, and send them yourself (lesson 6.4). Ten good ones beat fifty generic ones.

Day 18: Answer one real thread on Reddit or Quora where your customers compare options, as yourself.

Day 19: Track rankings for article 1 and your audited page, in the right market (lesson 6.1).

Day 20: Article 2. Brief, draft, check and edit, the same as week 2, in one sitting now that you know the routine.

Day 21: Publish article 2. Turn on Autopilot for articles 3 and 4 on review if you're on Pro (lesson 4.3), or keep writing them by hand.

Week 4: Make it a habit (days 22–30)

Day 22: Your pricing page. State every plan, price and limit in plain sentences, and add a short FAQ (lesson 7.3).

Day 23: Reports. Turn on the weekly digest and alerts (lesson 7.6). From now on, let them tell you when to look.

Day 24: Watch a competitor monthly (lesson 6.5).

Days 25–27: Articles 3 and 4. Review and publish them, whether you wrote them or Autopilot did. Read every paragraph either way.

Day 28: Follow up on outreach emails that got no reply. One polite follow-up, then stop.

Day 29: Close the loop. Check Citation Trend for the prompts your articles target (lesson 7.5). Don't rewrite anything yet: engines need weeks, not days.

Day 30: Fill in your scorecard. Same five rows, same way you measured them on day 1.

What to expect on day 30

Be realistic. Thirty days is enough to fix your site's basics, publish four good articles, get onto a few pages engines read, and start the measurements. It's usually not enough to see big changes in Google clicks or AI mentions. Those tend to show up in months two and three, as pages get crawled, indexed and linked.

So on day 30, look for leading signs: your first verified AI crawler visits to real pages, a tracked keyword appearing in the top 100, an outreach reply, an Audit score that went from 42 to 80. Those are the things that come before the traffic.

Then what?

Repeat weeks 3 and 4, every month: four articles, one round of outreach, one old page improved, one look at your sources. That's the whole job. The sites that win are rarely the ones that did something clever once. They're the ones that kept doing the basics every month.

Done when

• Your day-1 scorecard is filled in
• Your four articles for the month are chosen
• You've put the 30 days in your calendar, 30–60 minutes a day
• On day 30, you've filled in the same scorecard again and decided what next month looks like