Whether you're redoing your website or you're starting a new domain from scratch, here's your complete 90day organic search marketing plan for a new website. And yes, that includes both Google and AI search. We're going to cover a lot of ground here, so if you want to jump to a specific section, be sure to use the chapter markers below. We'll start by setting up all the tools and tracking we need to start capturing important search data. Google Search Console is the very first thing I'd recommend setting up. Just search Google Search Console in Google, click add property, and follow the onscreen instructions, which may require you to add some DNS records. This is light work for your web master, but may take a few hours or days to authenticate. And by the way, if you want to go deeper, we just published a super in-depth guide to get the most out of Google Search Console. We'll leave the link in the description or the info card. Now, if you're a Positive Surfer customer, you can add your site to surfer sites through your Google Search Console account and immediately start seeing realtime performance data in your dashboard. This will also make content creation much easier down the line. Now, if you're not yet a Surfer customer, no worries. The rest of this video will absolutely be applicable to you. And I'd also set up Bing Webmaster Tools, which has some really handy tools like AI citation reporting, some light keyword research tools, and even the ability to analyze competitor backlinks, a feature missing even from Google Search Console. After that, we need to set up some sort of tracking system that shows how our organic search channel is performing compared to the rest of our marketing efforts and what our visitors do when they actually land on our site. The industry standard is Google Analytics 4, which works just fine. So, I'm taking you down into the weeds with all these tool installations, but now we're going to zoom way out to a 30,000 ft view to analyze our strategy because this will dictate everything we do moving forward. The most popular service I sell to clients is a brand visibility blueprint where I analyze the current state of their company's online presence and give them a clear step-by-step path on what to do to succeed in organic search. One deliverable I've recently added to that and I recommend everyone doing whether you're starting a new website or not is a comprehensive customer journey map. This is much more detailed than your typical top, middle, and bottom marketing funnel. The goal here is to be extremely specific at every stage of your customer journey, all the way from complete ignorance of the problem to a purchasing customer, potentially even a repeat customer. This is something that's much easier to demonstrate with an example and also an excellent use case for AI tools. So, let's start with an example. Bonsai is an all-in-one business management platform that helps professional service firms manage clients, contracts, time tracking, invoicing, and payments. Let me show you how easy it is to build a customer journey for Bonsai and for your business as well. I've put a copy and paste version of this prompt in the description. You give it the basic details of your business and it works backward from your final conversion to map the decisions that lead someone there. The output shows what your customer is trying to accomplish, what information they need, what might stop them, what they do next, and the kinds of things they may search at each stage. It also scrapes the web for real customer language, which is much better than just AI generated assumptions. Now, there's always a chance AI could be way off with your brand's customer journey, but I've tested this a couple times, and honestly, I'm continuously impressed with the output it gives. Even if it's only 80% of the way there, it's a really great starting point. For Bonsai, it searched the web for real user language and broke down the customer journey into nine distinct phases. And as a Bonsai customer myself, I can tell you this is very similar to my own Bonsai buying journey. For each phase, we also have some keyword ideas which will come in handy later when we start validating keywords and creating content. From here, you can go back and forth with the AI until you've arrived at a customer journey that reflects your brand's reality. Again, whether you use AI or not, I think this is a really important exercise in the new era of search. So, don't skip it. And so, you might think our next step is keyword research, but it's actually not because there are a few pages we know that we'll want regardless of keyword research trends. Those are our core money pages. Core money pages are pages that are explicitly designed to drive conversions and they're non-negotiables for your brand. In fact, they're so important that if you were to omit them from your site, they would obscure a massive part of whatever product or service you're selling. You're obviously going to have to have pages that talk about your solutions and use cases and target audiences regardless of what the keyword volume says, right? So, we might as well knock those out first. your core money pages. Plus, in the same way you wouldn't build a house without laying a strong foundation, we don't want to just start flailing around and writing content about whatever we want until we button up the pages that, you know, make us money. In my experience as a search marketing professional, I've encountered several different categories of money pages. Let me show you with some examples. Now, a great brand example that I like to use, and I know I've mentioned them a couple times on this channel, is Transcend. Transcend is a digital privacy platform, but I think it's just a really great example for software companies. So, if we look at their site, we can see how they structure their core money pages. We can see if we hover over platform, we have these core money pages. Now, these are specifically targeting aspects of their software. So, AI, governance, policy engine, consent and preference management. And each of these pages is a dedicated is a page dedicated to that particular feature targeting that very specific keyword. Then if we hover over solutions, we get even more bottom offunnel core money pages. We can see that they've broken things out by team. So who they serve, IT and infrastructure, engineering and product, data and analytics. We can even see them breaking it out by use case. So what do you want to accomplish with our software? AI transformation, personalization and a audience activation, retail media networks. So you can go here and obviously each of these are targeting a very specific keyword here as well. And then you can go to company type and so basically you can see this and see like your industry and know oh this is something that's relevant to me. So AI, consumer, healthcare, fintech, media, etc. Okay, but what if you're not a software or maybe even a B2B company? What if you're a local services business? Well, you're going to structure your money pages a little bit differently. Here we have Harold Plumbing, which is a plumber here in my hometown of Orlando, Florida. And they're a great example of how a lot of local services businesses need to structure their core money pages. You can see they have individual pages targeting everything that they offer. So, plumbing services, drain cleaning, gas services, house repiping, and of course, each of these are going to be targeting a very specific keyword in a very specific location, namely whole house repiping in Central Florida or in Orlando. But another thing that they do is they target service areas. And this is important because, you know, Orlando is a very big city. There's lots of different, you know, subdivided areas of Orlando. If you're not from here, if you're not from Central Florida, we have lots of different cities in the greater Orlando area. And so, not everyone is going to be searching Orlando plumber. People could be searching Alamont Springs plumber, which is a local suburb or local city here. They could be searching Mateland plumber, Ovito plumber, and so they have a dedicated page for each of these locations, which is a really great practice for local service-based businesses. And here's another business type that may be relevant to you and again from Orlando and that's lawyers. Now the way that law firms will typically organize their core money pages is by their practice areas. So for someone searching Orlando personal injury lawyer or Orlando car accident lawyer, they have dedicated core money pages for each of those. And then last but not least, we have e-commerce. Now, as you might imagine, e-commerce core money pages are your product pages, the places where you actually sell your product. And depending on how much inventory you carry, you're often going to have a lot more core money pages than the other industries mentioned here. For example, this website, Novadrum, which is something I've been into lately, learning. You know, you probably see the instruments back here. I'm always a sucker for a cool new instrument. So, I've been looking into these steel tongue drums. So from here, all of these uh different product pages here, these are going to be your core money pages. And they can often be categorized in category pages, but the actual core money pages are going to be your products themselves. So I want to answer the objection. Isn't this kind of excessive? Why so many pages? Especially when it comes to B2B websites, why not just one solution or product page? Well, a few reasons. Firstly, your ultimate goal as an organic search marketer should be to build topical clusters around well each topic. And splitting up our topics across pages sets us up much more nicely for that. Take the AI governance page for example. In order for Transcend to build topical authority around this particular subject, they'd want to create content in all stages of the funnel that appeals to people specifically interested in AI governance, like what AI governance is and why it's important and the best AI governance platforms, etc. And each piece of content on that topic should internally link back to this money page. This is what passes backlink authority through the site and provides the best user experience for potential customers interested in this specific topic. Secondly, it'd frankly be insane and very counterproductive to try to get one solutions page to rank for all of these core keywords. If Transcend were to just mash all their product features onto one solutions page, the page would cover way too much ground. It'd be nearly impossible to target one keyword that accounts for everything, making it unnecessarily difficult for Google to categorize your page appropriately. Whereas, if everything is broken out, you can cleanly target one main keyword per page, which makes things a lot easier to optimize and a lot easier for Google to appropriately index and serve your content. The same applies to local businesses, like the plumbing example we saw earlier. Not everyone is going to search Orlando plumber. Some may have one particular plumbing need that they search for like repiping services in Orlando. A query handily answered by specific service pages. The final reason I recommend lots of bottom offunnel money pages like these is AI search. People using AI search are often very conversational and nuanced in their queries. So, you want to make sure that you're prepared with answers to anything they might ask. For example, when people search best consent and preference management platform for fintech companies in Chad GPT, Transcend often shows up first. This is undoubtedly helped by the fact that Transcend has both a consent and preference management features page plus a specific page just for how their product serves the fintech industry. They're covering all angles of this question. It's really a matter of asking yourself, can this page target one idea, one person, one use case, or one solution? Essentially, one entity. If it targets more than one, it likely needs to be broken up into its own page. Anyway, I know that's long-winded, but I hope I've convinced you as to why these bottomunnel pages are so important because they really, really are, especially in this new age of AI search. Now, once you've got a plan for your money pages, it's time to actually build them out. And this is where Surfer comes in. Okay, so I'll start by clicking create content. Then I'm going to select my target keyword. So, let's say I'm building a money page for Bonsai's time tracking feature. I'll type in the target keyword time, not Tim, time tracking software, and then click create. And immediately, Surfer is doing deep research from AI search sources, basically scraping all of these AI sources in real time, which is awesome, as well as gathering the live results from the Google SER to give us the best possible data. Surfer's template feature allows you to choose what kind of page you're creating, including a blog post, a landing page, a comparison page, or a service page. You can even turn your best performing pages into templates, which is super handy for money pages that often share very similar content and layout attributes. I'm going to go ahead and select based so that we make sure we're gathering everything from the search results into the content editor here. Now, from the content editor, the first thing we'll want to do is make sure that we're pulling in the correct competitors because timetracking software is technically a mixed, meaning it's bringing in someformational content like listicles as well as some commercial content like core money pages, which is what we're after. So, we want to make sure we uncheck everything that's not relevant. I can click this cog wheel here, and so I can see here that this is a listicle. We don't want that. This is a product page. We do want that because that's what we're competing with. Again, toggle one of our main competitors in this hypothetical scenario. So, we'd want to check that. Uncheck the Zapier listical. Uncheck the PayO app listical. We do want time track. We don't want that. And we do want that and we don't want that. So, see what I've done here is I've basically unchecked everything that isn't relevant to us. A very important step. Otherwise, you could be getting some skewed data as you write your content. Now, after that, the first place I'm going to go for inspiration is on other comparable competitor sites that are targeting the same keyword. I can do that by clicking this, seeing research and create outline, and I can look at what Clockify, Toggle Track, all of my competitors are writing about on their core money page for this particular feature. Now, these are actually homepages, which makes things a little interesting because it's not a onetoone match, right? because this is a featured page, a features page that I'm writing for, whereas my competitors here, these are the homepages. So, I'm going to have to take things that are relevant and leave things that aren't. Now, from here, what I'm going to want to do is insert an outline based on what I know I want to cover on this page and then write naturally and try as much as I can to inject as many of these key entities as possible. These are things that surfer through its crawling of the live results on the SER has gleaned from Google that this is what they want to see when you type in timetracking software. These are the kind of results that users want to see and therefore Google's Google is uh incentivized to promote and show to those users. So writing the outline including the entities and then of course you have your AI search info to cover. This is essential information that AI tools are looking for in their web retrieval based on surfers data that you'll want to include as well. We did an entire video on how to take a piece of content all the way from an idea to a completed piece. We'll definitely put that in the info card or leave that in the description. Now, you may be thinking, "But Matt, you're talking so much about onpage SEO. Like, we have technical SEO and off-site authority building. There's more than just onpage SEO here." And I totally agree. Trust me. I'll get to that last one in a minute. But let me talk a little bit about technical SEO. When it comes to technical SEO, I always find it to be more effective to have it in mind as you're designing or building your site, not as an afterthought or a retroactive series of tasks. That means as you're building out your page, checking with Google Search Console to make sure it's indexable, that it's loading quickly, there aren't any broken links or links to unsecure pages, all images are served up in a webfriendly format like webp if possible, and non-decorative images have descriptive alt tags for accessibility. Now, I know my technical SEO friends, please don't come for me in the comments. I realize that I'm just scratching the surface of technical SEO. But I truly believe that that is the 8020 of good technical SEO. And if you keep those basics in mind as you're building, you're setting yourself up for way fewer technical headaches down the line. And there are always free tools like Screaming Frog that you can use to just do regular technical checkups on your site. Now, once you've built your core revenue driving money pages, we're going to reference our handydandy customer journey chart once again and perform this exact process just one layer up the funnel. But wait, before we get there, if you're enjoying this video, please give it a like and subscribe to the Surfer Academy YouTube channel. Our team puts a lot of effort into giving out this free info and your support helps a lot. Thanks. Now, your brand's customer journey may be different from the one that I've got here, but sticking with the bonsai example. The next layer up in the funnel is final validation. This is someone right on the brink of converting, but wanting to remove all risk of buyer's remorse. They're searching for things like, "Is Bonsai reliable? Bonsai payment fees, Bonsai support reviews." Now, one thing you'll notice when you search these queries is that many of their search engine results pages are dominated by third-party sites. This is one of the reasons why I love doing SEO starting with a customer journey. Wherever the customer journey takes us, that's where we need to be. In this case, for example, when I search is Bonsai reliable, I'm seeing sites like Reddit, Trust Pilot, and third-party review sites. That's giving me a very clear indication that for this keyword at least, I need to move off page and start to engage on these sites to meet my target buyers where they go. Now, that doesn't mean I can't also supplement it with onpage content answering these questions. I think that's actually a really good idea, but clearly Google is telling me something. It's telling me that when people discuss things like this, they prefer to do so on third-party sites. And don't stop at just the third-party sites you see surfaced in the SER. While you're on an off-site kick, I recommend finishing all your brand profiles on all software review sites and create social profiles linking back to your site on all networks. If you're a software company, of course, if you're a local business or if you're a service-based business, you'll want to look at other industry directories that are relevant to you. Even if some of these links are no follow, there's still strong evidence that they support both Google and especially AI's ability to understand what your page is about and serve it to users. And here's another little pro tip that you can do for free right inside of Google to see where your competitors are being mentioned online and you're not. All you're going to do is you're going to take a competitor. In this example, we'll say toggle because we're competing on their time tracking features. And we'll just say minus site toggle.com space and then just spell out toggle. Now, what this is doing is it's showing us everywhere that toggle is mentioned online except their website. So that's super handy because you can see all the third-party places that are mentioning toggle and then you can ask yourself are we mentioned there as well. But you can do even better than just asking yourself. You can actually see through another Google operator. So we can go back up to our operator here and we can actually type in minus bonsai. Now, what this is doing is it's showing us, you're basically asking Google, show us everywhere across the web, at least indexed on Google, you know, that they're surfacing here, where toggle is mentioned except their website and also where Bonsai is not mentioned. So, you can know for a fact that all of these sources are mentioning your competitor and not mentioning you. And if you want to take this even further and expand it even to AI web retrieval sources, then you should use Surfer's AI tracker, which exposes all of the third-party sources where each of your competitors are mentioned, not just one and you aren't, clearly telling you where you're not mentioned and where you are mentioned, giving you a super targeted hit list for outreach. The important principle here is to follow where your customer journey leads. If you find that your customers sentiments lead you off the site, then go off the site. Don't try to shoehorn keywords or content onto your site when Google and your entire customer base is giving you another signal. So from here, you'll follow the pattern that we've established so far. Start at the bottom of the funnel. Follow the customer journey keywords and queries. Create content making your brand known wherever those keywords lead. As you continue to go up the funnel, you'll start to notice different types of pages like vendor comparison pages or best x for y type pages. These are really good for AI visibility, especially when people are comparing vendors straight in an AI tool like chat GPT. This is also where Surfer's topical map can help us decide what to create next. Once your site has enough data in Google Search Console, it organizes the keywords and pages you already have into topic clusters. It shows which clusters you've covered, where you still have gaps, and which neighboring topics may be worth exploring. Now, one important caveat for a brand new site, Topical Map relies heavily on Search Console data. And if you don't have enough impressions yet, we recommend starting with topic research. Use that alongside the customer journey we built earlier to generate a first batch of ideas. Then validate each one before you commit to the content. And when you choose a topic, you can create a content editor query straight from the map. That brings the idea into the same workflow we used for our money pages. We choose the right competitors, build an outline that matches search intent, answer the user's question early, and cover all the relevant entities and facts, which Surfer makes incredibly easy. Then connect the new piece back into the rest of the site. Positive Surfer's internal linking tool uses your search console data to suggest relevant pages from your own domain, find possible anchor text, and insert the links after you review them. For every completed piece of content, I always say that you should be linking in two dimensions. You should link sideways to related pages in the same topic cluster, and you should link down the funnel to the money page that can actually convert the reader. Now, you've got a connected set of pages around the problems your customers care about with a clear path from an early question to a purchase. Now, if you want to go deeper on content strategy, we created a full guide here on how to develop six months worth of content in 60 minutes. It goes super deep on finding ideas, content strategy, and how to use AI to speed up the process. I'll see you in that video next. Thanks for watching and happy wrecking.