In short
The first ninety days are mostly diagnosis and removal. Visible new work tends to start later than clients expect, and the engagements that skip the diagnosis are the ones that stall in month six.
It is also the window where most of what we need from a client is needed, and a slow handover of access is the most common cause of a slow start.
Weeks one to three: access and inventory
- 01Accounts in your nameSearch Console, Analytics, ad accounts, the CMS, the domain. In your ownership, with us granted access, never the reverse.
- 02A full inventoryEvery page, its status, whether it is indexed, what it targets. Most sites have pages nobody remembers competing with pages that matter.
- 03The numbers as they standA baseline recorded before anything changes, because without one every later claim is unfalsifiable.
Weeks four to eight: removal before addition
This is the unglamorous half and the half that determines the rest. Queries that were never going to convert come out of the ad account. Pages competing for one term get consolidated. Tracking that was double-counting gets fixed, which sometimes makes the numbers look worse and is still correct.
Weeks nine to twelve: the first real test
By the end of the first quarter there should be leading indicators moving even where outcomes have not: impressions on terms you were invisible for, crawl errors cleared, cost per lead trending rather than static. Several documented engagements in our library show the outcome arriving in month four to six, which is the honest shape.
If none of the leading indicators have moved by then, the approach is wrong and should be reconsidered rather than extended. That is the conversation we commit to at the start, and it is the one most worth holding an agency to.
Sources
- Fire Protection Company: the two-year shape of a considered-purchase account. Monastic Marketing case study. Read September 29, 2026.
- Cleaning Services Company: six months to a measurable click-through change. Monastic Marketing case study. Read September 29, 2026.