Types of SEO Project
The type of an SEO project decides what comes first, what timeline to expect and which KPI counts as success. The same change can be useful on one project and destructive on another. This lesson covers five types, the documented particulars of each, and how to tell a problem you can read in a report from one you can only infer.
It rests on Google's site move guide, the manual actions report and the guide to debugging search traffic drops.
Why the type decides more than the checklist
A mass URL change will clean up an old catalogue and wreck a migration that has no redirect map. Deleting weak pages will tidy the index of a mature site and damage a new one that has nothing to tidy yet. So the context comes first and the tools second.
Type 1. A new site
No history, which is both an advantage and a limit: no legacy mistakes, but no signals either. The first job is not rankings, it is getting pages into the index at all. The status per reason lives in the page indexing report, and ownership gets verified at the very start by adding the property to Search Console — otherwise the project's first weeks pass with no data.
On timing, Google's starter guide warns outright that changes do not show up at once and can take months. The KPI for the first months is indexed pages and first impressions, not positions.
Type 2. A working site that wants growth
History, data and accumulated mistakes all present. This is the most rewarding type: priorities come from your own reports rather than someone else's checklist. Start with a full site audit, then prioritise where impressions already exist, as in the lesson on competitive analysis.
Type 3. Migration and redesign
The riskiest type, and the only one Google gives a step-by-step guide for. Three facts from it are worth showing the client before anything starts:
- "Expect temporary fluctuation in site ranking during the move" — a dip does not mean the move was done badly.
- For a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or more for Google to start showing the new URLs instead of the old ones; for larger sites, longer.
- A move counts as complete once Googlebot has visited every URL on the old and new site at least once, and it happens on a per-URL basis.
The same guide carries the recommendation that lowers the cost of a mistake: if the site is large, move a piece of it first and watch the effect. And another: schedule the move for a seasonal dip, so fewer people meet the problems. If the addresses do not change, there is a separate guide for a move without URL changes.
The redirect map is the project's central artefact. Check it in bulk and before launch: the bulk redirect checker shows the status code and the chain for a list of URLs.
Type 4. A site after a fall
Two completely different cases hide behind the one word "penalty".
| Manual action | A drop with no action | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A decision by a person at Google: "some or all of that site will not be shown in Google search results" | Algorithm changes, competition, season, a technical fault |
| Can you see it | Yes, in the manual actions report | No dedicated report — only data and an order of investigation |
| What to do | Fix the violations from the spam policies and file a reconsideration request | Work through the documented order: seasonality, search types, data anomalies, then a cause on your side |
The first action on such a project is always the same: open the manual actions report. An empty report saves months of work in the wrong direction. Lining the date of the fall up against algorithm releases is what Google updates is for, and finding the affected pages and queries is what wins and losses does.
Type 5. Holding what you have
The channel works and the job is not to lose it. That is not "do nothing": this is where regressions after releases live, new templates shipped without meta tags, sitemaps that quietly break. Sitemap monitoring and indexing cleanup give the early warning before the dip reaches the click count.
Establishing the type in thirty minutes
- Is the site in the index at all? No — type 1, and there is nothing further to ask.
- Open the manual actions report. Not empty — type 4, and everything else waits.
- Is a change of addresses, CMS or domain planned in the coming months? Yes — type 3, and the work starts with the redirect map.
- Is traffic falling or growing? Falling — type 4 on the algorithmic branch. Growing or flat — type 2 or 5.
- Write the answer in one sentence and set the KPI from it, not the other way round.
What not to do
- Apply one checklist to every project: what fixes one breaks another.
- Promise timelines on a project after a fall before the manual actions report is open.
- Start a migration without a redirect map and without checking it in bulk.
- Give a new site a KPI based on positions: it has no impressions to average yet.
- Treat a dip during a migration as failure — the documentation warns about fluctuation outright.
Practice
- Take your own project and run the five questions above.
- Write the type in one sentence, and three tasks that follow from it.
- Choose the KPI for the first two months to match that type, by the rules in the lesson on goals and KPIs.
- Note which of those tasks would be a mistake on a different type of project. That is the check that the type was established rather than guessed.