Worked example
Worked example: the first ninety days for a Portsmouth trade business
This is a worked example and it says so at the top, because we do not have ninety days of Portsmouth data yet and will not pretend otherwise. What follows is the actual month-by-month order of work, with the real figures from two accounts elsewhere used as the reference for what each month tends to produce. Those figures are marked wherever they appear. When the first Portsmouth business here has sixty days of its own data, this page is replaced by that account, with permission and with the caveats attached.
By Daniel Stoychev, Webso Digital · 4 September 2026
Days
profile changes can show
5 wks
map pack entry on the reference account
60 days
before Search Console can be read honestly
6 mths
before a competitive city term is a fair test
Month one
Everything that can be fixed without waiting for Google
The profile is rebuilt first, because it is the only part that can move within days: the right primary category, every service listed, real hours including the Saturday you actually work, the service area drawn around the districts you cover, and photographs that were taken this year. On the site, the technical faults go: image weight, the scripts the page waits on, pages that nothing links to, a sitemap listing pages that no longer exist. Then a page for each service that earns money, written so it answers the question a customer types rather than describing the company.
Reference figure. On the reference account this month produced the 65 to 96 mobile speed score and the 44 pages resubmitted for indexing. It comes from a real account elsewhere, not from Portsmouth, and it is the scale we plan against rather than a promise about your business.
Month two
The district pages, and the reviews routine
Portsmouth is not one market. Southsea, Fratton, Cosham, Portchester and Havant behave like separate ones, and a page that is a copy of another with the place name swapped is filtered rather than ranked. Each district page gets written around what is actually different there: the roads work arrives by, the kind of property, the type of job that comes from that postcode. At the same time the review routine starts, because the map pack moves on review count and recency more than on anything on the website.
Reference figure. On the reference account, duplication between area pages fell from 72% to 29% in this phase. It comes from a real account elsewhere, not from Portsmouth, and it is the scale we plan against rather than a promise about your business.
Month three
The first honest read of the data
Sixty days of Search Console is the earliest point at which anything can be read without fooling yourself. The queries that reached positions four to twenty are the fastest wins and get the next month's work. Pages that get impressions but no clicks get their titles rewritten. Pages that get nothing after ninety days are examined rather than defended: usually the query does not exist in the volume assumed, and the page is repointed.
Reference figure. On the reference account the map pack was entered in week five and clicks were up 500% against the period before launch, from a small base. It comes from a real account elsewhere, not from Portsmouth, and it is the scale we plan against rather than a promise about your business.
What ninety days does not do
The city-wide map for a big trade is not a ninety-day job here
Portsmouth is dense, and for the largest trades the top three on a city-wide search is held by firms with fleets and hundreds of reviews collected over years. The district map is a different question, and that is where the first ninety days is aimed. Anyone who tells you the city-wide top three is a quarter's work in a city this size is selling on a number they cannot control.
The same applies to organic positions on the most competitive terms. On the reference account the competitive city term sat at position eleven with no clicks after the first months. That is normal, it is stated in the monthly report, and it is the reason the plan starts with the searches that can actually be won.
How to read this page
- The order of work is exactly what we do, and is not hypothetical.
- Every number is from a real account elsewhere and is labelled as such on the line where it appears.
- No Portsmouth client is named, described or implied, because there is not one yet on this site.
- The figures behind the references are on the results page, each with its period and its caveat.
Want this mapped to your business rather than to an example?
Send your website and the districts you cover. You get the three checks run on your own site, the businesses currently above you in the map, and a plan with the first ninety days written against your trade.