This new year, it’s really easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of your SEO campaigns, though we highly advice you to stop for a second and take a look at the bigger picture.
It is ideal to look for any quick and easy wins, as well as determine the larger projects that will help you start the year in outstanding shape.
The fast and easy wins:
There are two main factors to focus on with this one:
1. Google Search Console review
This feature is commonly neglected by most, but it can easily be one of the best reference of information when it comes to distinguishing how to make fast and easy wins. These includes:
- HTML modifications. Editing any lengthy meta descriptions or duplicated page titles is an easy way of increasing the CTR for your present rankings.
- Structured data. Guarantee that there would be no errors within your mark-up.
- Mobile-friendly. Mobile traffic now represents an important portion of site traffic, if not the majority for numerous sites. As such, make sure that your site has an optimum mobile experience and should be placed on top of your priority list.
- Crawl errors. Determine and resolve any 404 errors to guarantee a great user-experience. Also, it is important to redirect any link authority leading to redundant URLs.
2. Content gap analysis
Staying relevant to user search behaviour is critical at both the top and the bottom of the funnel, so as to boost up your site’s visibility amongst the full spectrum of search terms. A quick content gap analysis is the perfect way of focusing your attention on the fast and easy content wins. From there, you can easily construct a content development road map that will enable you to fill the highest priority gaps throughout the first quarter of this new year.
The larger projects:
It is also important to take a look at the bigger projects that are on your road map. If possible, re-prioritize each of them based on what you think you can realistically accomplish in the first quarter of the year. These are the type of projects that will likely make a concrete difference to your performance this 2017, so it shouldn’t be taken lightly.
Mobile experience
Quite a lot of sites now offer a strong mobile experience, but surely there is still more room for improvement in terms of usability. As we go through this new year, mobile traffic is likely going to further increase, which places even more value on providing hassle-free mobile experience.
Take time to answer these questions:
- Does the navigation fit to screen size without the need to scroll?
- Are you able to access the same depth of content across devices?
- Are all the links large enough to let you click through?
- Are rich media assets slowing down the page load time?
If you recognize any issues at this stage, take note of those things and work on them as soon as possible. Making changes to the mobile site template may likely be a lengthy process but it’s absolutely worthwhile.