Christmas can be a tricky time for some businesses, as consumer attention shifts towards the more festive, “present giving” frame of mind, which can leave some industries in the dark. There is a silver lining to be found though, the Christmas period can be the ideal time for some SEO housekeeping to prepare for the next year.
Check the technical health of your site
Carrying out a technical review of your site is something we always recommend, in fact we love them so much we check all our sites every month. If you don’t tend to crawl your site often, doing so at the end of the year can be a great way to close of the years SEO activity, and also set the foundations for a good start for the following year.
Review your keyword targeting
After a long year of targeting a variety of keywords, Christmas is a great time to review how your site ranks and what has been achieved. In turn, the process will identify optimisations which were not quite as successful as you may have hoped. This presents the ideal opportunity to review how your site is optimised against keywords you want to target. This can range from page titles and heading structure, to on page copy and internal linking.
This process can also identify any changes and trends in how consumers refer to the services or product you provide, which can help inform the wider business on the terminology being used.
Plan content for 2022
Achieving new rankings in search is an excellent way to grow your organic presence. The Christmas period is a great time to look for ranking opportunities and building out a content plan to help you target new keywords next year. A content gap analysis can be the ideal place to start this task, as you simply gather a collection of competitors together, chuck them in your SEO tool of choice, and sift through the keywords they rank against to identify where there might be gaps in your content.
Once you have a list of keywords you want to start targeting, whether they are long tail keywords or not, try populating a content calendar to help your content writer keep track of what is needed, and when. What’s more, a great content brief is an excellent way to make content creation as smooth as possible. Try outlining the keywords the copy should include, possible heading of the page, meta data, and identify any competing pages which could help shape the content.
Take the time to research what could happen in 2022
Whilst changes in the SEO world can be slow, they are often significant and should be planned for where possible. Fortunately, if there is anything worth knowing about in advanced, Google do tend to let the industry know via its Search Central blog, so its worth keeping an eye on this. Examples of this are Google’s updates to Chrome to identify non-HTTPS sites as ‘non-secure’, and the more
To find out how our team of SEO experts can help you, why not give us a call today on 0845 450 2086.