With the New Year still fresh in our memories, there is no better time to take a step back and take stock of your SEO campaigns. Look for any success stories and identify the biggest projects that will help you start the year off in great shape.
These are the actions you can start doing today. In my opinion, there are two key areas you can focus on.
1.- Check Google Search Console
Google Search Console is often forgotten, but it can be one of the best sources of information for identifying wins. Review Search Console navigation From top to bottom, look for any errors or warnings. The main areas to review are:
- Structured data. Make sure there are no errors in your data.
- HTML improvements. Reviewing duplicate or long meta descriptions and page titles can be an easy method to increase CTR for your existing rankings, especially if you work closely with your paid search counterparts to identify your top-performing ad copy.
- Mobile usability. Mobile traffic now represents a significant percentage of site traffic, if not the majority for many sites. As such, ensuring your sites have an optimal mobile experience should be a priority.
- Blocked resources. Complete a quick check to make sure you have the resources search engines need so your pages don't get blocked.
- Crawl errors. Identify and resolve any 404 errors or 404 soft errors to ensure a strong user experience and to redirect any link authorities that point to redundant URLs.
While the above is not a complete site audit, it provides a list of quick actions that are easy to implement (when presented with appropriate business case reasoning).
2.- Analysis of the Content Gap
Staying relevant to consumer search behavior is vital at both the top and bottom of the funnel to increase visibility across the entire spectrum of search terms.
A quick content gap analysis is an ideal method to focus your attention on easy content gains. From there, you can create a content development roadmap that allows you to fill the highest priority gaps during the first quarter of the year.
Big projects
It's important to take a fresh look at the biggest projects that are on your roadmap and, if necessary, reprioritize them based on what you think you can realistically do in the first quarter of the year. These are the projects that are likely to make a real difference in 2017 performance and should not be overlooked.
While each project is unique and has its own priorities, these three main areas are important:
a) Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)
On September 20, 2016, Google began rolling out accelerated mobile pages across top mobile search results; This global rollout was expected to be completed by the end of 2016. In short, they are no longer restricting AMP to the Top Stories carousel.
While there will be no ranking benefit from using AMP, offers the opportunity to deliver a much faster mobile experience to consumers – and therefore, greater engagement and more potential conversions.
b) HTTPS
This is important for three reasons:
- Consumers are looking for a more secure and reliable online experience, and HTTPS is the ideal way to deliver it. This will become even more important with Chrome now flagging unsafe sites.
- HTTPS is a Google ranking factor.
- It is a prerequisite for implementing HTTP2, which will allow sites to load significantly faster than with the HTTP protocol.
The benefits may seem small, but with HTTPS being a prerequisite for HTTP2, I see real value in the page load time improvements delivered on both desktop and mobile.
3.- Mobile Experience
Many sites offer strong mobile experiences these days, but there is still room for improvement in terms of usability. As we move through 2017, mobile traffic will continue to increase, which places even more importance on delivering a great mobile experience.
Along with mobile usability errors in Google Search Console, it's helpful to review your mobile site and ensure it's delivered as strong as possible.
It's important to review your site through the eyes of a consumer and check for any sticking points, including:
- Is the site mobile friendly?
- Can the same depth of content be accessed across devices?
- Does the navigation fit the screen size without scrolling?
- Are all links large enough to click?
- Do rich media assets slow down page load time?
If something is revealed at this stage, keep in mind that it will probably be a long process to make changes to the mobile site template. However, it is still absolutely worth it, regardless of the time.
Conclusion
It's very easy to get bogged down in the day-to-day running of your SEO campaigns and lose sight of the full picture. The above tasks must be prioritized to advance and increase performance in both the short and long term.