If your strategy focuses on link acquisition, the end of the year is a good time to move part of your efforts to other areas.
The holiday season has come again and you know what that means ... the year is almost over and it's time to start preparing our SEO strategies for the next year!
Along with the New Year mood, the end of the year means time for reflection - and this is also true for SEO.
As your current SEO strategy ends, now is the time to think about additions to the strategy. In particular, if your strategy focuses on acquiring links and reaching out manually, the end of the year is the perfect time to shift some of your efforts to other areas.
Prioritize the future
We are not saying that you should abandon your current link building strategy - backlinks are just as valuable in December as they are in March.
However, you should be aware that site owners (people who will link to you) are generally less responsive during the holidays, and it’s better to spend your time on events that will prepare your site for links in the future.
Instead of desperately trying to squeeze the last part of this year's ROI, we suggest investing in long-term initiatives that will bring dividends in the future. These initiatives include:
• Competitive analysis and review
• Planning and creating content
• Audit of technical and internal SEO issues
Optimize your SEO efforts at the end of the year by prioritizing actions that will affect the long-term future of your site
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Competitive Analysis and Review
As the year draws to a close, this is a great time to check competitors and analyze what they have done in terms of search.
A good place to start is the content of your competitors, analyzing which you will find out which pages help them attract organic visitors. Tools such as Ahrefs and SEMrush make it easy to make a list of the most popular pages on competitor sites. Browse through these pages to determine if it would be appropriate or necessary to create such pages on your own site. During the review, answer the following questions:
• Is this topic relevant to my audience?
• Do I already have an existing page that covers this topic?
• What type of traffic will be obtained from the rating for this term (upper, middle, lower)?
• Do I have the resources and time to invest in creating a page?
It is important to ask these questions, and not just copy your competitors - not all the best pages of competitors will make sense for your site, audience and goals.
You can also use these tools to track your competitors' keywords over the past year. Comparing this data with the performance of your own site can help you identify areas in which competitors might get around you.
SEO is not only about getting new keyword rankings and organic traffic sources. Search results always change, and if you do not protect your ranking, you will lose them. Tracking your competitors' keyword growth will help you identify potential threats before they become losses. If you see competitors succeed in areas where you are not sustainable, think about these topics:
• Updating an existing page with fresh content with greater depth
• Optimization of factors on the page
• Overview of internal link features
• Manual promotion of external links
Regardless of whether you are opening up new opportunities or identifying potential problems, an analysis of competitor strategies will provide valuable information, and the end of the year is the ideal time to conduct this analysis.
Content planning and creation
Along with the analysis of competitors' content strategies, the end of the year provides an opportunity to analyze your own content initiatives.
Holidays are sales times for many businesses, and creating seasonal content may be a priority for you. However, if you want this type of content to be visible on holidays, most of this work must be done well before the holiday season begins.
Using competitor analysis data, you can prioritize future marketing activities, such as updating existing pages, changing content in new formats and creating new pages, to perform the most important tasks in the first place.
In addition, you can spend this time creating content for a stable launch over the next months.
If you have the time and resources available in the fourth quarter, the distribution of these resources for planning and creating content is optimal.
Audit SEO Technical Issues
Finally, take the time to check the technical side of the website at the end of the year.
Unfortunately, technical improvements and fixes are often the first elements that can be put in the background when bandwidth is limited. Therefore, if you plan to make an attempt to increase the link mass late or, finally, start making those technical corrections that you put off, we recommend spending your time solving technical problems.
Some common problems that appear over time:
• Broken images and links
• Redirection chains
• 404 and other status errors
• Duplicate content
• Missing alternative text
Resolving these issues will help improve the overall search performance of your site.
In addition, you need to optimize the pages of the site, which includes:
• Improving page speed and mobility
• Transcriptions for multimedia content
• Increased keyword focus and headline optimization
• Layout layout and optimized formats for SERP functions
Output
The end of the year can be slow, especially for those whose clients are away from their offices on holidays and vacations. However, there are many more SEO tasks that you can work on to finish the year and set up your site for success in the new year.
Futureinapps will audit your site and resolve all technical errors. We will prepare recommendations for improving website SEO optimization and help your business advance in the search.
