With New Year’s Day still fresh in our memories, there is no better time to step back and take stock of your SEO campaigns. Look for any quick wins and identify the larger projects that will help you start the year in great shape.

Hygiene: Quick wins

These are the actions you can do tomorrow.  In my view, there are two keys areas to focus on.

1. Google Search Console review

Google Search Console is often neglected, but it can be one of the best sources of information for identifying quick wins. Working through Search Console’s navigation from top to bottom, I would look for any errors or warnings. The main areas to review include:

• Structured data. Ensure there are no errors within your markup.
• HTML improvements. Revising duplicated or lengthy meta descriptions and page titles can be an easy method of increasing CTR for your existing rankings, especially if you work closely with your paid search counterparts to identify their 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 optimum mobile experience should be a priority.
• Blocked resources. Complete a quick check to ensure that any resources the search engines need to render your pages are not being blocked.
• Crawl errors. Identify and resolve any 404 or soft 404 errors to ensure a strong user experience and to redirect any link authority pointing to redundant URLs.

While the above is not a comprehensive site audit, it provides an action list of easy-to-implement, quick wins (when presented with the appropriate business case rationale).

2. Content gap analysis

Staying relevant to consumer search behavior is vital at both the top and the bottom of the funnel to increase visibility across the full spectrum of search terms. A quick content gap analysis is the ideal method of focusing your attention on the easy content wins. From there, you can build a content development road map to enable you to fill the highest priority gaps throughout the first quarter of the year.