A lot of people will be starting new marketing campaigns in the new year, so the sooner you can get going with yours, the better.
If you're on the lookout for SEO ideas for January, here are some top tips of where to start.
Twitter Analytics
If you're a Twitter user, make good use of the Events calendar on Twitter Analytics. Any registered Twitter account has access to this, and it costs nothing - you don't have to be a paid-up user of Twitter Ads.
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| Go to https://analytics.twitter.com/ and click on Events for a list of upcoming calendar dates. |
Not all of them will be relevant to you, but it's a very useful place to spot diary dates that you might otherwise have missed (I've just noticed one for one of my current clients while writing this post...!).
It's a continually updated page and even gives you an estimated Twitter audience size for events while they are taking place, so if you have a social media strategy in place too, Twitter Analytics should be a regular source of info.
New Year's posts
Should you post a Happy New Year update? Absolutely! These kinds of calendar celebrations are well worth covering and it's an opportunity to be a bit more personal than you might otherwise be throughout the year.
Try to steer clear of the totally generic "we would like to wish our customers a happy new year" and make it a little more personal and warmer, but also don't worry too much about it as you're probably not pushing a specific sales opportunity.
Instead, think of these milestone posts as gimmes: they're the marker posts that your visitors expect to see at certain times throughout the year, and New Year's is one of those occasions, so don't be afraid to post something quick and follow up with a more direct marketing post or SEO landing page after the weekend.
Get going!
Finally, you have post-Christmas thoughts, New Year's plans, January sales and so on to mention, so don't delay.
Any SEO strategy for January should be forward-thinking. It may take a few days for newly published content to be crawled and indexed by Google, so try to avoid making it too time-sensitive.
Of course that's not possible for limited promotions like January sales copy and landing pages, but if you've missed the mark slightly this month, start planning ahead for your February SEO strategy too.
Make sure you have submitted a sitemap to Google and/or submit newly published individual pages using the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console to get them into the search results faster.
Beyond that, it's just about looking ahead to the next few months and drawing up your SEO strategy from New Year's to Easter so you can hire a freelance writer to produce any content you need.
January SEO To-Do List
- Publish first posts/pages (Happy New Year, January sales etc).
- Submit sitemaps and individual URLs to Google Search Console.
- Check Twitter Analytics for useful upcoming events.
- Try to publish new content weekly throughout the month.
- Plan ahead first for February then through to Easter.
