New year SEO checklist
The new year is a good time to review your site's position in search from start to finish. This checklist helps you work through Search Console data, technical issues, content freshness, local visibility and measurement settings in order.
- 01
A year in review in Search Console
Compare the last 12 months of click and impression data with the previous period, and identify pages and queries that are declining. Check problems in the page indexing report and any manual action or security issue notices.
- 02
Technical health
Redirect broken links and old addresses returning 404 to suitable pages. Verify that the sitemap contains only pages that should be indexed, that robots.txt rules do not block important pages and that hreflang pairs are correct on a multilingual site; prioritise page groups rated poor in the Core Web Vitals report.
- 03
Update your content
Update pages whose title or text contains last year's date, an old price or information that is no longer valid. Merge weak pages covering the same topic, remove or redirect those with no value on their own, and show the update date of revised pages honestly.
- 04
Structured data
Check that structured data such as products, articles, FAQs and business information is error-free using the relevant reports in Search Console and the Rich Results Test. Structured data should describe only information that actually appears on the page.
- 05
Local visibility
Update opening hours in your Google Business Profile, especially for public holidays, along with your phone number and address; add new photos and reply to unanswered reviews. Make sure your name, address and phone number are written the same way on your site and in directories.
- 06
Measurement settings
In Google Analytics 4, the retention period for detailed data is two months by default and affects exploration reports; on standard properties, raising it to 14 months makes year-on-year comparison easier. Check that key conversions are recorded, that they work correctly according to cookie consent and that internal traffic is filtered out.
- 07
Plan for the year
Starting from last year's data, identify priority topics and pages: for which searches are you just below the first page, and which of your services has no page of its own? Draw up a calendar that publishes seasonal content before the season; to be cited in AI-assisted search too, answer questions clearly and verifiably.
Related pages
Articles that complete this topic, plus the matching service page.
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