Your 2026 SEO Strategy Plan: How to Get Ahead Now

January 2026 is looming and you’re starting to panic about your SEO strategy plan.The clock is ticking but you’re unsure where to start, worried about the work involved and wondering how you’re going to deliver your strategy in the new year.

Fear not, your plan can be broken down into three phases “Research, Refine, Results”. This simple process gives you the best chance to effectively deliver your SEO strategy plan for a great year ahead, bringing in the right audience to turn them into valuable customers.

You could of course, save yourself the time and effort by getting someone like me to write your whole strategy for you and implement it with you. Get your personalised SEO strategy today and start seeing growth sooner.

SEO Targets for Growth

Before you go anywhere near your plan, you first need to figure out your SEO targets. Why are you looking at SEO to start with? By understanding your intentions, you can create a strategy that will enable growth effectively, against your own business goals. But you do need to think beyond ‘I want more traffic’ and be more specific to your actual needs.

If you need help thinking about your goals then I’ve put together a guide to help you think more strategically by asking yourself some simple questions.

Research: Gathering Data to Create an SEO Strategy Plan

Now that you have your goals in place, the next step is to gather data to produce several initial reports. These reports allow you to make data-driven decisions. It’s very easy for any business owner to be stuck in their own bubble and base plans on assumptions, but data helps identify the real problems to produce real solutions.

Let’s break down the key areas to your research phase.

Baseline SEO Report

Begin by looking at your current performance and lay down some key metrics that align with your SEO targets to set a benchmark going forward. These initial figures are the ones you are trying to beat and if you follow your strategy well enough, you will beat them over time.

Lay everything out in an easy to read to dashboard or report format so you can refer back to it over time and use the initial report to track ongoing performance over time. We will come back to this shortly when we get to the third phase of your plan.

In the meantime, if you need advice on some key metrics then this website traffic metrics guide will help you. 

Competitor Research Report

Now that you know a little more about your own performance, it’s time to go snooping on your competitor’s performance. From this report you can truly unearth some gems that will strengthen your strategy and help position you as a market leader. 

Here are five steps to creating your competitor analysis report:

1. Identify your true SEO competitors
2. Analyse their top performing keywords
3. Audit their content strategy and page content
4. Review their backlinks
5. Assess their technical SEO

Using the data gathered from these five steps will help feed more information into your strategy and they won’t even see it coming! Check out my guide for writing a competitor analysis report for more help in this area.

Keyword Research

From your baseline SEO report and competitor analysis you’ll have identified some keyword data you can use in this area. But you will need to find additional keywords within your industry area that your audience are using in search that you can tap into to get you in front of them.

Gone are the days you needed to find a list of keywords and throw them into your content. If anything, that tactic will hurt your SEO more than help! Instead, you need to think about identifying one main keyword per page and use that as your mainline topic, with a few keywords supporting it.

Some things to remember when identifying keywords:

• Search volume isn’t everything but try to find keywords with a relatively healthy volume for reach
• Keyword difficulty is a key factor and will help you choose keywords that you’re more likely to rank higher for
• Intent is your new bestie! Understanding why your audience are searching for specific keywords will allow you to shape your content to fit their needs

Understanding the types of keywords will help you identify a stronger list to use later in phase two of your strategy. 

SEO Audit

Now this is the big one and will shape most of your strategy, so it’s not to be missed! A full SEO audit allows you to take a step back and look at what is and isn’t working. It’s your go-to report to identify everything that needs fixing and will shape the second phase of your strategy.

Your audit should include:

• A technical health check including site speed, indexing issues with Google and any broken pages or links
• Content audit to check for thin/boring content
• Page structuring for your customer journey
• Top recommendations in order of priority

The more in-depth this section is, the stronger your SEO plan will be! So try not to skimp on this part and see it as an investment in your future growth. 

If an audit is something you find a bit overwhelming then I’m here to help you. Check out what’s involved in my SEO audits as part of your phase one strategy. 

Now, you’re ready for the next phase. But if you feel like this is a lot of work already then take the stress and energy away by getting a personalised SEO strategy with me and I’ll cover all three phases for you.

Refine: Fixing the Issues Holding You Back

By now, you have a lot of data in front of you and a clear plan of priority recommendations. This is where the real work begins and you fix the SEO issues holding your website back. Write yourself a clear plan of attack and a timeline for when you think they will be completed by.

Think of this phase as the ‘doing’ phase and it should include:

• Technical SEO fixes (crawling and indexing issues, broken links, site speed etc.)
• On-page optimisations (titles, header structure, meta descriptions etc.)
• Content improvements (keywords, audience questions, internal links etc.)

If you are enrolled into my SEO strategy, in this phase I pull in a service I call the SEO Boost, where I implement most of these fixes for you. I’ll get to work on those technical fixes and give you clear outlines to guide your content optimisation.

Results: Ongoing Tracking for Continuous Maintenance

Once everything is fixed and you’ve updated your content and structure, you’ll want to know how your hard work is paying off. Remember that baseline report you did a short while back? Well this is what you’ll use to measure success.

SEO takes time, unlike other marketing channels, so don’t expect to see results overnight. Instead, you need to think longer-term for your reports. I recommend ongoing quarterly reports, which give you enough time to see any patterns in data, allow Google to catch up and gather enough meaningful data. Those monthly reports you are desperate to see won’t give you a long-term picture and will only show small quick wins.

Analyse your data but also take a look at any further fixes you need to make and set yourself new priority actions. SEO requires continuous support, leave it alone and it will slowly die, feed it little and often and it will flourish! You’ll find that you’ll be in a mini cycle going back to do some more research, refining any further problems found and then back into tracking performance of these fixes.

Phase three of my SEO Strategy is all about these quarterly reports and giving you the actions to grow. Get your baseline report in Phase One and let me show you the ongoing results and recommendations.

Pulling Together Your SEO Strategy Plan

By now you should have a fair idea of the work involved in creating your SEO strategy plan and understand the need to get in there early, particularly with phase one to allow you to start phase two in January, or for the more organised among you in December when things are a little quieter.

I get that the whole process can be overwhelming, even when broken down into three phases. The good news is that I’m here to take all the hard work away by creating and implementing your SEO strategy for you! Get started today with your SEO plan and leave the January panicking to your competitors.