2 SEO tactics to start 2026 strong with short-term wins:
1. Do a backlink audit and find the pages on your site with the most backlinks from high quality sources.
Then do two key things:
1) Optimize these pages for conversions to capitalize on that referral traffic
Add a CTA to join your newsletter, embed testimonials, case studies, lead magnets.
2) Internally link from these pages to your other most valuable pages
Audit existing internal links on this page, remove less valuable internal pages and replace for your most important pages. Drive that link equity to your key pages without diluting it.
2. Prune your worst-performing content.
Google views your WHOLE SITE as one main entity.
Search engines and AI will rank and showcase a website with only good content higher than a website with 5 great articles and 5000 garbage ones.
Before you get content-velocity-happy or spam programmatic pages, look at the data.
To identify low-performing content, you can perform a content audit and find:
- Bad URLs and broken links
- Traffic from an organic search for the last 90 days
- Landing pages with low time-on-site and high exit rates
- Content with fewer social shares
- Content with little to no backlinks
Once you’ve got all the data in front of you, create an Excel sheet with 3 tags:
- Leave it as it is
- Remove / redirect / consolidate
- Improve
The last step is to take action to improve it.
- Remove or redirect the pages, or consolidate them in topical clusters.
- Hire a good copywriter to improve the content that you need to rewrite
- Replicate style, tone, intent matching, and depth of best content
-Jeremy
