January is the most important month of your year. If you start strong, the momentum builds as the weeks and months progress. But most business owners get stuck. They wait for the “right time” to get started—usually February. By then, their competitors are already ahead.
To help you take control in January, we’ve put together an 8-point marketing checklist to make sure 2025 is your best year yet.
1. Google Business Profile is claimed and up to date
If you are a service-based business, having a Google Business Profile is critical for the success of your brand. It allows you to manage core info about your business such as opening hours, service locations and contact info, and facilitates interaction through Q&A and reviews, building trust and loyalty. Having a well-optimised GBP also helps you appear more often in the map results, which show up regularly in local searches.
Key tips: When people search for your brand, make sure your core details (such as phone number, address and website URL) are correct, and appearing on the right side of the search results. Review all your citations (ie. business directory listings such as True Local) to ensure your Name, Address and Phone (NAP) are consistent across the web.
2. Perform keyword research and competitor analysis
If you’ve invested in SEO, then you would have already identified the most suitable keywords and themes for your business. However, if you haven’t performed keyword research in the past 12 months, then it’s time to again. Keyword volumes can change over time, so a regular analysis will help you to identify changing trends, as well as any new opportunities. It also forces you to consider what the core focuses of the business are, and if they have changed in recent times. If so, then your SEO focus should also change.
Key tips: Before commencing a keyword analysis, it’s crucial to know your target audience. What types of words do they use to look for your products and services? (They may be different to the phrases industry professionals such as yourself use). For all keywords you’re considering, be sure to identify their intent. While a phrase might seem suitable to you, searchers could be looking for something different. Check the top SERPs to get an idea on intent.
3. Review your external backlinks
Backlinks to your website build authority, which is a major factor in ranking prominently in search. It is important to periodically review your backlink profile, to ensure it is continually growing, and is coming from a diverse range of sources. Understanding your current backlink profile helps you plan your ongoing link building strategy, as well as identifying any toxic links that may be harming your rankings.
Key tips: If your website hasn’t got a manual penalty, but you have identified potentially toxic backlinks, it’s still important to disavow them in Google Search Console. But if possible, first try to contact the website owner to ask them to remove the links. But if all else fails, disavow those links!
4. Run a full website crawl
Websites have a lot of moving parts and if you are regularly making changes, accidents happen. Whether a new plugin is causing a page to display incorrectly, or you’ve there are broken links or missing meta tags on important pages, a website crawl will identify these. A technical audit allows you to ‘clean up’ your website and make sure it is technically sound – important from both a user experience and search ranking perspective.
Key tips: As well as identifying technical issues, also review your website’s structure, including URL hierarchy, internal linking, and navigation. Ensure your site structure is organised in a logical and user-friendly way.
5. Segment your email list (and grow it)
A mailing list is one of the most cost-effective marketing tools for any business. It helps you build relationships with potential customers, keeps you engaged with existing customers, and allows you to reconnect with old customers or prospects. Segmenting your list into various categories allows you to tailor messaging that resonates with the recipients, resulting in higher engagement rates and conversions.
If your email list is small – or non-existent – there is no time like the present to start growing it. Setting up a landing page with a free lead magnet and driving traffic to this page via paid ads will bring in prospects to your list. Email marketing via tailored email sequences can then be automated and sent to these prospects, who can digest your content and learn more about your brand.
Key tips: Create a resource that will resonate with your target audience, so they will happily provide their email address to acquire it. Collect the right data and don’t ask for too much. Continually provide valuable content to your list, and keep your brand front of mind.
6. Perform a Google Ads health check
Google Ads is great at driving instant traffic to your website, but it isn’t cheap. So if you aren’t performing a regular health check of your ads campaign, you’re potentially throwing money away. Identifying areas where improvements can be made can help improve metrics such as click through rate (CTR), cost per click (CPC) and return on ad spend (ROAS).
Some of the key areas to review include:
- Keywords
- Ad copy
- Landing page
- Bid strategy and budget
Key tips: Negative keywords and filtering are your friend!
7. Create a 90-day social media roadmap
Social media platforms may not be amazing at driving conversions, especially if you’re a business such as an accounting firm or vet (no-one impulse buys a tax return or a sick animal). But social media is great for building brand awareness. Posting regularly on the main social channels, whether that be weekly or even monthly, adds trust and credibility to your business, and grows your digital ecosystem which in turn improves your search presence.
A 90-day roadmap involves mapping out the next 3 months of social posts. Carefully planning the topics you want to post on, as well as the types of posts, will streamline the process and ensure your messaging is consistent. Even if you’re only posting twice a month on Facebook and LinkedIn, at least when prospects check your profile they see regular activity, and not just a few random posts that were lasts made in 2018.
Key tips: Keep posts short and sweet – people have short attention spans. Monitor the competition – you might find ideas which you can replicate. Have a healthy balance of lead-generated posts and content meant for engagement only. Too “salesy” and people will be less receptive. Be imperfect – don’t be afraid to share vulnerabilities from time to time to show you are a real person.
8. Ensure Google Analytics tracking is setup (and review 2024 data)
Analytics helps you get a more complete understanding of how your customers engage with your business so you can deliver better experiences and drive results. That sentence was taken word for word from the Google website, and summarises the benefits of analytics tracking perfectly.
Google Analytics is free to setup and provides important data such as number of users, average time spent on the site, bounce rates, most popular pages, regions of the users, and the channels from which they arrived (such as organic, paid, social, direct, etc).
Setting up conversion tracking within Google Analytics also allows you to monitor when someone takes a meaningful action on your website (submits a form, sends an email, clicks on the phone number) so you can assess which marketing efforts are resulting in legitimate leads.
If you already have GA4 setup on your website, it is still worth reviewing your conversions, and ensuring they are up to date, tracking correctly, and if there are any new actions that should be added to Analytics.
Key tips: Setup Google Tag Manager (GTM). You can then simply manage all tracking codes through that interface – rather than relying on different tags for different tools. This gives you more control and makes things a lot easier to oversee.
This article doesn’t go into a huge level of detail, but hopefully it serves as a good checklist for reviewing your marketing for the year ahead. If you would like more information on any of these strategies, or would like to discuss getting assistance implementing them, please contact us.
Here’s to a big year for your business!
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