Known as "code freeze," when developers' hands are bound and the code of a website is unable to be changed or improved. Obviously, this is to prevent any unexpected glitches or defects from surfacing immediately before the peak holiday season, which begins with Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and Thanksgiving. Finder's recent figures make it clear why this is so

With only a few days left until the holiday shopping season begins, you may find yourself fidgeting in your chair, trying to think of new ways to improve your business. However, there are many improvements that don't require a single line of code to implement. A lot will rely on your present site and available resources, but if prioritised appropriately, they may have a significant influence on your website.

Optimisation of Keywords and Content

One of the quickest gains is optimising your landing pages for targeted keywords, as this usually does not add any work to your development team. There are a number of approaches you may use to guarantee that resources are prioritised for the

Pages that provide the most value for your money

Google Analytics may be used to identify the best-performing landing pages, so start with those that provide the most income and conversions. Also, when the holiday shopping season draws near, pay attention to your seasonal pages.

Questions that are easy to answer

It may just take a tiny modification to the H1 or meta title to improve your SERP rankings and, in some circumstances, this may be all that is required. Other adjustments, such as reorganising the material, may need a more extensive overhaul, therefore prioritise them based on effort and current ranking position.

Temporary webpages

Prior to the busy season, make sure your holiday-specific pages, such as those for Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and other sales pages are optimised. Do so by including seasonal keywords and messages into the page's copy.

Linking internally

Internal links can take a variety of forms, all of which can help your site's link equity be distributed evenly and increase the relevancy of its pages within the context of one another. In terms of landing page optimisation, it's one of the most effective.

Interconnect related items within a same company

Your site's items will all have similar qualities, such as the brand, colour, size, and product category. You might think of these as Taxonomies — pages that share importance, even though they appear in distinct categories or URL structures on your page. Since these pages are buried deeper in the site's design, crawled less frequently, and so earn less link equity, it is advised that you boost the number of internal links pointing to them.

Begin by mapping your highest-earning items to other products that have the same taxonomy. After that, you can begin employing keyword-rich anchor text to create internal links within the body of your article. You may start by editing the product description, which can be done manually.

In addition to raising your average order value(AOV), these connections will assist your pages become more contextually relevant to the consumers.

Add breadcrumb links to your site's navigation.

You might be able to accomplish this without modifying your code depending on your set-up, therefore I'm going to provide it even if a developer is required.

If you want to construct a major link between vital, relevant sites, breadcrumb links are the way to go! Contextual relevance is built by having these sorts of connections, from product pages to their top-level hub page, which helps Google better grasp page hierarchy.

It also supports the customer journey by guiding customers back to category pages and additional goods if they can't discover what they were looking for originally.. As an example, users looking for "formal shoes" may land on the wrong page if they land on a "sports shoes" product page instead of the "formal shoes" product list page. This is especially useful when they've landed on the wrong page due to content gaps, inefficient keyword targeting or cannibalisation issues.

You should take advantage of breadcrumb navigation links because they have a direct influence on SEO! Make sure to include Breadcrumb Schema Markup once you've completed these steps. Make sure your schema is correct by using this generator and Google's Rich Results Test.

Links with exact match anchor text

Using these kinds of links to boost your page's position in search engine results for a specific term may be quite beneficial. The major targeted term mapped to the destination URL should be used as the anchor text in the link. Money Saving Expert, for example, uses keyword-rich anchor text to connect the right audience.

While a coding freeze, search engine optimisation (SEO) is a winning strategy

Search engines receive confusing signals if you use the improper anchor text to connect to your sites, such as utilising a term that is already being targeted by another URL. This promotes cannibalisation. Run a Screaming Frog crawl and export the 'links' bulk outputs to check the status of your anchor texts. As a last option, you may utilise custom extractions to pull text from various components of your page templates, alter the data in Excel, and then do a keyword search on the resulting data. See Screaming Frog for more details.

Check for Errors, Internal Vonnections that no Longer Work

In the case of 404s, all authority signals are lost and will not be propagated through internal links to following pages if you have broken links in your site's internal linking structure. Running a Screaming Frog crawl and then exporting the 'All Inlinks' report will show you if any of your site's internal links are pointing to 404s and should be corrected.

Whether you use a backlink analyser like Ahrefs or Majestic, you can see if any external links are heading to 404 pages on your website. Backlinks leading to 404s, even if they have high authority and merit, will have no effect on your site's value.

Either redirect the 404 page (if applicable) or contact the referring domain to realign it, as previously described. While this might be a time-consuming procedure, the results will be worth it in the long run, even if they aren't visible during the code freeze itself.

To make sure you're constructing a complete list of backlinks, you can also utilise Kerboo to fill in your historical domains and your current domain. To learn more about how to re-align your backlinks with the help of Kerboo, check out this tutorial.

Make sure that your Website's Meta Data is Working

Meta data updates are a quick and straightforward technique to increase keyword optimisation. While titles aren't always taken into consideration by Google, it's still a good idea to optimise them because they're still a useful tool for focusing on specific keywords.

Similarly, descriptions aren't a ranking factor in and of themselves, but they can boost CTR, which in turn increases traffic. Incorporating your core emphasis keyword into the page title is a wonderful method to notify Google that your page and its content are related to that query and strengthen that.

Focus on your high-revenue and high-seasonality pages, which are likely to provide you larger returns during the code freeze, and add money terms that attract eager customers looking with transactional intent.. first. Additionally, by include keywords like "Black Friday" and "Cyber Monday" in their meta data, you may increase the number of people who click on to the category pages you've created just for those events.

In addition, working with your PPC team to learn what meta data is effective in the organic channel can help. Title tags that already include a high-volume priority keyword should be carefully renamed to avoid hurting your search engine rankings. If the query in the title has a high enough rating to merit keeping, make a decision.

Using a meta data checker can help you make sure your titles and descriptions are inside the allowed pixel count. Run it through a Screaming Frog spider crawl to scale it up.

Remove Low-Wuality Information to Improve Search Results

First and foremost, it guarantees that a higher proportion of link equity goes to high-value pages, depending on the ratio of high-quality content to low-quality material. A crawling agent may get trapped in a loop trying to reach low-value pages, reducing the discoverability of higher-value pages, such as blogs or news articles. Your crawl money will be better used if you eliminate them.

Export click and impression data from GSC for the previous 16 months and cross-reference it with a Screaming Frog crawl to locate these pages on your site. Any pages with no clicks, low impressions, or low content should be flagged. Redirects (if the page has any external links pointing to it) or 410/404-error codes might be used to indicate that the page has been deleted.

Remember to keep an eye out for URLs with little click/impression statistics but great potential for ranking for highly sought-after keywords as you go through these pages. Delete these sites and come back to them later to improve their SEO!

Tips that have stood the test of time for improving faceted navigation may be found in this list of best practises for optimising crawl performance.

Conclusion

On-page text updates and off-page link realignment are just a few of the many possibilities for boosting SEO even during a coding freeze. It makes sense to keep up the good work and take advantage of the forthcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales, which may lead to an increase in traffic, a rise in click-through rates (CTRs), and an increase in income. To get help on website improvements, call us today.