Most businesses set next year’s marketing budget in the autumn, and most of them set it without a search plan to put it against. That’s how SEO ends up as whatever money is left over in March. If you want 2027 to go differently, now is when that gets decided.
Why the autumn, specifically
Search work takes time to show up. Content has to be written, published, crawled and assessed before it earns anything, and technical fixes wait for developer time that is usually booked months ahead. A plan agreed in January tends to deliver its first results in the second half of the year. A plan agreed now can be underway when January starts.
There are three more practical reasons.
Budgets are being set now. If search isn’t in the conversation when next year’s numbers are agreed, it usually gets whatever is left. A plan with a clear order and a realistic cost gives it a proper line.
Big changes want a quiet window. If a site rebuild, a platform change or a URL restructure is coming, it should be timed away from your busiest trading period. For most retailers that means planning it now, not deciding in November.
Search has changed a lot this year. AI Overviews, AI Mode and assistants like ChatGPT now answer many of the questions that used to send people to websites. A plan written before that shift may be aimed at clicks that no longer exist.
What a planning session covers
It starts with the evidence rather than a template.
- Where you are now. What Search Console shows, which pages actually bring in enquiries or sales, and where the site is being crawled but not indexed.
- What changed this year. Whether traffic moved because of demand, rankings, the results page itself, or AI answers taking the click.
- Where the opportunity is. The searches worth winning, the pages worth improving, and the ones that can be left alone.
- Paid and organic together. Where you’re paying for clicks that organic could win, and where paid is doing a job organic can’t.
- AI search. Whether your business is being named in AI answers, and what would make it more likely.
- What should wait. Said out loud, because a plan that lists forty things at the same priority rarely gets anything done.
What you get
A plan with an order to it. What happens first, what comes next, and what explicitly waits, with the reasoning behind each decision.
Each piece of work carries a complexity rating rather than a date, because timing depends on approvals and developer availability that neither of us fully controls. It’s written so a developer, a writer and a business owner can all act on it without a translation.
Where the honest answer is that SEO isn’t the main thing holding the business back, the plan says so.
How it starts
With a free analysis. I look at your site, your Search Console and who you’re really competing with, then come back with what I’d do first and what it would cost to do. There’s no obligation attached, and no list prices, because the cost depends entirely on what the analysis finds.
If it’s useful to talk it through, we can have a chat to walk through it before anything is agreed.
Related
The full service is SEO strategy, and what a 12-month SEO plan looks like shows the shape of one. How the work is done, from data to delivery, is on how I work, and the FalseEyelashes.co.uk case study shows what a year of planned content work can build.
FAQ
When should I start planning next year’s SEO?
In the autumn, ideally September or October. That’s usually when budgets are set, and search work needs lead time before it pays back. Starting then means the first changes can be live early in the new year rather than being agreed in January and delivered in the summer.
How long does a planning session take?
The free analysis comes first, and turning it into a full plan depends on the size of the site and how much data there is to work through. A small business site takes far less time than a large ecommerce catalogue. I’ll tell you how long it will take once I’ve seen what’s involved.
Do I need Search Console access?
It makes the plan much better, because it’s the only source for what your site actually earns in Google rather than what a tool estimates. Without it the plan still works, but it’s built on third-party figures that are useful for comparison and less reliable as absolute numbers.
Will the plan include AI search?
Yes. It checks whether your business appears or is cited in Google’s AI Overviews and in assistants such as ChatGPT, and what would make that more likely. Most of the work that helps is still sound SEO, so it’s part of the same plan rather than a separate project.
Start planning 2027
Get in touch, or start with a free assessment. The sooner it starts, the more of next year the plan can shape.