The mid-year point is an underused moment for SEO review. By June, you have six months of performance data from the current year, enough to identify what is working, what has decayed, and what adjustments are needed before the second half. The Q3 and Q4 periods are typically the most commercially important for UK businesses in retail, services, and hospitality, making a thorough mid-year check particularly valuable for ensuring your SEO is performing at its best before peak trading periods.
This checklist covers 20 specific things to review and action before Q3.
Technical SEO Health Checks
1. Review Google Search Console Coverage Report
Check the Coverage report in GSC for any new errors, increases in excluded pages, or unexpected changes in indexed page counts. A sudden increase in "Crawled but not indexed" pages or a new exclusion category appearing may indicate a technical issue introduced in the first half of the year.
2. Check Your Core Web Vitals Status
In GSC, review the Core Web Vitals report for both mobile and desktop. Identify any URLs moved to "Poor" status since your last review. Google's page experience signals continue to be incorporated into rankings; any pages in "Poor" territory for LCP, CLS, or INP should be flagged for developer attention.
3. Audit Your Robots.txt for Unintended Blocks
If your site has had development work in H1, check that no temporary robots.txt blocks were accidentally left in place. Search for any Disallow rules that might affect important content directories.
4. Verify Your XML Sitemap Is Accurate
Navigate to your sitemap URL and check that it includes your most important pages and does not include 404 pages, noindexed pages, or pages with redirect responses. An outdated sitemap with incorrect URLs can misdirect Googlebot's crawl.
5. Run a Screaming Frog Crawl and Review New 404s
Run a fresh Screaming Frog crawl and compare 404 pages against your last crawl. New 404s that have not been redirected waste link equity and create a poor user experience. Identify whether any 404s have external backlinks (check in Ahrefs) and prioritise those for redirection.
6. Check Your Page Speed Scores
Run your top 10 traffic pages through PageSpeed Insights. Compare scores against your January benchmark. If scores have degraded (often caused by new page elements, third-party scripts, or image additions), identify the cause and address it.
Content Performance Review
7. Identify Your Top Organic Landing Pages and Their Year-on-Year Trend
In GA4, compare organic session data for your top 20 landing pages: H1 2026 vs H1 2025 (or your first period of tracking). Pages with declining organic traffic require investigation and likely a content refresh.
8. Review Keyword Rankings for Your Core Commercial Terms
Pull current ranking positions for your 20 most important commercial keywords in your rank tracking tool. Compare against January. For any keywords that have dropped from page 1 to page 2 or beyond, review whether a competitor has overtaken you and assess whether a content update could recapture the position.
9. Identify Your Underperforming Content
Use GSC to find pages with 500+ impressions per month but a CTR below 2%. These pages have visibility but are not compelling enough to generate clicks. Review and update the title tags and meta descriptions for these pages to improve CTR without changing rankings.
10. Prioritise Content That Needs Refreshing
Review your top-performing content from 2024 and earlier. Identify any posts with statistics or examples older than two years. Schedule content refreshes for your highest-traffic posts before Q3, while there is time for refreshed content to regain or improve rankings before peak season.
11. Check for New Featured Snippet Opportunities
In GSC, identify queries where you rank positions 2 to 5 and where Google shows a featured snippet. Review whether your content is structured to compete for the snippet: does it include a direct, concise answer to the query immediately after the relevant heading?
12. Assess Your Content Pipeline for H2
Review your planned content calendar for H2 against the keyword opportunities identified in your GSC data. Are there high-impression queries where you have no content or only thin content? Prioritise new content production for these gaps, particularly for topics that will be commercially relevant in Q3 and Q4.
Link Profile and Authority Review
13. Audit New Links Acquired in H1
Review links acquired in H1 in Ahrefs. Confirm that new links come from relevant, credible sources. If any new links appear from low-quality or potentially toxic sources (link networks, unrelated directories, sites with very thin content), consider disavowing them proactively.
14. Check for Lost Backlinks
In Ahrefs Lost Backlinks report, review links lost in H1. For any lost links from high-DR domains, investigate whether outreach could reclaim the link (broken link, removed page, content update).
15. Review Your Unlinked Brand Mentions
Run a brand mention search in Ahrefs Content Explorer or Google, filtering for the past six months. Identify any high-DA publications that mentioned your brand without linking. Prioritise outreach for these before Q3.
16. Assess Internal Linking for Your Key Commercial Pages
Check how many internal links point to your most important commercial landing pages using Screaming Frog or Ahrefs. If your core service or product pages receive fewer than five internal links, update your blog content and category pages to add relevant internal links pointing to these high-priority destinations.
Strategic and Competitive Review
17. Run a Competitor SERP Review for Your Core Keywords
Search your 10 most important keywords on Google. Have competitor rankings changed significantly in H1? Have any new competitors entered the top 3 for keywords you previously held? Identify which competitors have gained ground and assess why (new content, links, or algorithm tailwind for their approach).
18. Check Your Google Business Profile for Accuracy
For local businesses, confirm that your GBP opening hours, address, phone number, and description are accurate. Update your summer opening hours if applicable. Confirm that your service list and photos are current.
19. Assess Your Review Acquisition Rate
How many Google reviews have you received in H1? If your review acquisition has stalled, review your request process. A declining rate of new reviews reduces the freshness signal of your GBP and can affect local ranking position over time.
20. Review Your SEO Goals and Metrics Against H1 Targets
Compare your actual H1 organic performance against the targets you set at the start of the year:
- Organic traffic trend (sessions, users)
- Organic conversion rate and total conversions
- Rankings for core keywords
- Domain Rating or Domain Authority trend
- Share of voice for your priority keyword set
Identify where performance is ahead of target, on target, or behind target. For areas behind target, assess whether the strategy needs adjustment for H2 or whether the timeline simply needs extending.
Working through this checklist systematically ensures your SEO programme is aligned with the data from the first half of the year and positioned for strong performance in H2. Dynamically conducts mid-year and quarterly SEO reviews for UK businesses as part of our ongoing SEO retainer service. Get in touch if you want a professional mid-year SEO audit for your site.
