The Mid-Year Marketing Audit: 4 Checks to Run Before Q3
Half the year is almost gone. Here’s a 30-minute audit that tells you whether your marketing is actually working — or just looking busy.
Why May Is the Best Time to Audit
We’re at the halfway mark. Q1 numbers are settled, Q2 is mostly written, and Q3 planning hasn’t locked in yet. That window — May into early June — is when small, smart adjustments compound for the rest of the year. Wait until August and you’re course-correcting in a riptide.
1. Pull a Real Number on Your Cost Per Lead
Open your ad accounts and your CRM side by side. Spend ÷ qualified leads. Not impressions. Not clicks. Not form fills. Qualified leads — the ones your sales team actually wants to talk to. If that number is higher than it was in January, something has drifted: ad creative is fatigued, audiences are stale, or your landing pages stopped converting the kind of visitor you’re paying for.
2. Audit the Pages That Aren’t Pulling Their Weight
In Google Search Console or GA4, sort your pages by traffic. Then look at the bottom 20%. These are pages eating crawl budget without earning attention. Consolidate them, redirect the duds, or rewrite the ones with intent that matches a real query. Most sites have at least five pages that should quietly disappear.
3. Check Your Top 10 Keywords for Position Drift
Spring algorithm updates shifted a lot of long-tail rankings. Pull your top 10 keywords and compare today’s position to your average from January through March. Anything that dropped three or more spots needs attention this month — content refresh, internal links, or a fresh angle. Don’t wait for the traffic loss to show up in your revenue report.
4. Read Your Last Five Customer Conversations
Open the last five emails or calls from people who became customers. What words did they use? What objection did they raise? Then look at your homepage hero. Does it sound like the conversation? If not, that’s probably the cheapest fix on this list — and the one with the biggest knock-on effect across SEO, paid, and social.
What to Do With This
Pick one. Not all four. Audits become wallpaper if every output is “do everything.” Start with whichever number scared you most when you opened it — that’s the one paying for itself by August.