The first half of the year teaches you something. Q1 set the baseline. Q2 either confirmed your strategy was working or quietly suggested it wasn’t. Now you’re at the doorway of Q3, when most of the budget for the back half of the year gets allocated and the levers you choose now will compound through year-end.
This is the moment for a marketing audit — not the kind that takes a consulting firm three weeks, but a focused review you can run yourself in an afternoon. Below are seven areas worth a careful look before you finalize Q3 plans. Each section is short on purpose: the goal is to make small course corrections, not rewrite your strategy.
1. Your Search Engine Visibility — Organic and Local
Open Google Search Console and look at the last 90 days versus the prior 90. Total clicks, total impressions, and average position. Sort your top queries by impression growth. Are the queries you’re winning the ones that actually drive business, or have you been picking up visibility on terms that don’t convert?
For local businesses, also pull a fresh Google Business Profile insights snapshot. Direction requests, phone calls, and “search vs. discovery” splits tell a story about whether people are finding you by name (good but limited) or by category (better for new-customer growth).
If your organic numbers are flat or declining, that’s not a Q4 problem — that’s a now problem. The traffic you build through Q3 is what feeds your Q4 conversions.
2. Your Top Converting Pages — And What’s Slowing the Rest
Pull your top 10 pages by conversion rate. Then pull your top 10 pages by traffic. The overlap between those two lists tells you where your wins are. The pages with high traffic but low conversion are where the next quarter’s optimization budget should go.
A practical check: open each high-traffic, low-conversion page and ask one question — does the path from headline to call-to-action take more than three seconds to be obvious? If yes, the page is leaking. Heatmaps and session recordings are useful, but most of the answer is visible in 30 seconds of honest reading.
3. Your Paid Campaign Spend Quality — Not Just Volume
Volume is easy to measure. Quality is where most accounts quietly bleed.
Run this filter on your Google Ads or Meta accounts: sort campaigns by cost per acquisition (CPA), then look at the bottom third. How much of your last quarter’s spend went into the campaigns with the worst CPA? In most accounts we audit, it’s somewhere between 20 and 40 percent. That’s where the easiest savings live.
The fix isn’t usually to pause — it’s to ask whether those campaigns are doing brand work that the conversion tracking isn’t catching, or whether they’re genuinely underperforming. Honest answer determines next action.
4. Your Email List Health
Open your email platform and check three numbers: list size growth over the last six months, average open rate trend, and unsubscribe rate trend. Healthy lists grow steadily, opens stay flat or improve slightly, and unsubscribes stay low.
If open rates are dropping, run a re-engagement campaign before Q3. Unengaged subscribers hurt your sender reputation, and that hurts the rest of your list. A 30-day re-engagement series followed by a clean prune is one of the highest-ROI activities most lists never do.
5. Your Reviews and Reputation
Search your business name in Google and pretend you’re a prospect. What shows up in the first screen? The Google Business Profile, your reviews, any AI-generated overview, your website, and probably a Yelp or third-party listing.
Recent review velocity matters more than total review count. A business with 200 reviews and the last one from eight months ago looks weaker than one with 80 reviews and three from this month. If your last review was more than 60 days ago, building a steady review-request flow into Q3 should be a small project of its own.
6. Your Reporting Setup — Will You Have What You Need for Q3 Decisions?
This one is unglamorous and high-leverage. Open the dashboard you (or your team, or your agency) use to make weekly marketing calls. Ask: in October, will I be able to tell from this dashboard what worked in Q3?
If the answer requires going into three different platforms and pulling exports manually, it’s worth a week of work now to fix it. The cost is upfront. The savings is every weekly meeting for the rest of the year.
7. Your Brand Consistency Across Channels
Pull up your homepage, your top-performing landing page, your Google Ads description lines, your Instagram bio, your LinkedIn company description, and the latest email you sent. Read them in sequence.
Do they sound like the same business? Do the value propositions match? Do the calls to action line up with what you actually want the next customer to do?
Drift happens slowly. A change to the homepage in March that didn’t propagate to the email footer. A campaign launched in April that introduced a new tagline only your paid team uses. Q3 planning is a good moment to re-align these so every channel reinforces the same story.
What to Do With the Audit
Done well, this audit takes a focused afternoon and produces a short list — usually five to seven specific actions. Two or three are worth prioritizing for Q3. The rest go into a backlog you reference at the next quarterly review.
The discipline isn’t in doing all of it. It’s in doing the audit at all, before you’ve already committed Q3 spend and headcount to a plan built on Q1 assumptions.
If you’d like an outside set of eyes on your Q3 plan — or if any of these areas are flagging something you don’t have time to dig into yourself — our team at Relative Marketing Group does mid-year audits for clients across SEO, paid, content, and reporting. A 30-minute call is usually enough to surface the two or three highest-leverage opportunities for the back half of your year.
What Google’s Documentation and Industry Research Say a Quarterly Audit Should Cover
The seven audit areas above are not arbitrary — they map directly to what Google and major research firms have published about marketing effectiveness reviews. Google’s helpful, reliable, people-first content guidance is the document quietly powering most of the content-quality conversation in 2026. A Q3 audit that does not include a content decay review against this guidance is missing the highest-leverage SEO lever of the quarter. We see the pattern across our client portfolio — home services, healthcare, fitness, restaurants, professional services, retail, B2B — every time: pages that ranked in 2023 and 2024 quietly stopped ranking in 2025 because they failed the helpful content bar, not because of a technical issue.
On Google Business Profile, the official performance reporting documentation is the source of truth for what counts as a meaningful interaction. A credible Q3 audit pulls direction requests, calls, and message conversations separately — not as a single “engagement” number — because each represents different intent. We routinely find that businesses focused on call volume are missing a step-change in direction requests that signals an underweighted location page.
For paid media, Google’s attribution guidance matters because Q3 budget decisions are usually made on Q2 attribution data. If the attribution model has not been reviewed since Q1, the budget shift you are about to make is built on a stale view of which channels actually contribute. Switching from last-click to data-driven attribution mid-year often reveals that paid social and YouTube were underfunded — a finding that holds across most verticals we audit.
The seventh and most important audit item is the “stop doing” list. McKinsey’s published research on marketing performance has repeatedly found that mid-year deprecation of underperforming tactics outperforms new-tactic experimentation. If you want a structured pass, our content strategy and development services and broader AI consulting work treat the Q3 audit as the foundation for the back-half plan, not a standalone deliverable.
