How to assess a six month SEO rollout

What six months can and can't tell you

Six months is a sensible point to stop and look properly. It's long enough for a rollout to have shipped most of its pages, and long enough for the early ones to have been crawled, indexed and shown in search. It isn't long enough to judge every page the same way, because a rollout ships in batches. The pages from month one have had half a year. The pages from month five have had a few weeks.

Google is plain about the timing. Its SEO Starter Guide says every change you make will take some time to be reflected on Google's end, that some changes might take effect in a few hours while others could take several months, and that in general you'd want to wait a few weeks to assess whether your work had beneficial effects. Its core updates documentation adds that after a site improves, it could take several months for Google's systems to learn and confirm the improvement over the long term. So a page published in the last month of a rollout has barely started its clock, and a review that lumps it in with older pages will undersell the work or oversell it.

Google is just as plain about promises. Its page on hiring an SEO warns that no one can promise a top ranking on Google, and tells you to look elsewhere if someone promises first place. A six month review shouldn't be scored against a promised position. It should be scored against what the plan said would be built, and against the enquiries those pages were meant to bring in.

That gives the review two jobs. One is about delivery: did the work happen, and was it done well enough to have a fair chance? The other is about outcomes: for the pages that had a fair chance, what changed, and was the change worth having? Keep the two separate. A poor result from work that was never shipped needs a very different conversation from a poor result from work that shipped on time and to standard. The guide on how long local SEO takes explains the separate clocks in more detail.

Gather the rollout ledger before the meeting

Most six month reviews go wrong before anyone opens a report. People arrive with a dashboard and a feeling, but no record of what was changed and when. Without that record you can't tell a rollout effect from a seasonal one, or a page that's slow to rank from a page that was never linked.

Build one rollout ledger first. It can be a plain spreadsheet with one row per page or change. Collect these items, in this order, a week or two before the review:

1. The original plan: every page, fix and task the rollout promised, with the month it was meant to ship and the search or service it was meant to cover.
2. The change log: what actually shipped, with the date it went live. Include changes outside the plan, such as a redesign, a new booking form, a phone number change or a page someone deleted.
3. Access to Google Search Console. Google's page on hiring an SEO suggests giving an outside auditor read access only at the audit stage, so you can share the data without handing over control.
4. Your Google Analytics 4 key events, such as call clicks and form submissions. Google's help says marking an event as a key event doesn't change historic data, so note the date each key event was set up and treat anything before it as missing.
5. Your Google Business Profile performance figures, if the rollout touched the profile. Google's help lists calls, website clicks, directions, messages, bookings, searches and views.
6. Your own job records: enquiries by source, and which ones became booked work. This is the only place the quality of a lead shows up.
7. A list of outside events in the period: a busy or quiet season, a price change, a new competitor, a staff shortage, and any Google ranking updates listed on Google's Search Status Dashboard.

Check what was delivered, and how well

Start the review with delivery, because every outcome you read later depends on it. Go down the plan and mark each item shipped, partly shipped or not shipped. Then check the shipped items against a small set of quality tests. A page that's live but not indexed, or indexed but linked from nowhere, hasn't had a fair test yet.

Search Console's Page indexing report is the main tool here. Google's help says it shows how many URLs on your site have been crawled and indexed, and that you shouldn't expect all URLs on your site to be indexed, only your key canonical pages. It lets you filter by a specific sitemap, so a rollout with its own sitemap can be checked on its own. Two statuses come up often in rollouts. Crawled, currently not indexed means Google crawled the page but didn't index it, and it may still be indexed later. Discovered, currently not indexed means Google found the page but hasn't crawled it yet. After you fix an issue, the report's Validate Fix button starts a check that Google's help says typically takes up to about two weeks.

Score each test as met or missed, cohort by cohort. A pattern of misses is a delivery finding, and it goes to the top of next quarter's list before any new pages are planned.

Split the results into launch cohorts

A cohort is a group of pages that started at the same time and do the same job. For a rollout, the simplest split is by launch month, then by page type within each month: suburb pages, service pages and guides behave differently, so they shouldn't share a line. Pages that existed before the rollout form their own cohort, and they're your control group, because they show what the site was doing anyway.

Search Console makes this split possible. Its help says the Performance report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, and that results can be filtered by page URL with a partial or full match. If your rollout used a consistent URL pattern, such as every suburb page sitting under one folder, one filter pulls a whole cohort. Two cautions apply. Google's help says impressions are counted by URL or by property depending on the filters you use, so a property total and the sum of its pages won't always agree. And anonymised queries are dropped when you filter by query, so query totals are an approximation.

Read each cohort against its age. The table below is a rough guide to what's fair to expect at each age, built on Google's own timing guidance. It's a reading aid, not a target. Your market, your competitors and the quality of each page all move it.

Read each cohort's outcomes in order

With cohorts set, read the outcomes for each one in the same order every time. The order matters because each step explains the next. A cohort with no impressions can't have clicks; a cohort with clicks but no key events has a page problem, not a search problem.

Compare like with like. Google's guide to debugging traffic drops suggests setting Search Console's date filter to the last 16 months to see whether a dip repeats each year, and using the Compare tab to set the last three months against the same months a year earlier. For a seasonal trade, that year-on-year view matters more than month on month. The guide on local SEO seasonality covers how to read it.

Then check outside events against your dates. Google's core updates documentation recommends waiting at least a full week after a core update finishes before analysing your site in Search Console, then comparing the week after with a week before. If a cohort moved the same week an update rolled out, note it, and don't credit or blame the rollout for that move on its own.

Know what each channel includes, too. Google's help for GA4's default channel groups says Organic Search counts visits from non-ad links in organic search results, including Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. Visits from tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and others fall into a separate AI Assistant channel, which excludes Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode. At the time of writing (October 2026), that means AI-driven visits are spread across two channels, and a review should read both.

1. Impressions. Is Google showing the cohort's pages, and for the searches they were built for? Read the query list, not only the total.
2. Clicks and click-through rate. Are people choosing the result? Low clicks on healthy impressions often points to a title or description that doesn't match the search.
3. Average position, read with care. Google's help defines it as the topmost position a link to your page held, averaged across all queries, and says an AI Overview counts as a single position. Treat it as a direction, not a score.
4. Organic landing page visits. GA4's Landing page report, under Engagement, shows sessions and key events for each page where a visit began.
5. Key events. Calls and form submissions that started on the cohort's pages.
6. Booked work. From your own records: which of those enquiries were real jobs, in areas you serve, for work you want. The guide on connecting search data to sales quality shows how to match them.

Choose next quarter's work, cohort by cohort

Every cohort leaves the review with one decision and one owner. Decide from the combination of delivery and outcome, never from outcome alone. A strong cohort tells you what kind of page to build more of. A weak cohort that was delivered well tells you something about demand or the page type. A weak cohort that wasn't delivered well tells you nothing yet, except that the delivery needs fixing.

Keep the next quarter's list short. A review that ends with twenty actions usually ends with none done. Pick the few changes that touch the most enquiries, put a date on each, and agree the check that will show whether it worked. The guide on how to prioritise the next 50 pages covers ranking the new pages; when to merge overlapping SEO pages covers combining.

Bring the same questions to the meeting each time, whether you run the review yourself or with an agency. Google's page on hiring an SEO suggests asking what results to expect, in what timeframe, and how success is measured, and asking for detailed information about recommendations and the reasoning behind them. Those questions work just as well six months in, and the list below adapts them to a rollout. The table sets out the five decisions and when each one fits.

• Which planned items didn't ship, and why?
• Which cohort brought the most booked work, and what do its pages have in common?
• Which cohort brought visits but no enquiries, and what's the reason we think explains it?
• What changed outside the plan, and how did we account for it?
• What will we stop doing next quarter?
• What check, on what date, will show whether each next-quarter change worked?

Worked example: a six month review for a Nambour roofer

The business below is invented to show the method. The place names are real; the business, its pages and its records are made up, and no figures are given because none would be real.

A roofing business based in Nambour ran a six month rollout. The plan was a set of suburb pages for roof restoration across the hinterland in months one and two, a batch of service pages for gutter and roof leak repairs in months three and four, and a handful of guides in months five and six. The owner sits down with the change log and the plan two weeks before the review.

Delivery comes first. The month one and two suburb pages all shipped on time. Three of the service pages slipped from month three to month five, so that cohort is younger than planned. The Page indexing report shows two suburb pages as crawled but not indexed. Both read almost the same as their neighbours, with only the suburb name changed. A test call from a phone shows the click-to-call key event was set up in month two, so month one's calls weren't recorded in GA4 at all.

Then the cohorts. The suburb pages from months one and two have had four to six months. Filtered by their folder in Search Console, they show impressions for roof restoration searches in the suburbs they name, and a steady trickle of clicks. In GA4's Landing page report, some of those visits led to call clicks. The owner checks the job book: most of those calls were genuine restoration quotes, a few were for a suburb the business doesn't serve. The leak repair pages that shipped late have had a few weeks. They're indexed and linked, and that's all that can fairly be said. The guides are too new to judge on anything but delivery.

Outside events are checked against the dates. Search Console's year-on-year comparison shows the older pages followed the same seasonal shape as last year. A core update finished in month four; the owner notes it, waits the week Google recommends, and finds no cohort moved sharply that week.

The decisions follow. The suburb pages that bring genuine quotes: continue. The two near-duplicate suburb pages: fix, by adding real local job detail, or combine them into their stronger neighbours. The page bringing calls from outside the service area: stop, and adjust the wording so it's honest about where the business works. The late leak repair cohort: fix the schedule slip in the log and judge it at the next review. Expand goes to restoration pages for two more hinterland suburbs where the job book already shows regular work. Each action gets an owner, a date and a check, and the owner books the next review for three months' time.

If you'd like a second set of eyes on your own rollout, you can request a strategy review and bring your plan and change log along.