A Year-End SEO Check Before 2027: 7 Items for Your Website

The last weeks of the year are busy with ads and campaigns, so site upkeep gets postponed. But a few small problems waiting for you in January can affect the whole first quarter. You can finish the seven items below in one afternoon. Each says where to click and what to look for.

The seven-item check

1. Search Console indexing report. Open the 'Pages' report and check the reasons under 'Not indexed'. Redirects and 404s can be normal, but if a page you sell from sits under 'Crawled, currently not indexed', write it down. Also confirm in 'Sitemaps' that your sitemap is read without errors. When carrying the site into the new year, also review redirects: try a few pages whose address changed during the year and see whether the old address still lands on the new page.

A small note: most of these items use free tools. Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, the Rich Results Test and the Business Profile dashboard cost nothing. You only need to have added your site to Search Console and verified ownership once.

2. Speed and mobile experience. In Search Console open the Core Web Vitals report and look at the 'Poor' or 'Needs improvement' groups on mobile. Click the issue covering the most pages. For a single page, paste the address into PageSpeed Insights and start with the large images and unnecessary scripts it lists first. Measure speed on both phone and desktop; if most customers come from phones, the mobile result is your real measure. Buttons that jump while the page loads and late-arriving images can also make visitors tap the wrong thing.

3. Old and thin content. In the Performance report choose the last 12 months, sort by page and find those losing clicks. Update stale details such as prices, dates and years. Either strengthen very short one-paragraph pages or merge them into a similar page and redirect the old one. Updating is usually better than deleting, because the page keeps its history in Google.

4. Google Business Profile. Open your profile: are opening hours, holiday and New Year hours, phone, address, service list and photos current? Reply to unanswered reviews with short, personal and polite answers; avoid template text. Fill in the services and products section, pick the right categories and set special New Year hours; a wrong time on the map costs you a customer who has already made the trip.

5. Internal links and broken links. Crawl your site with a crawler tool (free versions exist) and list links returning 404. Check that blog posts link to your service and product pages; if your most important page has no links pointing to it, add some. Do not just delete a broken link; redirect it to the right page or fix the link.

6. Structured data. Enter your home page, one service or product page and one article into Google's Rich Results Test. Fix any errors or warnings in markup such as business details, product and FAQ. Prices and hours in the markup must match what the page shows.

7. Readiness for AI search. Open your main service pages and ask: does this page answer the customer's question clearly in the first paragraph? If not, add a 2-3 sentence answer summary and a short FAQ section beneath it. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need no special markup; a well-written, crawlable page is the right base.

The goal of this check is not a perfect site but closing the doors you have overlooked. Even in a small business, a week of neglect can send campaign spend to a broken page or a wrong opening hour. Ad visitors landing on a slow or erroring page during the November sales period (Black Friday, 11.11) is the same kind of loss.

While you do the check, also try the site like a customer. Search your business on Google from your phone, tap the result and see how fast the page opens and how easy it is to reach the phone number and directions. Then search for something like 'your service + district' and see what information your competitors highlight. This few-minute test often reveals problems tools do not show: unreadably small text, buttons that do not work or missing address details.

Finally, look back at this year's goals: which pages brought you the most calls or forms? Protecting them can matter more than writing new pages. Keeping your best pages among the most recently updated helps them keep working in January.

Order for the first half hour

• First check page indexing and sitemap status in Search Console.
• Then update hours and phone on your business profile; it is the fastest win.
• Run the speed test for your three most visited pages.
• Add the remaining tasks to your January plan.