Most ranking failures are baked in before publication: the article duplicates an existing one, targets the wrong intent, ships without internal links, or carries a title nobody clicks. This checklist catches all of it in ten minutes, in the order the checks matter. It is part of SEO checklists for articles.
- Twelve checks, ten minutes, in the order the failures matter: duplication and intent first; links, title and slug before you ship.
- Most ranking failures are baked in before publication — this list exists to catch them while they are still cheap to fix.
- The two checks everyone skips are the internal-links check and the 'does this duplicate an existing page?' check.
- Keep a failure log: the item that keeps catching you is the one to bold, automate, or tape to the wall.
The checklist
- No duplicate exists. Search your own site for the topic. If a page targets the same intent, update or merge instead of publishing a rival (see cannibalization).
- Intent verified this week. You have read page one for the target query recently and this article matches its dominant type, format, and angle (the five-minute routine).
- One target query, stated. You can say in one sentence which query this article exists to win, and which cluster it belongs to.
- Title tag earns the click. Under ~60 characters, contains the topic plainly, promises only what the article delivers, no clickbait.
- Meta description written. 150–160 characters, written for a human scanning results, includes the benefit of clicking. (Google may rewrite it — a good original still improves your odds.)
- Clean slug. Short, readable, keyword-bearing, no dates you will regret, no typos. You will never want to change this again.
- One H1; logical headings. The H1 is the article's title; H2s map the sub-questions; no skipped levels for styling.
- Answer near the top. The introduction delivers an instalment of the answer in the first screenful (intro patterns).
- Internal links out. The article links to its main guide and 2–3 siblings with descriptive anchors.
- Internal links in — scheduled. You have listed the 2–3 existing articles you will edit today to link back to this one. (Publish-day edits, not someday.)
- Claims sourced. Every statistic or strong claim has a source, linked, from our research — nothing remembered from another blog's summary.
- Images have alt text; page loads fast. Alt text describes the image for someone who cannot see it; images are compressed; no autoplay anything.
Why this order
Items 1–3 are strategic: they decide whether the article should exist in this form at all. Items 4–7 are packaging: how the article appears in results and reads on arrival. Items 8–12 are structural and evidentiary: the things that are painful to retrofit — links you forget to add stay forgotten, and an unsourced claim published today becomes a correction tomorrow under any honest editorial policy.
The two checks everyone skips
Check 1 is skipped because searching your own site feels redundant — until Search Console shows two of your pages splitting a query. Check 10 is skipped because publish-day energy goes to the new page, not old ones. Both skips map directly onto the failure causes in our diagnosis guide, why articles don't rank. Protect these two and the checklist pays for itself.
Sources (5)
Google Search Central documentation on titles, snippets, and images (developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance); internal-linking rationale from Google's crawling documentation.
- Google Search Central — Google Search Essentials
- Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide
- Google Search Central — Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
- Google Search Central — Link best practices for Google
- Google Search Central — Block indexing with noindex
Turning this into your own checklist
Print this list, run it for a month, then edit it without mercy. Cross out anything you have never once failed (for you, it is ceremony, not a check) and add the item that would have caught your most recent publishing mistake — everyone's list grows a personal item or two: the author byline you always forget, the affiliate disclosure your reviews require, the image licence you must verify. The goal is a list short enough to run in ten minutes and personal enough that every item has caught a real error at least once. Ours has twelve items because those twelve have earned their places; yours will have its own dozen.
The five-minute emergency version
Deadline crushing you? Run items 1 (no duplicate), 4 (title), 9–10 (links out and scheduled links in), and 11 (claims sourced). Those four protect against the failures that cannot be quietly fixed tomorrow. Everything else can be polished within the week without lasting damage — but say so in your publishing log, and actually do the polish.
How this list interacts with drafting
Do not draft with the checklist open — it will strangle the writing. The on-page list belongs to drafting; this one belongs to the gate. The healthiest workflow separates the modes: write freely, edit for the reader, then switch hats and run the twelve gates as an inspector who did not write a word of it. On a one-person site that hat-switch is a fiction, but a useful one: a coffee and a fresh tab between drafting and checking does most of the work. The failures this list catches are disproportionately failures of familiarity — your eyes read the title you meant to write, not the one on the screen — and distance, even artificial distance, is the cure.
Recording checklist failures
When an item catches something, note it in your publishing log: date, article, item number. Patterns in that column are pure gold — they show which checks are load-bearing for your workflow. If item 10 (scheduled link-backs) catches a miss monthly, the fix is not more care; it is a workflow change, like keeping the link-back edits in the same browser session as the publish. Checklists diagnose systems, not just articles.
Batch publishing without batch errors
Sites that publish in batches — a week's spokes written together, a migration's worth of pages — face amplified versions of every risk on this list, because fatigue scales with the batch. Two adaptations help. First, run the gates per article at draft completion, not in a single exhausted pass at the end; the inspector mindset survives three articles, not fifteen. Second, add one batch-level check: open the site's cluster map and confirm every batch article appears on it, in the right guide, with its links reciprocal. Batch errors are disproportionately structural — a whole cluster published with a template that omits the return link — and only a batch-level view catches them before Google does.
The gatekeeper's question
Behind all twelve items sits one question an editor asks of anything leaving the building: "if this page is the only thing a stranger ever reads from us, does it earn the next visit?" The items are proxies for that judgement — accuracy, usefulness, navigability, honesty. When an item and the question conflict, the question wins; checklists serve judgement, never the reverse.
Frequently asked questions
What if I publish without the checklist and fix things later?
Some items retrofit fine (meta description). Others do not: a changed slug needs redirects, missing launch links are usually forgotten, and a duplicate published today creates a merge job later. The ten minutes is cheaper.
Should the checklist differ for updates vs. new articles?
Yes — refreshes use the content refresh checklist instead, which assumes the article exists and focuses on intent, gaps, and facts.
Do I need to check mobile appearance before publishing?
Yes, add it mentally as check 13 if your theme is new: open the preview on a phone. Most of your readers will meet the article there.
Is a keyword in the slug essential?
Not essential, but a short descriptive slug helps readers and linkers understand the page. One clear topic phrase, no stuffing.
Who should run the checklist — writer or editor?
Whoever publishes. On a one-person site, that is you, ideally with a few minutes' distance from the draft so you read it fresh.
Run the twelve checks on your next article before it goes live, and log what they caught, however embarrassing. Within a year the log turns this generic list into a fingerprint of your site's actual weaknesses.
Which of the twelve checks would have caught your last publishing mistake?
