Blog Post Publishing Checklist

Confirm the publish date in the editorial calendar (Notion, Airtable, or Asana) and the assigned writer, editor, and reviewer. Conflicts with paid-media launches or product announcements are a common gotcha — flag them now, not the day before publish.

Use Ahrefs or Semrush to confirm search volume, difficulty, and SERP intent (informational, commercial, transactional). The post must match the dominant intent on page one or it will not rank — a how-to article cannot displace product pages on a transactional query.

Brief covers working title, target keyword, search intent, persona, key arguments, internal link targets, outbound sources, and target word count from a Clearscope or Surfer pull. Skip the brief and the writer will optimize for the wrong intent.

Target keyword in the first 60 characters so it survives SERP truncation. Test the title in CoSchedule's Headline Studio or Sharethrough for emotional and clarity scoring before locking it.

Include the target keyword once, frame the value proposition, end with an implicit CTA. Anything over 155 characters truncates on most desktop SERPs.

Hyphen-separated, lowercase, three to five words, no stop words, no dates that will age the post. Once published, changing the slug requires a 301 — get it right the first time.

Writer hits target word count from the Clearscope brief and flags any unverified claims for fact-check. Subheadings should map to the H2 outline in the brief — drift here breaks SEO topical coverage.

Two to four internal links to related cluster posts using descriptive anchor text — not "click here." Pull from the topic-cluster map; orphan posts that don't feed a pillar drag down site authority.

Editor checks brand voice against the messaging house, paragraph length, scannability, and CTA placement (top-half, mid-content, bottom). This is the structural pass — copy edit happens next.

AP style or your house style guide, grammar, link descriptions, and accessibility (heading levels in order, alt text written, no color-only emphasis). Run through Grammarly or Hemingway for a first pass before human review.

Any quantitative claim, comparative claim, or customer testimonial with a material outcome triggers FTC and Lanham Act substantiation requirements. Mark each one inline so legal review knows what to verify.

Bundle the source studies, internal data exports, and customer-consent letters into one file. Legal will not approve the post without a substantiation file behind every flagged claim — the FTC Endorsement Guides require it on file before publish.

Run the staging URL through Google's Rich Results Test and Schema.org validator. Article, BlogPosting, or HowTo schema as appropriate. Broken JSON-LD is silent — the post will publish fine but lose rich-snippet eligibility.

1200×630 for OG/Twitter cards, under 200KB compressed via TinyPNG or Squoosh. Confirm alt text is written for every image — accessibility and SEO both depend on it. Heavy images tank Core Web Vitals (LCP).

Use the team's UTM convention document — source/medium/campaign must match what the dashboards expect. Convention drift across writers is the top reason GA4 attribution becomes uncomparable across campaigns.

Use GA4 DebugView or Tag Assistant to confirm the conversion event fires on actual form submit, not on email-blur or page-load. A mis-mapped event inflates reported conversions and distorts paid-media budget allocation.

Preview on the staging environment (HubSpot, WordPress, Webflow, or Contentful). Check mobile rendering, image loading, embedded video, and the canonical URL. Publish only after staging signoff.

Use the URL Inspection tool in GSC and request indexing. Submission speeds first-crawl from days to hours. Confirm the page returns 200, not 301 or noindex, before requesting.

Gated content sits behind a form and feeds the MAP (HubSpot, Marketo, Pardot) for lead capture. Ungated maximizes organic reach and backlinks. Choose based on the post's role in the funnel — TOFU usually ungated, MOFU often gated.

Form fields match the lead-scoring model in HubSpot or Marketo. Set the thank-you redirect, the auto-responder email, and the lead-source UTM. Confirm the asset PDF is hosted and the download link works before promoting.

Segment must match the post's topic and persona — sending a developer post to the marketing-ops list tanks engagement and trains your reputation against the spam folder. Run a Litmus inbox preview before scheduling.

Queue LinkedIn, X, and any other relevant channels through Sprout Social or Buffer. UTM tag each link separately so attribution distinguishes channels. Tag any expert sources quoted in the post — adds reach when they reshare.

Pull GA4 sessions, average engagement time, scroll depth, and conversion rate. Compare against the topic-cluster baseline. Note any social or email outliers that drove disproportionate traffic.

Confirm the page is indexed in GSC, check current SERP position for the target keyword in Ahrefs or Semrush, and note any backlinks acquired. Flag for the quarterly content audit if performance is below the cluster median.