SEO Publishing Checklist for Content Teams

I use this before publishing anything on the blog.

Not because I like checklists, but because SEO drift is expensive and easy to miss.

Most breakage happens in boring places:

• wrong canonical
• stale sitemap URLs
• descriptions that are too long to be useful
• pages with zero internal links

This checklist keeps that under control.

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Metadata Baseline

• Title is between 45 and 60 characters.
• Description is between 120 and 160 characters.
• Primary keyword appears naturally in title and opening paragraph.
• Open Graph and Twitter metadata are aligned with page intent.
• Social image URL resolves correctly.

Canonical and URL Integrity

• Slug is final and human-readable.
• canonical_url exactly matches the live route.
• Canonical uses https and the correct domain.
• Canonical is not duplicated elsewhere.

Content Signals

• Intro answers search intent in plain language.
• Subheadings are meaningful (H2/H3) and scannable.
• At least 3 contextual internal links exist.
• ## Related reading section is included.
• Images have descriptive alt text.

Pre-Release Commands

I run these every time:

yarn validate:content
yarn validate:seo
yarn build

• Required frontmatter fields are present.
• SEO validator passes (or warnings are consciously accepted).
• Production build succeeds.

Indexing Workflow

• Page is present in sitemap.
• There is at least one crawl path from nav or related pages.
• URL is inspected in Search Console.
• Indexing is requested for priority pages.

Post-Publish Review (7-30 days)

• Track impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position.
• Compare against baseline in Search Console.
• If CTR is weak, test title/description variants.
• If position is weak, improve internal links and cluster support.

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Final note

This is intentionally simple.

If your publishing workflow is consistent, SEO gets more predictable. If your workflow is inconsistent, no plugin will save you.

Related reading

• SEO URL and Canonical Policy for The Tech Pulse
• 30-Day SEO Ranking Plan
• Next.js App Router SEO Checklist for Content Sites