You have
a good post!
It is well-written, well-argued, properly structured. It reflects genuine expertise on the topic. You are ready to publish.
Thank you for reading this post, don’t forget to subscribe!Now: give it 20 minutes.
Not because the post isn’t ready, it’s ready and you know in your heart that it’s ready — but because there are still five things.
They take twenty minutes collectively, and they determine whether a good post performs or disappears into the archive without a trace. Most content teams skip some or all of them.
These content teams then get to wonder why the posts that seemed strong are invisible six months later.
Here are the five things.
Thing One:
Read the Title and
Meta Description as a
SERP Result
Open a private browser window. Search the primary keyword you are targeting. Look at the results.
Now imagine your title and meta description on that list. Is it the one you would click? Does it make a specific promise the others don’t? Does it create any reason to choose your result over what is already there?
If that’s a no — if your title is generic enough to be any of the other results — rewrite your title and meta, your SERP presentation, before you publish.
A post that ranks and gets no clicks is not performing. Titles earn clicks, clicks earn rankings. Simply publish nothing you wouldn’t pick.
Thing Two: Check
Your Internal Links —
in Both Directions
This thing is two things but you do them together.
First: go through the post and add contextual internal links to your most relevant already existing content. Every piece you publish should connect to all the content around it. If you’re writing about topic clusters and you have a post about pillar pages, link to it in the body, right where it is relevant, with anchor text that makes this clear.
Second: Now, and this one is more annoying but more powerful, go to your two or three most relevant existing posts and add a contextual link from them to the new post.
A new post with no internal links pointing to it starts from zero authority. A new post with links from your established content starts life with structural support.
Both things take five minutes tops. Neither happens by default. Make them happen before the post is live.
Thing Three:
Check Your Alt Text
Every image in the post should have descriptive alt text. Not “image1.jpg,” not “featured image,” not the verbatim post title— descriptive alt text that tells both Mama Google and a screen reader what the image actually shows.
Alt text is both an accessibility requirement and an SEO signal. It is also one of the most consistently neglected elements in content publishing, which is pretty ugly if you think about it.
Run through every image before the post goes live. two minutes.
The last two are done immediately on publication, but they do belong in this blog.
Thing Four:
Confirm Your Schema
Is All Good
Open Google’s Rich Results Test and run your post URL through it.
Even if you’re using a schema plugin, do it. Doing this confirms the schema is correctly implemented and eligible for rich results.
If you’re implementing schema manually, first of all you’re amazing and scary and second of all, you’ll catch errors before they compound across the indexing cycle.
things to check
- Article schema with a complete author entity and all correct dates.
- FAQ schema if it contains question-and-answer content.
- HowTo schema if the post is instructional.
- Breadcrumb schema reflecting the correct hierarchy.
Maybe think of it like this: A schema error that goes live and sits for ninety days before anyone notices has been silently hurting you for ninety days. Catch it before you leave.
Thing Five: Submit to
Google Search console
Sorry, but you must.
After the post is live, go to GSC, open the URL Inspection tool, paste the URL, request indexing.
Google will find new posts eventually without this step. But “eventually” is anywhere from a few days to several weeks, depending on your crawl frequency and domain authority.
A manual submission typically produces indexing within 24-48 hours. On a post you care about, this is obviously worth 30 seconds.
Why These Five Things
Get Skipped
They aren’t complicated, nor are they technically demanding. They are small, specific, low-stakes tasks that individually feel like they could wait.
They get skipped because content teams are optimizing for production — getting the post out — and these five things feel like they are between you and publication, rather than part of what makes that publication successful.
Squint your eyes and look closer: They are not between you and publication. They are the difference between a post that performs and a post that does not.
Twenty minutes. Every time. The SEO checklist items belong inside this workflow — SEO for content teams is where those live. And if you want a deeper framework for whether a piece is actually ready before it ships, the content authority checklist covers the ten questions that actually matter.
I write about content strategy, editorial leadership, and the infrastructure that makes search performance possible.
For inquiries: jacob@cliftoncreative.agency · cal.com/cliftoncreative