noindex the CMS added while it sat in staging.This free blog post publishing checklist is the quality gate between a finished draft and a live, promoted post. It takes one post at a time through a brief check, editing and fact-checking, on-page SEO and images, the CMS build and preview, a named sign-off that has to be given before anything goes live, then indexing, promotion and two performance reviews. Two questions at the start add a legal and compliance review for posts that make claims, and a disclosure step for sponsored or guest content. Editors, content leads and agency teams publishing for clients can run it per post. The wider pipeline, from idea to calendar to draft, lives in the Content Production Workflow Checklist.
Writing gets the attention; publishing gets the leftovers. Teams spend days on a draft and twenty minutes pasting it into the CMS on a Friday afternoon. That is when the slug keeps the working title, the alt text stays blank, the category defaults to “Uncategorised” and the call to action links to a campaign page that closed in spring. None of these is hard to get right. They go wrong because nobody owns the step and nothing reminds them.
Facts age faster than prose. A statistic copied from another blog is often three citations away from its source and several years old. Product details drift too: plan names change, prices rise and screenshots stop matching the interface. Checking each claim against a primary source, and linking that source, protects readers and makes the post worth citing. Google’s guidance on helpful content asks whether a page offers original information, reporting, research or analysis, and a post built on second-hand numbers struggles to claim it.
Some posts need a second pair of eyes with a different job. A comparison with a competitor, a claim about savings or results, or anything touching health, finance or the environment can create legal exposure that an editor is not trained to spot. Sponsored posts and paid guest contributions bring their own obligations: in the UK the CAP Code requires marketing communications to be obviously identifiable, and in the US the FTC expects any material connection to be disclosed clearly where readers will see it.
The editor owns the checklist; the approver owns the decision. Splitting the two roles matters most when a deadline is close. The editor works through every check and fixes what is broken. The approver, who may be a content lead, a subject expert or a client, looks at the finished preview and says yes or no. When one person does both on a busy day, the checks quietly become optional.
Publishing is not the finish line. A post needs to be found by Google, linked from the rest of the site, sent to subscribers and checked again once there is data. Teams that skip the 30-day and 90-day reviews never learn which posts are worth updating and keep writing new ones on topics they already cover.
Covers: ideas, briefs, calendar slots, drafting and handoffs between writers and designers.
Runs: continuously, across every format the team produces.
Template: Content Production Workflow Checklist.
Covers: one finished draft, from fact-check and SEO through sign-off, indexing, promotion and review.
Runs: once for every post, started when the draft is ready.
Ends: with a 90-day decision to update, consolidate or leave the post alone.
Six phases run for every post. The compliance phase and the disclosure step appear only when the first task says they are needed.
Shown when the post makes claims that need legal or compliance review.
rel="sponsored"Keep this table open during Phases 4 and 5. Each row is one element the editor checks in the CMS preview, what a finished version looks like, and the mistake that turns up most often when nobody is checking.
| Element | What good looks like | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Title element | Unique, descriptive, distinctive words first. Google sets no character limit but cuts title links to fit the screen, so set a house limit; we suggest about 60 characters | The same brand suffix and keyword repeated on every post |
| Meta description | Written for this post alone; Google may show it or use text from the page instead | The first paragraph pasted in, or one description reused across a category |
| Slug | Readable words joined by hyphens, which Google recommends over underscores | The working title, an ID number or a year that dates the post |
| Headings | One H1 matching the post title; H2s a reader could skim as a summary | Bold paragraphs styled to look like headings |
| Images and alt text | Standard <img> elements, short descriptive file names, alt text that says what the image shows |
Alt text stuffed with keywords, or a file named IMG_0423.jpg |
| Internal links | Descriptive anchors to related posts and one relevant product page; one older post linking in | “Click here” anchors, or a new post no other page links to |
| Dates | A visible, labelled published date, plus “Last updated” when the content really changes, matching the structured data | Changing the date to look fresh when nothing substantial changed |
| Social preview | og:title, og:type, og:image and og:url set, with og:url matching the canonical | The site logo as the share image on every post |
| Structured data | BlogPosting or Article with headline, author, datePublished, dateModified and image; one author entry per person | Author name with a job title in the same field |
| Disclosure | “Sponsored” or “Advertisement feature” at the top; paid links marked rel="sponsored" |
A disclosure in the footer, or paid links passing ranking credit |
Guest posts deserve one more check before they are accepted at all. Google’s spam policies count paid articles carrying links that pass ranking credit as link spam, and its site reputation policy targets third-party content published mainly to borrow the host site’s ranking signals. A guest post your editors chose, edited and stand behind is fine; one that arrived with a fee and a list of anchor texts is not.
The publish sign-off is assigned to the approver named when the post was logged. Mark it Not approved and the checklist halts, so the publish and indexing tasks never open until the fixes are made. See how approval workflows work.
Answer two questions on the first task. A post with claims gets the compliance phase and a reviewer; a sponsored or guest post gets the disclosure step. A routine how-to post skips both and moves faster.
The 30-day and 90-day checks carry due dates set from the publish date, so they appear in the owner’s work list when the data is ready. Every post keeps its own record of who checked, approved and published it.
Agencies writing for several clients can start a checklist per post from one shared template and assign the publish sign-off to the client contact. Our guide to onboarding marketing agency clients covers how to agree approval rules like this at the start of an engagement.
Once a quarter, step back from individual posts. The SEO Audit Checklist finds decaying and overlapping posts across the whole blog, which feeds the “update an older post instead” decision in Phase 1.
Check that the facts are right and sourced, that the post still matches its brief and the search it targets, and that the title, meta description, slug, headings, links and images are finished. Then preview the built page for the canonical, indexability, date, social image and structured data, get a named sign-off, and only then publish. Sponsored posts also need a visible disclosure.
Google does not set a character limit for the title element. It shortens title links in results to fit the width of the device, so the practical rule is to put the words that make the post distinctive at the start and avoid padding. A house guide of about 60 characters keeps the habit of front-loading. The H1 on the page can be longer and more conversational than the title element if your CMS lets you set them separately.
It is not required, but it is a quick check worth doing. The URL Inspection tool in Search Console shows whether Google can index the live page, and the request asks Google to crawl it sooner. A request does not guarantee indexing and there is a daily limit, so for large batches of URLs rely on an accurate XML sitemap instead.
Label it where readers see it before they start reading, in plain words such as “Sponsored” or “Advertisement feature”. The UK CAP Code asks publishers to make advertorials clear, and the FTC tells US creators to place the disclosure with the content itself, not buried in a profile or at the end. Mark links that were paid for with rel="sponsored", which Google prefers over the older nofollow.
Only when the content has changed in a meaningful way. Show the original published date and add a labelled “Last updated” date, and keep both consistent with datePublished and dateModified in the structured data. Google’s helpful content guidance treats changing dates to make a page seem fresh, without substantial changes, as a sign of content made for search engines rather than people.
Set the rule in advance so writers are not deciding case by case. A sensible default is to send any post that compares you with a named competitor, promises a saving, result or return, mentions health, money or environmental benefits, quotes a customer by name, or is sponsored. Regulated sectors such as financial services and healthcare will have stricter internal rules, and those should be written into the scope question on the first task.
14-day free trial, no card required. The Business plan is $10 per user per month after the trial. Full details at checkflow.io/pricing.
