Most posts that underperform are not badly written. They answer a slightly different question than the one people searched for, or they bury the answer, or nothing on the site links to them. All three are catchable in twenty minutes before you publish.
Work through these in order. The first four matter far more than the last eleven, which is the opposite of how most checklists are arranged.
Intent: the four checks that decide everything
Search the query yourself
Open a private window and look at what actually ranks. If the first page is all product comparisons and you wrote a definition post, your format is wrong — not your writing.
Match the format, not the word count
If the top results are step-by-step tutorials, publish a tutorial. If they are tools and calculators, an article may not compete at all, however good it is.
Answer in the first 100 words
State the answer near the top, then explain it. Burying the payoff under 400 words of preamble sends people back to the results page, which is a signal you do not want to send.
Cover what the others cover, then add one thing
Note the subtopics every ranking page includes — those are the reader’s expectations. Cover them, then add the thing none of them has: your data, a tool, a worked example.
On-page: title, headings and structure
- One H1, containing the main phrase in natural language. Not stuffed — stated.
- A title tag under 60 characters, so it survives truncation, promising something specific.
- H2s that describe sections in the words a reader would use.
- The main phrase in the first paragraph, one subheading and the closing section. Three placements, not thirty.
- Paragraphs of three to four lines. Long blocks lose mobile readers before the argument lands.
Meta tags and how the result looks
- A meta description of 120-155 characters that reads like ad copy — what the page delivers, and for whom.
- A short, lowercase, hyphenated URL slug, free of dates and stop words.
- Open Graph title, description and image set, so the link does not look broken when someone shares it.
Meta descriptions do not affect ranking directly. They affect whether anyone clicks the ranking you already have, which from where you are standing is the same thing.
Links, images and the technical floor
- Three to five internal links out to relevant pages, with anchor text that describes the destination — never “click here”.
- At least one internal link in to the new post from a page that already gets traffic. An orphan page is one search engines rarely revisit.
- Images compressed, sized, lazy-loaded below the fold, with alt text describing the image rather than repeating the keyword.
| Check | Good | Bad |
|---|---|---|
| CheckAnchor text | Goodhow to write product descriptions | Badclick here |
| CheckAlt text | GoodDashboard showing monthly post usage | Badai content generator seo tool |
| CheckSlug | Good/blog/seo-content-checklist | Bad/blog/2026/05/post-id-3841 |
| CheckTitle tag | Good15 SEO Checks Before You Publish | BadSEO Tips, SEO Guide, SEO Checklist 2026 |
What to skip
Keyword density targets, exact-match repetition quotas, LSI keyword lists and word-count minimums are all folklore. They persist because they are easy to measure, not because they work. Density is worth a glance only as a symptom: if one phrase appears thirty times in 900 words, the copy reads badly, and that is the actual problem.
After you publish
- 01Request indexing in Search Console, so the page is crawled in days rather than weeks.
- 02Add the internal links in from older posts. This is the step most people skip.
- 03Wait a full month before judging performance. Early impressions data is noise.
- 04At week six, check which queries the page actually gets impressions for. If they are not the ones you targeted, rewrite to match what people are really asking.
That last check is the most valuable one on the list. Search Console tells you the exact wording of the questions your page nearly answers, and rewriting a section to answer them properly is usually worth more than publishing something new.