SEO Checklist for Blog Posts

This is the checklist / SOP I use when writing a blog post. It makes creation much more streamlined, and helps me to make sure I have all the tools I need right at my fingertips.

It also keeps me on track. Extremely easy to get distracted these days!

(Note: it’s also important to first have the proper SEO plugin(s) installed. The one I use and recommend is The SEO Framework, for my WordPress sites.)

Here’s are the steps I follow, one-by-one. The tools I most frequently (and often exclusively) use are in bold:

SEO Checklist for Blog Posts (Free Tools Only)

Use a Keyword Generator to come up with a title for your blog posts that has a lot of searches, and which doesn’t have too much competition to rank for:

Ahrefs – simple, works well, and the free version is decent enough
SEMRush – even better than Ahrefs
Google Keyword Tool
AnswerThePublic
AlsoAsked
Reddit Keyword Research Tool
Google Trends
Quora + Reddit (Discover keywords that research tools won’t even show you)
Soovle
Choose a royalty-free image that goes well with your topic:

Pexels – I usually find the best photo’s using this site
Unsplash – Good variety, I use this as a backup
Other Free Stock Photo Websites That Don’t Suck (I’ll try some of these sites if I don’t find what I need on Pexels)

(Note: I download the smallest size option typically, to get the smallest file. For SEO you want to keep page load times as low as possible, so opt for smaller images (eg. 100kb vs 3mb))

(Note 2: Also, always remember to give credit to whoever took the photo, to prevent legal issues. Always read the fine print when it comes to attribution… it get’s confusing, and you don’t want to get sued.)
Optimize your images to reduce their size, and give it an SEO friendly name:

TinyPNG – quick and easy
ResizePixels – customizable: let’s you choose how much kb you want the photo to be

(Best practice: Images should be less than 100kb. Ideally, less than than 70kb.)

The SEO friendly name, you can just make it the same as your title, ie. “seo-checklist-for-blog-posts.jpg”. This also helps SEO and makes it searcheable in Google Images, which could drive you some extra traffic.
Use headings and create a table of contents, when finished with your blog post

Not only does using a table of contents ensure a better user experience, it allows you to rank for multiple keywords from just one blog post. This is because the google algorithm gives extra weight to those different sections.

With Gutenberg for WordPress, you can add a Table of Contents in a new block simply by typing “/table of contents”.
Schedule your posts to always publish at the same time (eg. 6pm CST)

Some evidence shows that this is because if google sees a consistent posting pattern, they’ll index your site more often, at those specific times.

Also, if you write multiple articles at the same time, stagger them out (timewise). Google likes to see a website that is continually being updated, so it’s better to stagger these articles to post once a week, over a month or so, instead of just posting 4 articles at the same time on one day.