After the recent big tech flurry into generative AI, it's getting harder and harder to find real, factually correct information on the internet. This is partly because so much slop is being created, and partly because good quality human content is often not optimized for search engine ranking (SEO), leading to search results full of spam, and real authors going unseen.

If you want to drive new customers to your business then there is no way around the need to increase your visibility, and unfortunately that still means playing the SEO game! SEO can conjure up ideas of spam filled keyword stuffed websites with no actual content, but if you take the time to think about, and follow a consistent process, SEO can take care of itself and help your audience find the content they are looking for.

I made this checklist mainly for our teams and customers so we can always ensure a consistent output. What better place to keep it than on our blog, so everyone can benefit?

How to use this single page app

This page remembers as you type by saving it in your browser's cache, so you can come back to it later, as long as you use the same computer! No data is sent to Arrillo, so don't worry, we won't be stealing your blog ideas!

If you have already completed the checklist, and want to use it for a different blog post:

If you want to delete your existing data:

And if you want to select a different form:

Topic, Idea, User Journey, Deliverable

You might know exactly what you want to say, but do you have as much of an idea of what your readers actually want to read? It can be helpful to begin by planning how a reader will get to the content, and what they will want to get out of it. I call this the deliverable, what are we delivering to the end customer (The reader in this case). Without planning how a user will get to the content and what they will get out of it, there is little chance the content will add real value.

For example using Google Trends you can search for blogging checklist and blog checklist, this highlights that SEO checklist for blog posts is the top related query. So I have updated my title to reflect that being a commonly searched term, and now I can make clear that the best way to improve your SEO long term is to follow a well structured format and abiding by this checklist can facilitate that.

Websites that are good for topic research and user interest analysis:

Plan Title and Meta Description

Sticking with the theme of SEO you can title your post for the search engines, or for users, but it's very hard to do both effectively at the same time. If you have a small or non existent audience who will see your work organically, optimizing for search is likely going to lead to more views - as long as you can deliver on the title's promise!

The meta description allows you to provide a concise snapshot of your content to entice users to click on your search result. How can you demonstrate in this summary that the user's search question will be answered by this page? Stay within 156 characters to avoid truncation in search results.

Characters: 0/156

Set Permalink

Think ahead about how you want your URL to appear! No one wants their well crafted slug to get cut off halfway, or become illegible because it was computer generated. Wordpress allow you to set a customize your permalink URL, but in our favorite blog building tool Zola, it's as easy as naming the file

BBC with a bad auto generated slug - they likely have to do this because the number of pages is incredibly high.

A nicely formatted slug from the Royal Horticultural Society - slugs who is who.

Images

Final Steps (Quality Assurance)

Post Publishing

Site Test & Validation

Share on socials!

Which social media platforms do your future audience use? How can you entice them to visit your website? This should enhance your meta description as most social media sites will create a snippet for your link anyway.