A checklist is not a strategy. But on a small team, with no one whose job it is to “do marketing,” a checklist is often the only thing standing between a useful article and a wasted afternoon.
This one is short on purpose. You should be able to run an article through it in twenty minutes. If a check feels heavy, you have probably tried to solve too many problems at once.
How to use this
Print it. Tape it next to your monitor. Run any article you care about through it once, before you publish. Then again at the 90-day mark, when the article has had a chance to do its work.
The downloadable version lives at the bottom of this page if you want a clean copy.
The eight checks
1. Does the title name the reader’s question?
The title should not be your framing. It should be the sentence the reader would type or speak when they have the problem the article solves.
A test: read the title to a colleague who is not in marketing. Can they tell you, in one sentence, who would search for this and what they expect to find? If they cannot, the title is too clever, too cute, or too vague.
2. Is the direct answer in the first 100 words?
Most readers will not scroll past your introduction. The introduction is not the place to set up the answer. It is the place to give the answer, then expand on it.
If you cannot find a clear answer sentence in the first 100 words, the article is structured around your draft, not around the reader.
3. Do at least three internal links point out of this article?
Three is the floor. Five is better. They should be useful links — pointing to articles a reader who liked this one would also benefit from. Not a glossary. Not a homepage link in the byline. Real, in-prose links with anchors that describe the next useful page. If this part feels fuzzy, use the small-team internal linking workflow before you publish.
4. Does at least one existing high-traffic page link to this one?
This is the check that almost nobody runs, and it is the single most useful one. Your existing top pages have more authority and traffic than this new article will for at least the first month. If none of them point to the new article, search engines treat it as an orphan. So do your readers.
5. Is there a clear next step at the end?
A “next step” is not a CTA. It is a small, concrete action the reader can take in the next ten minutes if they found the article useful. Print the checklist. Open the linked article. Add this question to their next planning meeting. Without a next step, the article ends in air.
6. Has it been mentioned in email or social, at least once, on day one?
The publish action does not announce the article. You do. If the article is good enough to spend an afternoon on, it is good enough to write a 200-word email about. One mention on the day it goes live is the minimum.
7. Does it have a reuse plan?
In a sentence: where else, in the next two weeks, will this article show up? In a newsletter? In a LinkedIn post? In a sales email? On a customer onboarding page? An article without a reuse plan typically gets one impression — the publish — and then nothing. Even one planned reuse multiplies its reach.
8. Is there a refresh date on the calendar?
90 days is a reasonable default. Put it on a calendar with a link back to the article. When the date comes around, you do not have to rewrite — you just have to re-read, fix anything stale, update the date, and re-share.
Print this. Run it on the next article you publish.
- Title names the reader's question, not our framing
- Direct answer is in the first 100 words
- At least three useful internal links out
- At least one existing high-traffic page links in
- Clear, concrete next step at the end
- Mentioned in email or social on day one
- Reuse plan in the next two weeks
- Refresh date on the calendar (90 days)
What this checklist is not
It is not an SEO audit. It is not a content strategy. It is not a substitute for writing about things readers actually want. If your articles are not useful, no amount of checklist will help.
It is also not a guarantee of traffic, rankings, or leads. The honest version is: articles that go through this checklist tend to outperform articles that do not, on the dimensions the checklist measures. Whether that translates to your business outcomes depends on a lot of other things.
What the checklist does is remove the most common, most fixable reasons that an otherwise good article fails to be seen.
A short note on the cadence
Run the checklist on every new article. That is the easy part.
Then, once a quarter, pull a list of the articles you published 90+ days ago and run the checklist on each of them again. You will be surprised how many of them have drifted — orphaned links, broken next steps, missed refresh dates. Quarterly maintenance on a thirty-article archive is usually a half-day of work and uncovers more visibility wins than writing a new article would.
The point of the system is to make “did we get this article seen” a question with a clear answer. Not a hope.
If a useful article fails the checklist, you may not need to rewrite it. Start with a focused refresh: clarify the answer, update the examples, and repair the internal links.
When the answer is not obvious, use the Article Refresh Scorecard to decide whether the page needs a quick update, a focused refresh, a rewrite, or no action.
Read why most published content never gets seen for the longer argument behind these eight checks.