Do These 5 Things Before You Start Writing

Every writer knows that writing is just a piece of the puzzle. There are many things you have to do before and after you write. For this piece, I want to focus on what you need to do before you start writing SEO blogs.

People usually treat SEO as an afterthought but it’s not. Before you start to write anything, you have to know what keyword you want to target for your SEO blogs.

You can use a tool like SEM Rush’s Keyword Planner to do that. You may already have an idea of what you want to write about for your audience.

For example, if you’re a writing coach and you’re looking for clients, there are certain blog topics you’d explore. You could plug “writing coach” into SEM Rush and see what pops up.

Here’s what I got

Depending on your audience, you’ll pick the appropriate 2–3 keywords to use in your piece. Since you’re looking for writers to coach, you’d probably want to skip “How to be a writing coach”, unless, of course, that’s something you coach.

I usually recommend looking for low-competition and high-search volume keywords. At the same time, you can target low search volume keywords because they may not be low volume forever. You’ll get that information by looking at the keyword density above. So it’s pretty easy to rank for “How to become a writing coach”, however, the search volume is pretty low.

Finally, be clear on the search intent of keywords. You can find them by looking at the “intent” column. “I” means informational so people making those searches are looking for information.

If you’re looking for more headings or content ideas, you can type your keyword into Google’s search bar and look at the related searches that are usually found at the bottom of the search page.

I found:

This is valuable information because if you’re just starting out this reminds you to be specific when advertising your services.

In addition to that you can check out the “People Also Ask” section. When I plugged “writing coach” into Google, the “People Also Ask” section had the following questions:

While you’re on the search result page, peek at the websites that are ranking for the keywords you want.

Then, observe:

While this may seem to be time-consuming, you can just use 5 minutes to scan these blogs.

This step is the most time-consuming for me. Content research means you’re looking for sources, external links, and information for your blog post.

If you’re writing primarily from your experience, it may not take that long. However, if you’re researching something on a more complicated topic, it can feel like it’s taking forever.

My trick is to scan the source quickly, once I realize it can be helpful, I add the link to a Google Doc and I’ll refer to it when I’m writing the section it’s helpful for.

Creating an outline is a great way to not feel overwhelmed and reduce your writer’s block. As a matter of fact, sometimes, I outline a piece or several pieces at a time and write them another day.

In my outline, I have the H2 and H3 tags I want to use, a working headline, and links to my sources. Sometimes, I’ll even have the internal links I plan to use. You can also make little bullet points of what you want to cover in your blog post.

This doesn't have to take a long time either. Once you do the work I outlined above, your writing outline can be created quickly.

Writing can be overwhelming but I find that doing a bit of work before you start writing can make all the difference.

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