7 key steps to create content outline for blog

In my blogging career I have examined different strategies to write contents. Creating the content outline is one of them.

It helps me to make decisions about what to include, what to remove. It provides me a clear idea before start writing, well understand during writing, proper overview after writing.

Here I shared the strategy what greatly worked for me.

What is website content outline?

A content outline represents the overview of what will be included within your content. It could be considered the frame of contents. After creating a outline, you will be able to easily fill up your spaces with necessary information.

Process to create a website content outline

1. Select the topic you want to write about

First of all, you need to select topic to write content for your website. You can brainstorm topic ideas and find out the topic under your niche.

You should maintain a balance while selecting your content topic. Find out if the topic is popular or not. If people are interested about your selected one, then you need to understand your competition.

If you find the topic has huge competition, you have better to avoid it. So, you need to find out the one which is popular but fewer people have written about it. Or you have a better chance to provide unique content.

You should give more importance to topic research instead of keyword research.

Because nowadays search engine's advanced technology understand the topic, no matter which keywords you are using.

In nearest before, search engine machines were highly dependent on keywords, but the scenario has been almost changed and continuously changing. And still keyword research is important for many reasons.

2. Decide your goal you want to achieve

Goals may depends on your website type. So, not all contents should written under the same strategy.

For instance, if you are running a blogging website for affiliate marketing, your intention should be emphasize users to click on affiliate links. Cleaver bloggers show links in different ways, which even increase user experiences. They place links on short description, comparison table, product names, and so on.

But while you promoting a brand or product, you need to ensure audience engagement with your contents. In such cases, you can implement quick jump navigation system or provide hooks to keep reading.

If you do things unwisely, you have a great chance to become failure even after getting a good user engagement. So, decide your goal very precisely.

3. Pick your targeted keyword and LSI keywords

Search engines always show results based on keywords. When your contents matches the searcher's keywords, then only you have a chance to get rank on search engines.

Exact keyword matching is not important, instead it is harmful for web content. If your overall content is enough relevant to your main keyword, then you will probably get rank for it.

Placing the same keyboard again and again creates over optimization, which is definitely harmful. Just keep everything in natural ways. Search engines, nowadays, are enough intelligent to understand.

You can instead use LSI keywords on your content headings and subheadings.

4. Find out the search intent of your selected keyword

Find out the reason why users are searching for your selected keyword. To understand that you can follow the search engine's result page.

If you write a high quality content based on your keyword and accidentally gate wrong visitors, you will instead make harm to your website.

Because when users won't find your content helpful, they will increase your website bounce rate, which has a great impact on SEO. And it causes result will decrease your search engines rank.

For example, if you write a content based on keyword 'Instagram', where you described everything about Instagram, users won't find it helpful. Because by searching keyword 'Instagram' they just want to visit instagram.com.

5. Get ideas from your competitors and SERP

You should collect content outline ideas from your competitor's contents and SERP features.

SERP stands for Search Engine Result Page. It includes organic search results, paid Ads results, Featured Snippets, Knowledge Graphs, video results, and so on.

Feature Snippets helps to get sub topics ideas, headings and sub headings ideas, users intent, and so on.

To get the top ranking positions, you need to outrank your competitors by overall content quality. So, you need to get ideas from their websites and find out the ways how can you provide more better things.

6. Outline your article with title, headings, and subheadings

It is time to work with an text editor. Put there your different findings sequentially. Include title, headings, subheadings, etc.

Please don’t over do anything, just include necessary things. If you put unnecessary stuffs, your audiences will find them annoying instead.

First, include a click-bait title, try to keep it under 60 words. Then put headings and sub headings sequentially according to importance.

7. Implement your personal content structure

After creating a basic content outline, you need to implement it on your content structure. Content structures have equal importance like content outlines.

You can have different content is structures according to your need. For instance, a common content structure could include main heading, introduction, short description, secondary headings, subheadings, FAQ, and Conclusion sequentially.

Why you should outline your content

• To get a clear overview

• Helpful for SEO optimization

• Helps to maintain writing flow

• Require less effort and save time

• Congregate enough information

• Provide better user experience

Conclusion

Outlining a content is not a hard thing. Inversely, it will make your work super easier. It definitely improve the content quality and saves huge amount of time. So why you are not using this simple strategy?

I bet you, you will love this strategy after doing few tasks. If you already following this strategy, that is great.