Creating a Content Outline

Our goal with this is to standardize the way we do research for a blog post.  If we are always performing this process then we can make sure that our content covers everything we need! 

Let's get right to it! 

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Make sure to create your outline using a Google Doc

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1. Use an LSI keyword generator.

If you’re not familiar with LSI, it stands for Latent Semantic Indexing.

Semantic means, “relating to meaning in language or logic.”

In other words, the LSI finds words that are related to each other.

There are a few different LSI generators. One of my favorites is LSIGraph.

It’s a free tool that will provide you with related keywords for whatever term you search.

The generator brings back a ton of related words that you can use to build into your content.

You can often use these keyword results to help build your outline for a long-form piece of content.

For example, you could select a few of the keywords above to build an outline like this:

• Content marketing process (intro)
• Content marketing examples
• Content marketing ideas
• 10 content marketing tips
• Conclusion with a PDF of a content strategy plan offering built into a CTA

You can use a tool such as LSIGraph to give you multiple keywords and help you build your outlines all with one simple click.

2. Use Google to generate related keywords.

In addition to the above, you should always use Google to help you generate related keywords.

Google wants to provide the best, most relevant content to searchers.

Luckily, that also helps us provide the best, most relevant content to searchers. And Google is helping us do it for free.

When you search for something in Google, it tries to help you out in a number of ways.

Auto-suggest. As soon as you start typing, Google starts automatically populating suggestions of what it thinks you might be looking for.

For example, try typing “content marketing” into Google.

You’ll notice I didn’t even spell it right and Google is already trying to auto-suggest ten different possible keywords before I hit enter.

This instantly tells you the most commonly searched keywords relating to content marketing.

There’s no need to worry about the relevance of their results either. Google updates every two-three weeks to make sure it’s offering searchers the most relevant choices.

Related searches. After you hit enter, you can scroll down to the bottom of the search results page.

Here are eight more related keywords for content marketing. You’ll notice that they’re new ones and not just a repeat of the once Google just tried to offer you.

People also ask. For some searches, Google will also provide you with a “People also ask” section. This didn’t pop up for content marketing.

If I narrow down my search to ‘how to use content marketing,’ I now get the following four suggestions.

These are common questions Google is asked that it thinks are similar to what you’re trying to find.

If you click one and search for it, it will populate even more related questions.

Google will give you a practically limitless list of related keywords.

3. Check out a site like Answer the Public.

Answer the Public is a great way to come up with new topic ideas and keywords.

It’s a mix between Google’s “People also ask” and Seed Keywords.

Answer the Public provides you with a list of questions directly from the minds of your customers, around a specific topic or keyword.

This site can give you hundreds of questions and related keywords with one quick and simple search.

To get started you just enter your general keyword or question into the search bar:

At first, your results will look something like this:

It’s kind of cool looking but not the easiest to navigate.

Don’t worry. You can fix that!

Select “Questions” and then “Data” to translate your results into grouped lists.

The first lists are the question-based results:

Next comes the “preposition” results.

The third grouping is comparisons:

For “website design,” it returned a total of 519 questions, all within seconds.

You can use any or all of them to easily come up with hundreds of relevant, related keywords you can build into one piece of content to rank in search results.

Some final tips to keep in mind

You now know the best way to rank for multiple keywords is to find relevant, related keywords to build into a single piece of content.

Here are some additional tips you should consider when building multiple keywords into one post or article.

Next, ask yourself these 3 questions...

1. What’s the Promise?

In other words…

• What will the reader know when they’re done reading?
• What will they be able to take action on?

For example, At the end of this post, you will know exactly how to outsource your content creation to guest contributors and ghostwriters to quickly create high-quality content for your blog.

2. What’s the Hook?

In other words…

• What makes this post different than anything else like it?
• What is the WHY that will make people want to take action on this?
• The benefits, the value, the “sizzle” (Your hook will likely make it into the blog post headline.)

For example, The four-step process we use to quickly create click-worthy content (without going crazy).

3. What’s the Outline?

This is where the writer will lay out the overall structure of the post and give a few brief details for each section.

In other words think of the hook: 

Intro

• The secret to creating a constant stream of quick, click-worthy content without going crazy is to have other people do it. But to do that you need a good editorial system.

Think of the headers

To help your other keywords get indexed by Google, you can build them into the outline of your content as subheadings.

Each one should have its own H2 or H3 tag.

Celebrate! 

You're done outlining the blog post and now it needs to be reviewed to make sure that you are hitting all the points that need to be hit! 

Hang tight while we review the outline 🙂