7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords

This is a little story I share with new blogging clients who get hung up about keywords. One client in particular (let’s call him Ted) had written about 10 blog posts which were saved as drafts because he was worried about keywords.

Let me say that there’s a learning curve involved in writing for your blog, and there’s no way around it. The only way to learn to write good blog posts is to write and publish blog posts—a lot of them. Saving them as drafts won’t work.

Being that it’s U.S. Open time, I was thinking about how this relates to tennis (of course!). You can practice your serve on a tennis court by yourself too. But until you serve the ball to someone on the other side of the net and keep score in a game, it really doesn’t count. You can’t learn from your results.

Here’s what I told Ted, “When you sit down to write a new post, focus first on these steps:

7 Blog Writing Steps BEFORE You Check for Keywords

1. Write to deliver valuable information that solves a problem for your typical reader
2. Grab their attention and make it interesting to them through stories or examples
3. Show that you’re a credible expert, use reliable information, studies, stats, quotes
4. Gain their trust by writing in a conversational tone, using plenty of pronouns like “you” and “I”
5. Ask for their feedback and ask them to share their questions
6. Do these steps over and over again: educate, entertain, engage and enrich the lives of your readers
7. Re-read, review and edit your post before and after you publish

This last step includes editing for typos and grammar AND for keywords* you want to focus your post on.

Yes, I do this last. I try to make sure my headline has clear keywords, the first paragraph also does, and that they are repeated in the body of the post. But that’s secondary to writing good information that engages readers.

Step #6 is the most important to keep in mind. Do this over and over again. Educate, entertain, engage and enrich lives and your blog posts will come up in the search engine results. If you’re doing that, and your keywords are where they’re supposed to be, you’ll be successful in getting found online.

If you’re lazy and don’t want to take time to learn through trial and error, get help from Scribe SEO Tool. They’ll do the analysis and tell you what to do to make each post optimized for search engines.

*For more information on keywords and using SEO, read my post here: SEO Content Marketing. Scribe SEO Tool is the easy, most efficient way to ensure each blog post is optimized for search engines. After using it for a while, you will understand what you need to know about keywords and where they need to go.