Before you do any research or put down any words, the first step is to decide why you’re even creating this piece of content to begin with.

Your content can have many goals, such as:

Increasing brand awareness.

Explaining use cases for your product(s).

Building backlinks for SEO.

Growing your email list.

Ranking for keywords on Google to grow traffic.

Etc.

Throughout this guide, I’ll be using ramen noodles as an example.

So let’s say I want to write an article about how to make amazing ramen noodles. My goal is to promote my fake company’s amazing hoisin sauce and build brand awareness. So I put that in under my “goal” section:

"Goal" section in content outline

2. Pick your target keyword

I never write an article without doing some basic keyword research first. Even if the intention of your article isn’t to rank for keywords on search engines, having SEO built into every article you write is still good practice.

Why?

Because it guarantees you build good habits. You may even be surprised at how much extra traffic you can gain—even from keywords that get almost no searches.

For example, I wrote an article about the best places to travel, and its goal was to get links from well-known travel blogs.

While outlining, I targeted the keyword “best places to travel in the world,” which gets about 1,500 searches per month. That article is now ranking for over 200 keywords and gets Google traffic even though SEO wasn’t the goal.

recommended name is what makes affiliate marketing such a powerful pillar of digital marketing.

Site Explorer overview for The Wandering RV's article

You can easily perform simple keyword whatsapp number list research like this by putting keywords related to what you want to write about into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and browsing the results.

For our article about how to make the best bowl of ramen noodles, I start by searching for “ramen noodles” in Keywords Explorer:

Keywords Explorer overview for "ramen noodles"

You can see it gets a whopping 143,000 searches per month. That’s awesome—however, we need to see if our article idea can actually rank for this keyword.

Scroll down, and you’ll see that the search results in the SERP overview consist of two product pages (Maruchan and Amazon). Those are followed by some extremely authoritative websites:

SERP overview for "ramen noodles"

In other words, unless you already have a strong website, ranking for this keyword with a guide on how to make ramen noodles will be difficult.

Next, scroll back up and look at the Keyword ideas panel. Here, you’ll see other ideas for potential keywords to target, such as “how to make ramen noodles.”