Going from a keyword or phrase to a well-developed and well-written article can be a daunting task. What do you write about that’s going to be interesting and useful, while still following good SEO practices? 

One good way to make sure that you stay on topic and produce a good piece of content is to create a content outline to serve as your guide to the finished piece. 

In practice, a lot of folks skip the outline step and just wing it, which sometimes works—until it doesn’t. There’s nothing quite like realizing halfway through a draft that you’ve drifted into an off-topic rant or repeated yourself three times without meaning to. An outline doesn’t have to be complicated or overly detailed; even a quick bullet list can pull you back on track when you feel lost in the weeds. It’s a bit like a grocery list for your ideas, so you don’t end up coming home with five bags of chips and nothing for dinner.

If you are using freelancers or staff writers to scale your content production, this outline also helps you communicate your vision for the piece to the writer.

Another thing—good outlines save time not just upfront, but later, too. Revising a poorly structured article is much harder than taking five minutes to map things out at the start. Plus, when writers hit those inevitable blocks, having a roadmap makes it much easier to pick things up again, rather than staring at a blank page (or scrolling social media and calling it “research”). It’s the kind of step that feels optional until hindsight shows you otherwise, trust me.