Content or SEO First

I was browsing my notifications this morning and came across a question in the SEO activation training. The question seem to be should you write content or should you do the SEO first.

The answer is yes.

I know, that's a bit ambiguous, but the answer is that both should happen at the same time.

So here's my process for creating a new post on my site.

I start at Jaaxy. I have an idea for something that I want to write about, so I do a bit of keyword research and I find a good keyword to target around that subject. I go into this in a bit more detail in the training that I did way back in the dark ages. https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/how-to-wr...

That post doesn't really look at SEO, but Jay has that covered in his 10 steps training: https://my.wealthyaffiliate.com/training/10-steps-... and provides a good checklist of things to take care of once you have completed your article. https://www.affiliateresources.org/pdf/10StepsRequ...

What I will usually do is create a first draft, often I will do this inside the Google Drive/Google docs. Then before a copy and paste into my website, I'll take a look at the keyword and see how it fits into what I've written. Often by doing the research first. I have a good idea of my first paragraph and title so the keyword has already been included in those. Of course, choosing that keyword sets the context of my post so often there are additional keywords that have found their way into the content, but I don't focus on those, I just focus on one keyword.

So now I've done a first draft, and probably am a good way through the second draft. While I'm checking for keywords and content. I also fix any grammatical and spelling errors. Now I'm ready to publish.

So then I get out Jay's checklist, I publish the post to my website and then I go down through that list. Often I will create my own YouTube video of between two and five minutes, but if not I'll find something that someone else is done that doesn't seem to have too obvious a call to action in it (I don't want people to use his call to action instead of mine).

You can certainly just publish content and not be concerned with who will find your site but the whole point of this is to get traffic. I know when you're just starting out, you just want to get stuff up. Starting on the right foot and getting the process down early will pay off in the long run.