Create A Winning SEO Content Brief To Get Top-Notch Content
If you are outsourcing your content writing, then this post is for you.
An SEO content brief plays a crucial role in the quality of your content and how well it’ll perform on SERPs.
You need to give very clear instructions and guidance to your writers so that they can write content that matches your brand and meets your website objectives.
A solid content brief can make an average content creator turn in above-average content, and a weak or no brief can make a good content writer turn in low-quality content.
In this article, I’ll discuss:
- What makes a good SEO content brief.
- The value to your content marketing and business.
- How to create a quality brief and what goes into it.
- What to avoid when creating briefs.
- Some software and tools that help, and
- A template to make your content brief creation easier.
But first…
What is an SEO content brief?
An SEO content brief contains information on how content should be written, including its goals, summary, target keyword(s), target persona, tone, sub-topics to be covered, external and internal links, image guide, call to action, SERP competitors, expected word count, etc.
It helps every content stakeholder be on the same page, understand the project and deliverables and know what will make an optimal result.
The best SEO content briefs do not leave a chance for second-guessing. They are very detailed and provide all the information a writer needs to deliver top-quality content that satisfies both search engines and humans.
Value of a good SEO content brief
A good SEO content brief is valuable for the writer, content strategist, editor, marketer, website owner, and every other stakeholder involved in producing the content. It helps you save time, resources, energy, and money and ultimately increases your chances of meeting your content marketing goals.
Here are a few ways a good SEO content brief can add value to your business:
1. Reduce content production costs
A good SEO content brief streamlines your content production process and costs.
It ensures your writers turn in well-written content, reducing the time and cost of editing and other complications that may arise from miscommunication and low-quality delivery.
2. Improves content delivery time
When you create a detailed content brief for your SEO content, writers won’t need to guess or assume your expectations for a piece of content.
The clarity from your brief will help reduce their production time and increase efficiency. You can easily meet your content publishing goals with your writers submitting work on time and meeting deadlines.
3. Improves content’s SERP position
Content that provides valuable, relevant information to searchers ranks easily on SERPs. A good SEO content brief makes it easy to write content that answers all search queries on a given topic, providing in-depth information for the readers while meeting basic SEO best practices.
If your writers always work with a good content brief, you’ll have many pieces of content ranking high on SERPs, giving your brand much-needed visibility and generating qualified traffic that’ll turn into sales.
4. Maintains brand tone and voice
To build customer trust, you must maintain your brand personality, tone, and voice across all marketing channels.
When many writers handle your content needs, achieving this becomes a huge task. However, with an excellent content brief, your writers will use the same tone, voice, and format in writing your content, making your brand messaging across all channels consistent.
5. How content briefs improve your SEO content marketing efforts
Creating SEO content briefs is a vital part of SEO content marketing efforts. It makes it easier to achieve your content marketing goals.
To create a good content brief, you must do in-depth research on your audience and the keywords they’re searching with. This helps your writers create relevant content that improves your SERP ranking and increases conversions.
Furthermore, content briefs help you effectively plan your content creation process. By outlining the content’s topics, structure, tone, style, and voice, the brief ensures that the content is consistent, high-quality, and meets the desired SEO content marketing goals.
Pro tip:
Keyword research is crucial for SEO, if not the most important part.. You can also ask your content writers to conduct keyword research.
But I would recommend doing that only if you are sure the content writer completely understands your brand, your content goals, SEO, and have proven to be good at finding high-potential keywords.
How to create a content brief
Here are some steps to creating a great SEO content brief that will improve your content marketing efforts:
1. Identify your target audience
Identifying your target audience is the first step in creating an SEO content brief and includes knowing your ideal customers’ demographics, needs, and interests. You must understand their pain points and the problems they are trying to solve so you are better equipped to prepare a content brief that addresses their needs and meets search engine requirements.
2. Conduct keyword research
Once you’ve identified your target audience and the problems they’re trying to solve, the next step is to find the keywords they’re using to search for information online. Identify the major (primary) keyword and other supporting semantic keywords they use to seek information on the same topic.
Some great ways to find these keywords include researching with tools like Semrush, studying your competitors’ websites, and reviewing commonly used keywords on search engines.
3. Define your topic
With the keyword(s) from your research, create a compelling topic containing triggers for your target audience. The triggers will ensure your target audience is hooked upon seeing your topic on the search engine or any other place your content is shared.
Defining your topic into a powerful one is crucial because great topics promise to address the needs of your target audience and give a good insight into the information covered in the content.
4. Create an outline
Create an outline for your content based on your keyword and competitor research. Ensure you cover the topic in detail by addressing the main pain points and sub-topics and adding supporting data, examples, or images you’d want in the content. The secondary keywords can form relevant sub-topics, making the content brief more detailed.
5. Define the format
After outlining the content, choose the format that best suits your content, such as a blog post, infographic, or video. Define the content structure and layout, identifying where each relevant information should be.
6. Specify the tone and style
After you’ve defined the format, the next thing is to specify the tone and style in line with your editorial style guide. The content brief must tell if you want content written in a professional or personal tone and whether you want it to be conversational. You can provide links to some content that uses the exact tone and style you want.
7. Establish the call to action (CTA)
If you want your audience to perform a task, specify it in the content brief. Whether you want the readers to sign up for a newsletter, follow a page, or buy a product, specifying it in the brief will help the content creator produce excellent content and a supporting CTA that meets the content expectations.
What should go into a content brief?
Here are the key components of an SEO content brief:
Primary keyword
This is the key term or phrase the content should focus on. It is also referred to as the focus keyword or phrase. It is often the primary information your audience wants to know about.
Search intent and knowledge level
The search intent addresses the problem the target audience is trying to solve and highlights the type of intent (informational, transactional, educational, navigational, etc.). The knowledge level identifies the audience’s knowledge of the topic and informs the language and tone to use. The knowledge level is also informed by the target audience’s position in the sales funnel.
Target customers at the top of the funnel with more informational and educational content and those in the middle and bottom with more content to aid their purchase decision-making.
1. Content title
The title specifies the scope of the content. From the title, your readers would know if the content covers the entire topic or just a category.
2. Word count
The content brief should specify the length of the content by stating the required number of words.
3. Insightful links
These are links to insightful resources and the top-performing articles on the SERPs for the keyword you wish to target. The writer studies them to produce content that would outrank the existing best.
4. Target audience location
For instance, the US and UK have varying English word spellings and cultural differences. Stating the target audience’s location helps the writer tailor the content to resonate more with the audience.
5. Content format
The brief should also state the content format. Is it a blog post, infographic, or video? The information will help guide the structure and layout of the content.
6. Content outline (breakdown)
The content outline is a crucial aspect of a content brief. The brief should state the headings and their sequence of occurrence, which would help the writer write free-flowing, cohesive content that meets SEO best practices.
7. Content media specifications
The content brief should also state the media quality, size, and format. It should also specify if the media are to be sourced from custom-image websites or designed from scratch.
8. Writing tone
Should the content be conversational and personal or straight to the point and professional? Your writer should know.
9. Deadline
The content brief should also specify the content project turn-in date.
What to avoid when creating SEO content briefs
To ensure your content meets its intended goals, here are some common mistakes to avoid when creating an SEO content brief:
1. Keyword stuffing
While target keywords are essential for helping the target audience and search engine understand the focus of the content, inserting them unnaturally throughout the content can lead to a poor user experience and even harm SEO rankings. Thus, target a few relevant keywords and indicate them in your brief.
2. Vague or overly broad topics
Avoid using vague or overly broad topics, as they significantly reduce click-through rates (CTR), making meeting SEO and business goals challenging.
3. Neglecting user intent
Addressing user intent is vital to creating SEO-rich content. Neglecting it means creating content that fails to resonate with the audience because their pain points weren’t addressed.
4. Failing to study the competition
Your competitors’ websites are the most resourceful places to search for relevant keywords and sub-topics. Failing to study your competition makes creating content that outranks them on the SERPs more difficult.
5. Lack of content goals and metrics
Not defining the goals of your content while preparing a content brief will make it difficult to measure the results at the end.
SEO content outline
A content outline is a skeletal form of content. It is like a building sketch that, when fleshed out, produces an amazing edifice.
Here’s an example of a typical SEO content outline:
- Content title, which includes the focus keyword
- Meta description: A snippet that gives the readers insight into the content
- Headings (H2, H3, H4, etc.) discussing the content details according to how the sub-topics relate.
- Conclusion
- Call to action that specifies what the audience should do after reading.
SEO content brief example
Here are simple content brief examples, starting with the one applicable to this content piece.
Example 1
Title: How to Prepare a Great Content Brief for Your Writers
Focus Keyword: Content Brief
Secondary Keywords: content briefs, content brief example, content brief template, how to create a brief, content creation brief, how to write a content brief
Content Breakdown:
- Introduction
- What is a Content Brief?
- How important is a Content Brief?
- Components of a Good Content Brief
- How to Create a Sound Content Brief
- Mistakes to Avoid When creating a Content Brief
- Content Brief Examples
- Software and Tools for Creating a Good Content Brief
- Conclusion
SERP top performers: Provide links to the top-performing articles on the SERP
Word Count: 1500–2000
Delivery date: xx/xx/xxxx
Search intent: Informational
Target audience: content marketers, small business owners
Example 2
Title: What is Brand Evolution and Why is it Important for Small Businesses?
Focus Keyword: Brand evolution
Secondary Keywords: evolution of a brand, brands that changed their logo, brand evolution process, brand evolution examples, brand evolution and rebranding.
Content Breakdown:
- Introduction
- What is Brand Evolution?
- Benefits of Brand Evolution
- Brand Evolution Examples
- Brand Evolution Process
- Difference Between Rebranding and Brand Evolution
- Small Business Brand Evolution Tips
- Is Brand Evolution Right for You (Conclusion)
SERP top performers: Provide links to the top-performing articles on the SERP
Word Count: 1500–2000
Delivery date: xx/xx/xxxx
Search intent: Informational
Target audience: content marketers, small business owners
Example 3
Here is another example of a content brief:
Title: 5 Sets of Brand Adjectives to Describe Your Small Business
Focus Keyword: Brand Adjectives
Secondary Keywords: words to describe a brand, how to describe a brand, brand personality, adjectives to describe a brand, brand voice adjectives, brand tone adjectives.
Content Breakdown:
- Introduction
- What are Brand Adjectives?
- Different Types of Brand Adjectives
- How to Describe a Brand Personality with Brand Adjectives
- Tips on How to Choose the Right Brand Adjectives
- Signs You’ve Done a Good Job with Your Brand Personality
- Signs You Need More Work Done on Your Brand Personality
- Conclusion
SERP top performers: Provide links to the top-performing articles on the SERP.
Word Count: xxxx
Delivery date: xx/xx/xxxx
Search intent: informational
Target audience: content marketers, small business owners
SEO content brief template
Based on the above explanations and examples, here’s a detailed SEO content brief template you can quickly fill out to produce an in-depth brief for your content creators.
Content brief software and tools
Here are some software and tools to help you improve your content marketing efforts and draft a detailed brief:
Semrush: This is another exceptional tool for performing keyword research, competitor analysis, backlink analysis, site audit, etc.
SurferSEO: An excellent tool for keyword research, on-page SEO analysis and optimization, and other vital tasks that help you produce high-quality content.
Google Search Console (GSC): GSC helps you monitor and optimize your website’s presence in Google search results. It provides your site performance reports, index coverage reports, security issues reports, etc., to enable you to improve your site’s performance.
Ahrefs: Ahrefs is another fantastic tool to study your industry and target audience and provide quality content that resonates with them. Its key features include the site explorer, keyword explorer, site audit, content explorer, and rank tracker.
Final thoughts on SEO content brief
SEO content brief is to a content creator what a blueprint is to a constructor. It provides an excellent guide to creating valuable, relevant content that will help you meet the needs and preferences of the target audience while also meeting search engine requirements.
The information in this article will help you create winning SEO content briefs to help you build a brand that appeals to your target audience, earn industry and domain authority, and easily meet all your business goals.
Have you ever written an SEO content brief when you have outsourced your content writing? What other tips would you add? Share in the comments!
Originally published at https://weignitegrowth.com on June 4, 2023.
