How to Write an SEO Content Brief in the Right Way

As someone that is starting a project or already has an established business on the internet, the necessity for an SEO-focused content brief for your writers should be quite obvious by now. Unless you are planning to do everything alone, it can be hard to transmit the ideas and connections you have for the text, especially if the writer is not an SEO specialist.

Therefore, as with any other department, it is essential to write a perfect brief to lead whoever is writing that piece of content. That is how one avoids losing excellent keyword opportunities, and it should not take more time than absolutely necessary.

At some point, you will no longer need that much work, as you will have specialists who look out for the keywords and discuss ideas with you. But first, they need to correspond to your expectations.

Now, everything starts with the correct definition of what is an SEO-focused content brief, or none of the lessons and hints here will take effect.

What Makes a Content Brief SEO-Focused?

A content brief basically tells what the writer will be talking about, with clear instructions on tone, structure, and subject. If it is not centralized in SEO, it will only be a piece of content that is not optimized to make your page emerge in good rankings. Of course, it can still be an amazing work content-wise without it, but you want organic traffic, or you would not be here.

Focusing on SEO means identifying the most relevant keywords, how much of them is enough, and words related to them. The entire content must be driven towards informing while being efficient and better than what the competition has or might have in the future. While that summarizes an SEO-focused content brief, I detailed its essential parts further below.

Why is It Important to Have an SEO Brief?

Having an SEO content brief can make your Search Engine Optimization strategies uniform in all your texts and pages. While hiring writers with an SEO background helps, giving them a particular direction in that field can result in relevant benefits:

• Reduction of Costs – Unless you are in some weird business where spending more is better, you might want to seek strategies that reduce your costs. Both time and money can be spent without a need if you have to ask your writers to fix things that you could have otherwise avoided with a good brief.
• Consistency – The same way an orchestra can result in a mess without a conductor, each page might look entirely different from the other if you leave your writers to do as they wish. Instead, a good brief will keep the brand voice and SEO strategy uniformized.
• SERP Improvement – Depending on the scale of text production you have, it would be impossible to accompany the quality of the work without a plan – and that is the SEO-focused brief. That way, you minimize the risk of not seeing any SERP improvements for missing relevant aspects of it.

What to Include on an SEO-Focused Content Brief?

Finally, I know that some of you have already decided about writing a perfect brief. Therefore, the parameters below will help and guide those that are completely lost on how to write an SEO-focused content brief the right way.

Filter the Primary Queries

The whole purpose of having an SEO-focused content brief and not a simple general brief is to rank better for a determined keyword. This is all about researching keywords with tools like Moz or Ahrefs and using the ideas and secondary keywords to give writers some guidance.

As an example, imagine I have a blog about healthy food and recipes. I simulated searching for “green bananas” as a keyword and figured out what other terms are relevant to go with it:

Pardon the pun, but do not go “bananas” on secondary keywords. Choose a few that are truly relevant and indicated that they should be used in relevant content on your brief. Google’s algorithms are quite efficient in determining results through semantics, even if you did not use a perfect match long-tail keyword.

Structure, Length, and Content Format

Is it a listing or a blog post? Defining the format of the text is far from being trivial, as getting the idea wrong could require writing from scratch. Now, if you are not sure, that is also not a problem. As with everything else, verifying what the competition does will do wonders for your strategy:

If the top websites are using listicles (listing articles), that is what I’m applying to my SEO brief strategy. By defining the format, the next thing to do is define the structure in terms of headers and paragraphs and determine its length. It should not be too short or too long but result in everything users want to know about the subject without fluff content.

Relevant Topics and FAQ

Unless your writers are already too familiar with your content strategy, leaving them with format and keywords only might not be the most efficient approach. Instead, make sure to determine what topics should be discussed and what questions must be answered.

You can determine those topics by comparing competitors’ pages and using tools to determine what keywords their pages rank for. However, in the case you do not have access to those, it is still possible to get some pretty good ideas from Google itself, as I did:

Know the Audience’s Purpose

Since you have already learned how to write an SEO-focused content brief for your writers covering all relevant topics and questions you can imagine, this work is half done. The purpose of your audience is within their queries – the keywords you explored.

However, go the extra mile and think about what the characteristics of that public are. Once again, using my example, it could be that those people looking for information on green bananas could be diabetic, vegetarians, or simply trying to be healthier or get fit. As such, the entire text should include more than keywords and the tone you want: it must talk directly to those people.

Internal and External Links

I doubt it is the first time you came across the concept of SEO. Therefore, you probably know the importance of internal links if they are used correctly. Adding the correct linking strategy can definitely increase SERP, but the challenge is to transfer the right idea through the content brief.

Starting with internal links, it is important to ask writers to get a general idea of every relevant page on the website – even those that they did not write. Instruct them as to the placement of those links, as you do not want them to exaggerate. When they realize that introducing a link is both relevant to the text and the readers, that will work.

As for external links, the most important rule is not to link to competitors. On the other hand, using them in a smart manner includes indicating references for statistics and data that was collected somewhere else. As long as you are not competing with that website, your page can benefit from adding relevant sources and letting readers know where the information comes from. In other words, you increase the page’s trustworthiness.

Established Goals

So far, the SEO-focused content brief is close to perfection. However, the content should include something that will lead to your goal, which should not be only ranking better on Google and other search engines.

Instead, let your writers know what the purpose of that piece of content is. For example, my hypothetical website that will have a page on green bananas might sell e-books or courses on how to live a healthier life. In that case, I would instruct my writers to include a Call-to-Action (CTA) to convince people to complete that purchase.

It could also be signing your newsletter or anything else, but do not stop at producing written content. If you have no idea, I suggest sitting for a couple of hours and give your business plan some thought in that matter.

Useful Tips and Overall Guidance

1. Establish the tone and the goals with every piece of content you want your writers to produce
2. Research the primary keyword of each page, relevant secondary keywords to go with them, and identify what people are looking for.
3. Examine your competition in terms of length, resources, content, and strategy. Your purpose is not to copy them but to make something better.
4. You can also find relevant queries using tools like People Also Ask, Quora, or Answer the Public.
5. Use an SEO sheet with clear instructions as a quick reference for your writers while they are growing accustomed to it.

What to Avoid in SEO-Focused Content Briefs?

• Prioritizing search volume – Always consider the relevance of the piece instead of favoring a keyword simply because of its search volume.
• Relying on keyword tools alone – Keyword tools are excellent to help you in your research, but you would be surprised with how long it could take for them to update for recent keywords. Use Google Trends or Google Search Console in combination with them.
• 100% organic traffic content While it is important to create content based on what people search on the web, remember that there are other traffic sources and that visitors might want to explore your website. Have content ready to keep them entertained, even if it does not contain a relevant keyword.
• Not involving your team – Yes, you can keep only sending briefs to your writers, but you will possibly benefit a lot more by actually involving them in the project. Make them feel a relevant part of it, and not a mere gear, show them the results of their work.
• Excess optimization – Excess optimization is a classic problem in SEO strategies. Make sure not to go beyond what is reasonable and continue to focus on filling the user intent.

4 Tools to Assist in Verifying SEO Content

Besides using keyword tools to assist in building the SEO-focused content brief, it could help to have some extra resources to assist in building and verifying the content. Fortunately, there are four excellent choices among those.

Frase.io – Answer the Questions

Frase will allow you to build an optimized content brief focused on SEO or to check the content your writers created. It compares with the top results for a given search query and gives the most important topics and answers you should cover in your piece. It has a Demo version and can be used for a reasonable entry price.

UseTopic – Easier Content Curation

The header is not telling you to pick this app over others, but I figured you would want to know where to find the tool given its simple name. Topic will analyze the competition and generate titles, descriptions, and outlines via GPT-3. It also considers the content that is already done, giving it a grade based on comparison with other websites. The payment per brief can become high, depending on how many of those you require.

Copyscape – Plagiarism Checker

I already covered the importance of identifying and resolving duplicate content. In order to avoid having ideas that are equal to those of your competitors, or if you are not 100% sure your writers are providing original content, using Copyscape can help to determine it.

Marketmuse – SEO Expert Tool

Marketmuse would work better for agencies and companies that do not count on an SEO expert. Given that you reached this post on how to write an SEO-focused content brief, I figure that you do have some experience in that field. Even so, it is worth mentioning that it works by generating ideas for your brief and giving a score to ready content based on all the most important SEO aspects – for a considerable price.

The Takeaway

By now, you not only know how to write an SEO-focused content brief for your writers but also will not commit terrible mistakes that could consume time, money, and effort for nothing.

It is clear that the current valid SEO strategies must focus on user intent and make sure that readers find what they are looking for while having a good overall experience. By ensuring that your writers have the correct brief to guide them through using the right keywords, tone, and structure, you will cover most of it.
Of course, some hits and misses are expected in that field. You can always resort to some tools for an extra price, at least at the beginning, or trust that you will use all that information the best possible way.