For content marketing teams, content briefs play a major role in guiding content writers toward high-quality, high–performing content. For SEO content specifically, SEO content briefs communicate the most important on-page factors that will help improve the ranking potential of content for specific keywords.
In this guide, you will learn all about content briefs, from what should be included in a brief to templates and examples. In addition, this guide will break down how to use SEO software to generate content briefs more quickly and efficiently.
An SEO content brief is a detailed document that outlines the guidelines and specifications for creating search-engine-optimized content.
It serves as a roadmap for content creation, ensuring that the content aligns with the goals and objectives of the website while also optimizing it to rank well in search engine results.
Overall, an SEO content brief is a vital tool in the content creation process. It helps content creators understand the goals, target audience, and requirements for the content, allowing them to produce high-quality content that is optimized for both search engines and users.
What individual marketing or SEO teams choose to include in a content brief may vary, but basic content briefs typically include the following information for the content creator:
A more complex content brief, or one designed to help create content with the highest ranking potential in search engines, may also include the following elements:
With these elements included in an SEO content brief, the content creator will know exactly how to create a high-quality SEO content deliverable.
In traditional content production, a content strategist or content manager generates a content brief. Then, they hand the document over to a content writer to begin the writing process.
Once the content writer has completed the content, they will send it back to the content manager for editorial review.
The content may go through several rounds of revisions before it is handed over to the client or published live on a website.
For content teams, like a content writing agency that produces content on behalf of clients, content briefs play an important role in streamlining and optimizing the content marketing workflow.
Why? Because content briefs:
If your marketing team or agency is not yet using content briefs in your content marketing process, you are likely missing out on many of the above benefits.
There are many potential formats for an SEO content brief, but here are some examples of real content briefs produced by SEO and content marketing strategists.
In this content brief, the strategist has made clear to the content writer the strategic goals of the content. The strategist has also already done the work of optimizing the most important SEO meta tags, including the page title, meta description, and H2s.
The content marketer has also provided brief instructions on what content should be included in each section. These instructions include adding internal links, and CTAs, as well as what questions should be answered within the body of the content.
Similarly to content brief #1, this SEO content brief includes the strategic purposes of the content, including the target keywords.
However, instead of outlining the content with H2s, this SEO strategist provided a list of keywords or topics with semantic relevance that the content should include.
As seen by these two examples, there is no one right way to generate a content brief. But if the goal of your content is to rank in search engines, the information provided should help the writer create content with strong quality signals.
Content marketers and strategists can also use the power of artificial intelligence and enterprise SEO software to generate content briefs more quickly.
Software tools that generate content briefs leverage the power of data scraping and artificial intelligence (like chat-GPT).
For Search Atlas users, you can generate content briefs and outlines in the SEO Content Assistant tool.
The software will take you to a new browser window in Google Docs. The document will include a detailed content brief that you can edit, adjust, or hand off to your content writing team.
Our team at LinkGraph wants to help you create better content briefs! If you have not yet registered for a free trial of our software, why wait?
With access to our SEO software, you can start generating high-quality SEO content briefs faster than ever.
For a comprehensive analysis of your website’s SEO performance, consider taking advantage of our free SEO audit.
Or, feel free to use our free content brief template to provide your content writers with all of the information they need to create rank-worthy content.
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