On-Page SEO: The SEO Content Brief

Creating customer first content is challenging. It requires collaboration from multiple sources, including writers, designers, editors, researchers, and SEOs.

Any communication breakdown takes an already complex process and makes it nearly impossible to produce helpful content that ranks high on search engines, and that's where the SEO content brief comes in. So what is a content brief? It's a set of directions, insights, and guidance to guarantee that a piece of content is aligned with the goals of the project. The more detailed you make it, the faster the writer can execute it, the more likely it is that the content meets expectations. In other words, briefs are one way to introduce agility into your workflow, making it possible to produce consistent high quality content from the first draft.

Going further, an SEO content brief should have the same goals as any content brief, but should also attempt to drive relevant organic traffic. Providing on-page SEO suggestions at the start helps to bridge the gap between content and SEO teams and foster a more collaborative seamless process.

SEO content briefs are key because they tell the writer exactly what the article is and is not thoroughly scoping out. The article in the stage prevents a possibility of scope creep further on in the process. It's much easier to create valuable content when it's clear to everyone involved what the content is meant to accomplish. An effective SEO content brief eliminates subjectivity and guesswork that arises during the content creation process by providing data-driven insights into your audience and their search intent. In short, an SEO content brief is an easy way of building a collaborative repeatable content creation process across teams.

So what should you include in an SEO content brief? Some elements you'll want to include are:

Your target audience, or who do you want to read this content.

The keywords you'll be targeting. And what is at the heart of the question? Your user is trying to find the answer to.

The goal of your content. Though your main goal should always be to satisfy a user's search intent. You might want to define some secondary goals, like jobs, the content should accomplish, information it needs to provide, or the scope that it'll cover.

What's the best format for this content for it to meet the user's needs?

What related question should the content answer? People also ask, results on Google are a great place to find inspiration for subtopics your user might find interesting.

Where is your target user in their buyer's journey?

What action do you want your audience to take after reading your content?

What related content can you link to make sure that you're citing credible sources and funneling traffic to other relevant pages on your website?

How long do you think it'll take to answer the user's query?

And lastly, providing your content writers with examples of effective and poor competitor content will help them ensure the content they create is superior to what's already out there.

Though this isn't a comprehensive list, providing these nuggets of information in your brief is a great place to start.

Content briefing can be a daunting task, so it's important to create a repeatable, efficient process. One way to speed things up is by using a template which you can create from scratch or find examples of online. This way you don't have to think about what needs to be included each time going further, think about optimizing your process with tools. For example, in Conductor, you can use the content brief template from actions, which makes it easy to create and share briefs, as well as get help actually building your brief with insights from content guidance.

Creating content that drives meaningful organic traffic is hard, but it's definitely easier with a strong SEO content Brief.