Content Briefs

When looking to scale your content marketing strategy a detailed content brief for your SEO content writers is key.

So many affiliate marketers give the title of the article and no instructions for what they expect.

Content is an investment. To ensure you’re getting the most out of your time and budget, you can’t afford to leave the entire direction of even a single piece of content to the discretion of individual content creators. They may not grasp the “why” behind what they’re doing. 

A great content brief saves you endless time with progressive optimisation and content expansion work.

That 30 minutes to create your content brief can save you hours long term not needing to continuously go back to optimise the existing content.

Let’s dive in to discuss all things related to Content Briefs for your SEO efforts.

What is a Content Brief?

A content brief is a set of instructions to assist your copywriter with your expectations.

Guiding your freelance writers on how to draft a piece of content will help keep the intent on topic.

Without content briefs, you risk getting back content that doesn’t meet your expectations.

By aligning your copywriters with content brief data points, you can confidently publish a piece of content, knowing how it maps to your brand goals.

Where Content Briefs are Used?

Content Briefs are used for any of the following documents:

• Hub Page Content Creation
• Pillar Post Content Creation
• Supporting Blog Post Content Creation
• Listicle Round-Up Page Content Creation
• Top of the Funnel Blog Post Content Creation
• Landing Page Content Creation

As you can see the content briefs are used for all different types of articles you upload to your website.

Best Content Brief Tools

Here are the best content brief tools to help write more optimised content in April 2024:

1. Surfer SEO
2. MarketMuse
3. Frase

If you are an advanced SEO, creating content briefs can be easy to do manually, by researching the SERPs.

But utilising the specialist content brief tools saves you time and indirectly money by using these SEO tools.

How to Find New Content Brief Opportunities?

Building topical clusters on your website helps you become an expert on the topic to the search engines.

The best practices to find new content brief opportunities is carrying out in-depth keyword research using tools like ahrefs and semrush.

The gap analysis tools give you content gaps your website is missing on a topic.

Once you have collected thousands of keywords from a thorough keyword research plan, then using a keyword clustering tool is key to grouping the keywords into clusters.

Our preferred keyword clustering tool is keyword cupid as it groups keywords that need to be covered on a single page to avoid any keyword cannibalisation problems internally on your website where two pages are competing for the same search query.

There are other great keyword grouping tools like cluster AI which helps to make sure your pages follow the one page for one corpus SEO strategy needed to win in the SERPs in April 2024.

The new content brief opportunities should form part of your content roadmap where your content managers or senior editors are consistently adding new articles or improving existing with sourcing accidental keywords or auditing existing content already uploaded to your website.

What should a content brief include?

A detailed content brief should include:

• Word Count Expectations
• Focus Keyphrase of the Article
• Headings (H2s to be used) using Frase
• Sub Headings (H3s within the H2s)
• Keyword Suggestions Using Surfer SEO Content Editor
• Search Intent
• Tone of Voice
• Intended Result for the Reader
• External Link Suggestions
• Internal Link Suggestions
• Quantity of Media Rich Images
• Questions from Marketmuse
• Semantically Related Topics Using Marketmuse

How To Get Started Creating a Content Brief?

The best way to get started on creating a content brief is the Writing Prompts for a Paragraph strategy.

Here is a video showing the paragraph style writing prompts to start content briefs.

As Income School recommend the prompts are starting with very basic lame tips that are obvious to the user. But then expanding on each of these tips to drive great insights and data to back up why these are important.

Check out how to get started with content briefs with the prompt to paragraph style strategy.

If you don’t follow Income School I highly recommend you subscribe to their channel for on-page SEO tips and tricks.

Summary

Understanding the importance of content briefs when you’re looking to ramp up content production is going to be the difference between success and failure.

Creating content briefs when scaling your article velocity is the key to not sacrificing quality or gambling on the ability of your content to rank well and gain traffic.

Using amazing tools like MarketMuse, Frase and Surfer SEO to create artificial intelligence generated content briefs are an indispensable asset.

The AI Tools provide a scientific approach to give you the best chances of your content production ranking well in the SERPs.

Briefing your writers is arguably the most critical step in the content creation workflow as gives your copywriters a way to work effectively and efficiently.

• Absolute Links vs Relative Links

  

• AI Content Detection

  

• AI Copywriting Software

  

• Artificial Intelligence For Content Writing

  

• Autoblogging AI Review

  

• Bolded Keywords in Google SERP

  

• Content Briefs

  

• Content Cannibalisation Google Penalty

  

• Content Decay

  

• Content Doctor

  

• Content Expansion

  

• Content Harmony Review

  

• Content Plan Roadmap

  

• Content Strategist

  

• Content Team

  

• Dashword Review

  

• Featured Snippets

  

• Focus Keyphrase

  

• Google Duplicate Content Penalty

  

• Google Fresh Content Ranking Factor

  

• How To Create A Topical Map

  

• Identify The Root, Rare, and Unique Attributes Of An Entity

  

• Jasper.ai Free Trial

  

• Onboarding Writers

  

• One Page For One Corpus

  

• Ordering Content SOP

  

• Page Optimizer Pro

  

• Page ReWriter Review

  

• Passage Ranking

  

• Progressive Content Optimisation SEO

  

• Search Perspective Frameworks

  

• SEO Avalanche Technique

  

• SEO Content Audit Guide

  

• SEO Content Optimization Tools

  

• SEO Content Writers

  

• Silo Internal Linking

  

• Standalone Content

  

• Stealth AI Writer

  

• Surfer AI Writer

  

• Surfer SEO Review

  

• Text Optimizer

  

• Text Structure

  

• The SEO Power of Concise Writing

  

• Topical SEO - Create Supporting Articles

  

• Use Topic Review

  

• Website Content Uploader

  

• Why Is Content Veggie The Best AI Content Tool for SEO?

  

• Workello

  

What Others Say

I love rounding up my articles with resources from what others say on the subject matter.

Here are some amazing resources on content briefs.

MarketMuse

Briefs give content strategists and leaders a way to get quality output at scale, which is how you build a foundation for consistent results. Content briefs improve content marketing efforts by ensuring that whoever is executing a piece of written content is fully aligned with the goals of the specific campaign and content marketing strategy at a high level. Here is the resource page from MarketMuse – https://blog.marketmuse.com/what-is-a-content-brief/ A genuinely great content brief will seamlessly combine editorial and brand guidelines, your vision for a specific piece of content, and a roadmap for the comprehensive topical coverage that search engines are looking for in the world of semantic search.

Moz

With little instruction to work off of, they produce content that misses the mark. Without a content brief, you risk getting back content that doesn’t meet your expectations. This will not only frustrate your writer, but it’ll also require more revisions, taking more of your time and money. Here is the resource page from Moz – https://moz.com/blog/how-to-write-seo-content-brief In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Scott Calland

Create fully-fledged content briefs with everything you’d need to make that page the best in the SERPs is what helps you scale your content production.

The time spent on a comprehensive content brief is worth its weight in gold as eliminates the need for multiple revisions.

This minimises the risk of poor content being written from the start and allows me to sculpt the tone of voice, sub topics to include, questions and what you want your audience to walk away with i.e. fill in the form or click an affiliate link.

My content briefs include everything from semantically-related phrases, people also ask (PAA), word counts and header structures to give my writer a full understanding of what I need from them.

By completely bypassing the back-and-forth between SEO and content writer by giving all that’s needed upfront, I’m able to get better quality content out much quicker.

LeadsPanda

LeadsPanda shows 10 Key Elements to Giving Concise and Clear Content Briefs for Writers:

Leon Angus

Leon Angus shows “How To Create A Content Brief For Your Writers when Outsourcing SEO Articles”:

Content Distribution

A writer’s brief provides clarity and focus for the writer, ensuring the delivery of a quality content piece. Clarity and focus are the core fundamentals of writers briefs. A quality brief will also unify the outcomes of SEO editorial and brand strategies. It will set up expectations clearly, it will assist the writer in research and it will save on time and stress in the editing process. In this video it highlights how do you ensure that a quality content brief is delivered to every single writer:

James Dooley

Entrepreneur

James Dooley is a British entrepreneur, SEO, investor, and philanthropist. James has built a huge Search Engine Optimization team that focus on organic SEO endeavours, including affiliate marketing, lead generation, as well as SEO services.