Writing an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

 

Suppose you are an SEO manager in a company. You have the responsibility to grow the organic search traffic to your company’s website. You are working with your company’s development team and have noticed some improvements that can be made in the content. Your company’s content team is not using keyword research to enrich their content and make it engaging. You have sent them ideas for using keywords, but the content team is not receptive to your thoughts or suggestions.

There can also be another scenario. For example, you are a marketing director at a startup. You need to assign content to your content team. But you don’t know what to give your content team. The solution is standard in both scenarios. You will need to write an SEO-focused content brief.

What is a Content Brief?

A content brief can be defined as the set of some instructions guiding the writers on drafting a piece of content. That piece of content can be anything like a landing page, a blog post, a white paper, etc. If you don’t have a content brief, you may get back the content that can fail to meet your expectations and marketing needs. Content that fails to meet your expectations will frustrate your writers and take more time and money in more revisions. Usually, content briefs are often written by someone working in an adjacent field like SEO, demand generation, or product marketing.

What is an SEO-focused Content Brief?

An SEO-focused content brief’s primary goal is to instruct the writers to create content targeting specific search queries. It further helps in getting more traffic to your website from the organic search channel.

What You Should Include in Your Content Brief

Here is what you can include in your content brief to make it SEO-focused.

Format

Format means how you can structure your content so it can appear at the top of search results. You can use the right keywords that can help you to get more online visitors. On the contrary, good content can be lost in an inefficient and unorganized format. Break your content into small paragraphs to make it easy to read and comprehend. Always use an appropriate tag hierarchy to maintain the structure of your article in the best possible way.

Primary Intent and Query Target

Primary intent and query target are essential in your SEO-focused content brief. You can use keyword research tools like Moz Keyword Explorer or any other to get ideas relevant to your business. Keyword-rich content and phrases will help search engines know about your content and allow it to rank. But beware, stuffing too many keywords may turn your website, visitors off and penalize search engines.

Pick the Target Query

Always pick the target queries first in your content. To get an in-depth understanding of topics and subtopics to cover, you can use a tool for keyword research to show you questions about the main keyword you are using. You can look at the People Also Ask box. Apart from these, you can find the sites running at the top of the search results and then run them through the keyword research tool you are using. It will help you to see what other keywords can also rank.

Write for Your Audience

Always write content that can appeal to your target audience’s interests or market and can answer their questions. Don’t write all contents describing your products and services. Instead, write and post content that should be relevant to your industry.

Add Call to Action

When you create a content brief, then be cautious about adding a call to action. It will help your visitors to take the desired action when they like your content. Some examples of call-to-actions that you can add to your briefs include free downloads, newsletter sign-ups, free trials, case studies, product listings, etc.

Add Internal and External Links

Try to include internal and external URLs relevant to your content. It will help the readers get relevant information about your company, products, services, and other things. The links should naturally fit your article.

Apart from doing all these things, you should involve your team in the planning process and respect their expertise. Before you implement your content brief, sit down with the members of your content team and gauge how mature they are in their searches.

SOURCES = Writing an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love