A Guide to Creating Effective SEO Content Briefs
Sarah
When you hire a writer to create content for your website, social media profile, or digital marketing campaign, the writer’s job is to produce excellent content that engages the reader and meets your search engine optimization goals. Your job is to offer clear direction and the tools they need. SEO content briefs help you accomplish this goal.
Generally, a writer needs much more to go on than a list of keywords. If you want to avoid the frustration of miscommunication, constant revisions, and finished work that doesn’t meet your expectations, consider providing your writer with an SEO content brief.
What Are SEO Content Briefs, and Why Are They Important?
An SEO content brief outlines the goals of a writing project and guides the writer toward meeting those goals. It explains your intentions for the project so that the writer can produce content that aligns with them. The brief might include specific advice on keywords, meta descriptions, links, and other key aspects of search engine marketing.
Because writing quality can be highly subjective, SEO content briefs are necessary to eliminate guesswork. They ensure that all decisions are data-driven, resulting in a smoother, more collaborative content creation process for all involved parties.
6 Steps to Writing Helpful Content Briefs
Knowing you need to create a content brief for your writer is only the first step. Use these six steps to help you nail down a consistent content planning process that gets results.
1. Describe the Article’s Primary Purpose
What do you hope to achieve with your content? Your writer needs to know if their primary purpose is to market a product or service, educate readers, or entertain your audience. Each requires a different writing style, so informing your writer of your intended purpose and expected results will help them get it right from the beginning.
2. Share Target Keyword Information
Effective SEO requires strategically placing keywords throughout your content. Tell your writer where you need your primary keyword to show up (in the title, a subheading, and the first paragraph, for example). Remind them to ensure that all keyword usage flows naturally and doesn’t make the article sound stuffed.
3. Detail Your Internal Link Needs
Internal links help search engines properly crawl and index your website and landing pages for better and faster rankings. They also point your readers to other relevant content on your site, allowing them to discover how your content, products, or services can help them.
Include internal linking instructions in your content brief so that your writer knows which pages or page types you’d like to highlight.
4. Ask for High-Quality External Links
External links connect your site to relevant, authoritative content that Google already deems high quality. Asking your writer to include them to back up any statistics or claims helps your SEO and ensures they stick to sources that provide factual information.
5. Outline Headings to Guide Flow
Google may not use headings as a direct ranking factor, but headings and subheadings do help search engines better understand your content and the value it provides readers. They also make content more accessible to your audience.
You don’t have to outline every detail of the article for your writer, but providing suggested headings will help them cover the essential points and structure the content in a way that makes sense.
6. Share Desired Actions for the CTA
A call to action (CTA) drives conversions by letting your readers know what you want them to do next. Do you want your reader to buy a product or contact your team to set up a demo? Make sure to tell your writer what your CTA needs to achieve.
Write Collective Provides Everything You Need for SEO Success
While you may realize the value of creating SEO content briefs, it’s also likely you understand how time-consuming it is to develop them. You know what you want your content to accomplish, but gathering the information needed to guide your writer toward success takes time, expertise, and focused effort.
At Write Collective, our services include content planning, keyword research, and competitor analysis. When you partner with us for your content marketing needs, we’ll help you streamline the content brief creation process so you can focus on building your brand. Place an order for one of our content marketing packages today and get access to everything you need to create solid content briefs with ease.