6 Best Tips for Writing SEO Content Brief Examples [2023]

Imagine you’re a business owner, and you’re investing in content marketing to reach new customers and grow your business. You hire a content writer to create a blog post for your website, but you quickly realize that you need to provide them with an SEO content brief.

You’ve never written an SEO content brief before, and you’re not sure what to include. But don’t worry, we have your back. Many business owners and marketing professionals struggle to write effective SEO content briefs.

That’s where this blog post comes in. In this post, I’m going to share with you the best tips for writing SEO content briefs for your content teams. By following these tips, you’ll be able to write SEO content briefs that will help you to produce high-quality content that is optimized for search engines and relevant to your target audience.

What is an SEO Content Brief?

An SEO content brief (or content outline) is a document that provides detailed instructions to a writer on how to create a piece of content that is optimized for search engines and relevant to their target audience. It should include all the necessary information for the writer to produce high-quality content that will rank well in search results and drive organic traffic to your website.

Benefits of Creating an SEO Content Brief

There are many benefits to creating an SEO content brief, including:

• Improved content quality: An SEO-focused content brief helps to ensure that your content is well-written, informative, and relevant to your target audience. It also helps to ensure that your content is optimized for search engines, which can lead to higher rankings and more traffic to your website.
• Reduced rework: It reduces the amount of rework that is required in your content creation process. By providing clear and concise instructions to your team of writers, you can help to ensure that your content meets your expectations and is ready to publish without any major changes.
• Increased efficiency: Streamlines your content production process by providing a roadmap and content format as per your SEO strategy for the writer. This can help to save time and resources, and it can also help to ensure that all your content types are published on time. This ensures that content marketers can smoothly handle content at scale.

Developing Your SEO Content Strategy

Before you start writing your detailed content brief and aiming for search rankings, it is important to develop a detailed content marketing strategy. From clearly knowing your content goals, and user intent to the average word count and other key elements in the form of a style guide of sorts. This will help you to identify your target audience, establish your primary and secondary keywords, and understand the search intent of your target audience. Resulting in comprehensive content for search engines, a smoother writing process, and potential top-ranking articles.

Identifying Your Target Audience

The first step in developing your SEO content strategy is to identify your target audience. Who are you trying to reach with your content? What are their needs and interests? Once you have a good understanding of your target audience, your content producer can start to develop content that is relevant and appealing to them.

Establishing Primary and Secondary Keywords

Once you have identified your target audience, you need to establish your primary and secondary keywords. Your primary keyword is the main topic of your content piece, the key keyword intent. This targets the essential elements of your content projects. Your secondary keywords are related to your primary keyword and can help to provide more context and detail to your content. This targets the intended audience across their funnel stage to make them potential customers.

Understanding Search Intent

Search intent indicates the reason why a person is searching for a particular keyword. There are basically four types of search intent discussed below:

• Informational: It is when a person searches for something specific to acquire some information about that particular topic.
• Navigational: it navigates the user to a specific website or web page.
• Transactional: The user is ready to make a purchase or take another action.
• Commercial: The user is researching a product or service before making a purchase.

It is important to understand the search intent of your target audience so that you can create content that meets their needs. For example, if you are targeting informational search intent, you should create content that is informative and provides value to the reader. If you are targeting transactional search intent, you should create content that is persuasive and encourages the reader to take action.

Analyzing Competitors’ Content Strategies

Another important step in developing your SEO content strategy is to analyze the content strategies of your competitors. What types of content are they creating? What keywords are they targeting? How is their content performing in search results? By analyzing your competitors’ content strategies, you can learn from their successes and avoid their mistakes.

Outlining Your Content Strategy Goals

Once you have developed a good understanding of your target audience, established your primary and secondary keywords, understood search intent, and analyzed your competitors’ content strategies, you need to outline your content strategy goals. You need to understand what are your goals. Are you trying to increase brand awareness? Generate leads? Drive sales? Once you know what you want to achieve, you can start to develop content that is aligned with your goals.

6 Best Tips For Writing the SEO Content Brief

Now that you have developed your SEO content strategy, you are ready to start writing your detailed content brief for your freelance writers. Your creative brief and detailed outlines should include all of the necessary information for the writer to produce high-quality content. This careful planning helps them optimize their content for search engines and be relevant to your target audience.

Set the Scope of the Project

The first step in writing your SEO content brief is to set the scope of the project. This includes defining the topic of the content piece, the target audience, and the primary and secondary keywords. You should also specify the type of content that you want (e.g., blog post, article, infographic, video, etc.) and the desired format (e.g., long-form content, short-form content, list article, etc.).

Define Your Target Keyword(s)

Your target keyword is the main topic of your content piece. It should be a relevant keyword that your target audience is likely to search for. You should also choose a target keyword that has a good search volume and low competition.

To define your target keyword(s), you can use a keyword research tool such as Google Keyword Planner. This tool will help you to identify relevant keywords and their search volume and competition.

Once you have identified a few potential target keywords, you need to choose the one that is most relevant to your content piece and has the best chance of ranking well in search results.

Determine Type of Content and Format(s)

The type of content and format that you choose will depend on your target audience and the topic of your content piece. For example, if you are targeting a technical audience, you may want to write a long-form blog post or article. If you are targeting a general audience, you may want to write a shorter blog post or create an infographic.

Include Internal and External Links Requirements (if any)

Internal links can help to improve your website’s navigation and user experience. They can also help to improve your website’s SEO by distributing link equity throughout your website.

External links can help to provide your readers with additional information and resources. They can also help to improve your website’s SEO by demonstrating that your website is a trusted authority on your topic.

If you have any specific requirements for internal and external links, be sure to include them in your content brief.

Specify the frame for Completion

When you are writing your content brief, be sure to specify a timeframe for completion. This will help to ensure that the writer has enough time to produce high-quality content.

A reasonable timeframe for completion will vary depending on the length and complexity of the content piece. For example, a long-form blog post may take a week or two to write, while a short-form blog post may only take a few days to write.

Outline Quality Standards for Deliverables

When you are writing your content brief, be sure to outline your quality standards for the deliverables. This will help to ensure that the writer meets your expectations.

Some things to consider when outlining your quality standards include:

• Grammar and spelling
• Accuracy of information
• Writing style and tone
• Originality and creativity
• Formatting and layout

You can also provide the writer with examples of high-quality content that you like. This will help them to understand the task more clearly.

Closing Thoughts

Once you have written your SEO content brief, be sure to review it carefully to ensure that it is complete and accurate. You should also ask someone else to review it to get their feedback. Once you are satisfied with your content brief, you can share it with the writer and start the content production process.

If you are looking for help writing SEO content briefs, we can help. We have a team of experienced SEO content writers who can create high-quality content briefs that are optimized for search engines and relevant to your target audience.