Tell me if this sounds familiar:
As an SEO Manager, you’re responsible for growing your company’s organic search traffic. You’re working with your dev team on some technical improvements, but you notice a big slice of the opportunity lies with content. Your company has a content team, but you notice they’re not using keyword research to inform their articles. You’ve tried to send them keyword ideas, but so far, they haven’t been receptive to your suggestions.
Or how about this scenario?
You’re a marketing director at a startup. You know that you need content, but don’t have the expertise or time to do it yourself, so you ask your network for recommendations and find yourself a freelance writer. The only problem is, you’re not always sure what to assign them. With little instruction to work off of, they produce content that misses the mark.
The solution in both of these scenarios is a content brief. However, not all content briefs are created equal.
As someone who lives with one foot in content and the other in SEO, I can shed some light on how to make your content briefs both comprehensive and beloved by your content team.
Let’s start by agreeing on some terminology.
What’s a content brief?
A content brief is a set of instructions to guide a writer on how to draft a piece of content. That piece of content can be a blog post, a landing page, a white paper, or any number of other initiatives that require content.
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.
Typically, content briefs are written by