8 Key Elements of an Effective SEO Content Brief
When it comes to building content that helps you achieve your SEO objectives, “good” isn’t good enough. Your content has to be tailor-made to achieve your goals. It has to target the right keywords for the right audiences, supply the best information to satisfy the intent behind the queries, and help guide your audience to where they need to go next.
This doesn’t happen by chance. Thoughtful preparation and direction will help ensure that writers are able to create content that achieves its goals. Developing an SEO content brief is an important step, providing clear and data-informed drafting inputs that will guide the drafting process.
SEO content briefs: 8 key elements
Whether you’re planning and drafting content internally, or working with a partner for either or both, creating detailed briefs is a great way to transfer knowledge and collaborate. The content brief should ideally represent the expert insight of SEO professionals, setting the published page up for maximum impact in search.
These eight inputs are essential to a comprehensive yet concise SEO content brief.
1. Primary keywords
Generally speaking, every piece of SEO-driven content should target one or maybe two primary keywords, identified as part of your keyword strategy. These are the search engine result pages (SERPs) you want your brand to show up on. At TopRank Marketing, our briefs include keyword data derived from SEO analysis tools to help writers understand the context, SERP landscape, and intent behind these primary keywords.
2. Semantic keywords
Each primary keyword you will try to rank for has several semantic keywords connected to it. These are words semantically related to the primary keyword that have become so frequently associated with the subject matter in other content online that search engines have learned to look for them when crawling for the primary keyword. Including these semantic keywords in your content can help you rank higher.
3. Audience insights
Understanding your audience is key to successful content planning. Provide demographic info, buyer personas, job seniority, role or function, and pain points in the brief to help writers cater to the intended audience.
4. Search intent
Identify the search intent behind the keywords and analyze the SERP to gain insights into why people are searching for specific queries.
5. SERP features
Understand the various SERP features and plan your content structure to align with these features. Content that matches SERP features is more likely to rank higher.
6. Content objectives
Set clear and measurable content objectives based on your research findings. Outline what you want your content to achieve.
7. Content outline
Provide a detailed outline of your content structure, including titles, meta descriptions, word count, headings, and subheadings.
8. Linking recommendations
Include internal linking, outbound links, and backlinks in your content to improve search engine understanding and ranking.
Be strategic in your approach to SEO by creating detailed SEO content briefs for every piece of content you create. This will help your content perform better and serve your overall SEO strategy effectively.
Ready to take your SEO content to the next level? Check out our blog post: SEO Content Strategy: From Basic to Advanced.
About the author
Harry is one of TopRank Marketing’s Content Strategists, with years of experience in creating high-quality content that performs well on search engines and social media. He is passionate about representing his clients’ voice and providing relevant, insightful information. When he’s not writing, Harry enjoys reading and watching movies.