The Perfect SEO Content Brief Template

A content brief is an indispensable strategic document that guides writers and content creators in producing SEO-optimized content. 

We’re about to talk through what makes a great content brief, things to take into consideration and common challenges, but if all you want is a new template to work from – it’s right here. If you’re keen to then edit that seo content brief template, or want to create your own from scratch, then read on as we describe what makes the perfect content brief.

It’s unsurprising to say that a great content brief contains key elements such as target keywords, audience information, and specific requirements to align content with overall SEO goals for clients. Getting your content brief template right, however:

• Ensures consistency: Maintain a unified brand voice across all client content, even when working with multiple writers or scaling content production.
• Improves efficiency: Streamline the content creation process by providing clear guidelines upfront, reducing the need for extensive revisions and speeding up turnaround times.
• Optimizes for search: Include target keywords, search intent, and other SEO elements to ensure content is optimized from the start, improving ranking potential.
• Focuses on audience needs: Help writers understand client target audiences, their pain points, and preferences, leading to more engaging and relevant content.
• Aligns with strategy: Ensure each piece of content serves a specific purpose in the overall SEO strategy, maximizing the impact of content marketing efforts.

SEO content briefs are both more important and complex than a traditional writer’s brief because they pass over key data-driven insights such as user intent and frequently asked questions. By providing insights into what users are looking for when they enter specific search queries, briefs help writers create content that satisfies both user needs and search engine requirements, in a way that would otherwise be non-obvious to most content writers.

For larger pieces, content briefs speed up the creation of comprehensive, authoritative content by outlining key topics, subtopics, and questions that would otherwise require the writer to do their own research, whilst avoiding the dreaded blank page. This level of detail and structure helps content rank better in search results and positions the agency’s clients as trusted sources of information in their respective niches, building authority over time.

Then, of course, there’s the important issue of scaling and standard agency processes. Content briefs allow SEO agencies to maintain quality and consistency while increasing content output, ensuring that each piece aligns with the client’s brand standards and contributes to overall SEO performance across diverse industries and markets. So, it’s pretty clear that good content requires good briefing – but what goes into a great content brief?

Key Elements of an Effective SEO Content Brief

To create high-performing content consistently for clients, SEO agencies should include the following key elements in their content brief templates:

1. Content Strategy Alignment

Clearly state how the content piece fits into the client’s overall SEO strategy. This helps writers understand the broader context and ensures that each piece contributes to long-term SEO goals, such as building topical authority or targeting specific stages of the buyer’s journey.

2. Detailed Audience Persona

Include an audience persona section covering:

• Demographic information specific to the client’s target market
• Psychographic details relevant to the content topic
• Pain points and challenges the audience faces in relation to the client’s products or services
• Content preferences and consumption habits, including preferred formats and platforms

This doesn’t need to be War and Piece – you’re providing a vignette into the audience reading the article so that the copywriter can draft appropriately, you’re not setting a multi-million pound ad-spend.

3. Search Intent Analysis

Provide a thorough analysis of search intent, including the primary search intents for target keywords, examples of how top-ranking content in the client’s industry addresses these intents and specific user questions the content should answer based on “People Also Ask” features and keyword research tools

4. Competitor Content Gap Analysis

Include a section on competitor analysis that identifies top-ranking competitors for target keywords in the client’s niche as well as any notes of what you like on those sites.

5. Content Structure and Formatting Guidelines

Provide a clear outline for the content structure, including:

• Suggested H1 and H2 subheadings optimized for target keywords and user intent
• Include estimated word counts for each section to ensure balanced coverage of topics and proper keyword distribution, considering industry norms for content length
• Recommended content types (e.g., lists, tables, images etc) based on any SERP features you might be targeting

6. SEO & Administrative Requirements

Include specific technical SEO elements such as:

• A reminder to avoid over-optimization
• A reminder to actually follow the guidance above
• Key dates – when was the brief created, when do you need it approved by and when are you expecting to put the article live?
• Explanation that if the writer happens to have some expert knowledge on the subject they can add additional information to what is in the brief, just as long as they still properly cover the areas chosen.
• If you’re relying on the copywriter to pick out imagery, make that clear.
• Meta title and description templates optimized for click-through rates in SERPs
• Image alt text guidelines for improved accessibility and SEO
• Internal and external linking requirements to boost topical relevance and authority

7. Content Goals and KPIs

Clearly define what success looks like for the content piece by specifying:

• Target / forecast organic traffic goals based on keyword search volume and competition in the client’s industry
• For some clients you’ll want to include desired engagement metrics (e.g. time on page, bounce rate) benchmarked against industry standards
• Conversion objectives aligned with the client’s overall marketing goals and sales funnel

8. Brand Voice and Style Guidelines

Ensure consistency in tone and style by including:

• Client-specific brand voice characteristics and examples of how to apply them
• Preferred writing style (e.g., formal, conversational) appropriate for the target audience and industry
• Industry-specific terminology or phrases to use or avoid, maintaining accuracy and relevance

By incorporating these elements into your SEO content brief template, you create a comprehensive guide that empowers writers to produce high-quality, SEO-optimized content consistently without taking away their ability to be creative. This level of detail actually makes content creation faster, not slower, by allowing more pieces to be approved on their first draft. That means better rankings, increased organic traffic, and improved ROI on content marketing efforts.

Customizing Your SEO Content Brief

So far we’ve talked through how to create a killer SEO content brief, but that doesn’t mean it works well for you and your team. Getting it ready for your agency’s about a lot more than slapping a logo on it. To create a customized SEO content brief template that speaks to your agency’s unique needs and client requirements, consider the following strategies:

Tailoring Your Template to Your Client’s Workflow

Consider having a per-client template to reflect their internal workflows and approval processes. Incorporate client-specific requirements or industry regulations that may affect content creation. For particularly complex sign-off processes (e.g. pharma) potentially include workflow’s making clear who the document needs to go to at every stage so it doesn’t get lost along the way.

Integrating Data-Driven Insights

You’ll likely want to modify the type of data that you’re putting into the brief based on the SEO tools that you use. For example, if you pay for something like Sparktoro, you might want to beef up the section on audience behaviour. Meanwhile, if you’ve a rank tracker that doesn’t give you information about search intent, SERP features etc then, apart from getting another rank tracker, you’ll likely want to remove those sections.

If you’re using briefs to have clients sign off on the very idea of creating certain pages then you’ll want to lean on some of your existing data to better understand why you’ve chosen this page, in particular, to create. This could include:

• keyword difficulty scores and search volume trends

• historical performance data of similar content within the client’s niche
• seasonal trends or market-specific data points relevant to the content topic and timing

Scalability and Flexibility

We talked about having customised templates for each client, but you’ll likely also need a different template based on the page type. For example, a brief for a category page should be much simpler than one for longform content. Do not spend 500 words explaining the 200 words you want written! 

Automation and Integration

Of course, if you’re creating a lot of content briefs, then automation is always an option. When automating the creation of your content briefs, though, it’s important to keep sight of the fact that each content brief is, in real terms, a work order for a content writer. As a result, producing 100 content briefs could quite quickly back up all of your content writers for quite a while whilst wracking up a bill for your agency. So automation needs to come with a good prioritisation system.

In SEOmonitor we highlight the pages that could benefit from re-writing within the content audit section:

This is in addition to our ‘keywords with missing pages’ section, that suggests new pages that could be created – all prioritised by the size of the opportunity.

Within the Content Writer section we also do the keyword research for you to understand that an article on ‘how to measure shoe sizes’, for example, could achieve up to 7.2k visits a month:

From there it’s a click to decide the type of article you want:

…and then, within 5 minutes, you’ll have a content brief (with keyword justifications) ready to go. In the background it’ll have analysed semantically connected keywords, the content on the top 10 results for those keywords and a range of other factors to understand what the article needs not only to match user intent, but to rank.

Balancing AI and Human Expertise

While automation is objectively pretty cool, it’s essential to maintain a balance:

• Use AI as a tool to augment human creativity and strategic thinking, not replace it, especially for nuanced industry insights. 
• Review any automated suggestions before sending them to the client. I cannot emphasise this enough. 
• Combine AI insights with human expertise to create truly innovative content strategies tailored to each client’s unique market position. More recently I’ve been combining LLM created briefs with summarised expert-level interviews on topics, combining both to add real nuggets into briefs. This requires significantly less expert time, but many of the benefits.

AI is a tool to support human decision-making, not replace it entirely. The most successful content strategies will leverage AI capabilities while still relying on human creativity, industry expertise, and strategic vision to create content that truly resonates with audiences and achieves client objectives. 

Training and Adoption

If nobody uses your template, do you really have a template at all? Ensuring successful implementation of your template across your agency is as, if not more, important than the strength of your template in the first place. In the past I’ve had FAQs on Notion explaining how to use the templates. As new questions were asked about those templates I’d add the questions and answers to the FAQ.

By investing time in creating a customized SEO content brief template, you’re building a strategic asset that can significantly enhance your agency’s content creation process and SEO performance for clients. Remember to regularly refine and evolve your template based on insights gathered from its use and changes in the SEO landscape. 

The Content Guidelines to Go With Your Content Brief

Find yourself wanting to write a few pages about tone of voice etc? What you’re writing is a Content Guideline document, not a brief. The good news is that these can be appended to the end of a brief.

In your Content Guidelines document you’ll want to consider adding information on:

1) E-A-T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness)

Explain what each of these are, why they’re important and include guidelines on the kind of things that writers might want to include to excel at these; like quotes, reference to real-world trust signals like awards and links to government sites. 

2) Optimizing for Featured Snippets

In your brief you may refer to requiring content in a particular style to target a SERP feature. In your Content Guidelines you’ll likely want to provide good examples of how those lists get used by Google and tips on creating them.

3) User Experience (UX) Considerations

Guide writers on creating a logical content flow that keeps users engaged with the client’s website, reducing bounce rates. Your best writers will find it slightly patronising, though your west will likely benefit from it a great deal. Let the writers know if there are any interactive widgets at their disposal – such as calculators for financial clients – that they can include within the articles. 

4) Notes from the Client

I always insisted that the client add in their own words how they saw their brand, their tone of voice and any other details that they felt were pertinent. If it’s not in the Content Guidelines then they shouldn’t expect the content writer to know or get it right. This gave the client ownership over the document and allowed everyone to point to it in the unlikely event that an article had major issues.

5) Accessibility and Inclusivity

Ensure content is accessible to all segments of the client’s audience:

• Include guidelines for creating inclusive language and diverse representation in content, broadening appeal and avoiding alienation
• Provide instructions for making content accessible (e.g., alt text for images, transcripts for videos) to improve both user experience and SEO
• Suggest ways to present information in multiple formats to cater to different learning styles and abilities within the target audience, enhancing engagement

Common Challenges and Solutions in Content Brief Creation

Unfortunately there are some challenges with content briefs that will forever be subjective. Here are some of the issues that you, as a team, will simply need to agree:

1. Balancing Detail and Flexibility

Challenge: Providing enough guidance without stifling creativity across various industries.

Solution: Strike a balance by:

• Clearly define non-negotiable elements (e.g., target keywords, core topics) specific to each client’s SEO goals
• Allowing room for writer interpretation in areas like tone and style, while staying within client brand guidelines
• Including a section for “Additional Insights” where writers can add their own expertise relevant to the client’s industry

2. Keeping Briefs Concise Yet Comprehensive

Challenge: Including all necessary information without overwhelming writers, especially for complex industries.

Solution:

• Use a modular brief structure, allowing for easy customization based on content type and client industry
• Prioritize information, placing the most critical elements at the beginning, tailored to each client’s specific needs
• Utilize visual elements like charts or mind maps to convey complex information succinctly, particularly for technical industries
• Make it clear that the copywriter can, and should, ask questions if unsure.

3. Aligning SEO Requirements with User Intent

Challenge: Ensuring content meets both search engine and user needs across different sectors.

Solution:

• Conduct thorough search intent analysis for each target keyword, considering industry-specific search behaviors
• Provide clear guidelines on how to address user questions and pain points unique to each client’s audience
• Include examples of content that successfully balances SEO and user value within the client’s niche

4. Adapting to Rapid SEO Changes

Challenge: Keeping briefs up-to-date with evolving SEO best practices across various industries.

Solution:

• Implement a regular review process for your brief template, considering industry-specific SEO trends
• Stay informed about SEO trends through reputable sources and adjust briefs accordingly for each client sector
• Use AI-powered tools to stay ahead of emerging SEO trends and search patterns relevant to each client’s market

5. Ensuring Consistency Across Multiple Writers and Clients

Challenge: Maintaining a consistent brand voice and quality standard across diverse client portfolios.

Solution:

• Develop comprehensive style guides for each client, enter them into your Content Guidelines document and attach it to your brief.
• Provide examples of high performing content for different content types and industries
• Implement a peer review process to ensure consistency before final editing, especially for new or complex client industries

6. Scaling Brief Creation for High-Volume Content Production

Challenge: Creating detailed briefs efficiently for large content volumes across multiple clients.

Solution:

• Lean on AI-powered tools to assist in brief creation, tailoring outputs to each client’s industry and needs
• Develop templates for different content types and industries to streamline the process
• Train a dedicated team in brief creation to ensure consistency and efficiency across various client sectors

Remember – as with everything in agency life this is not a solve-once problem. Mark out some time to regularly evaluate and adjust the approach based on client feedback and changes.

Ultimately, the goal is to create a content brief process that’s both scalable and adaptable, capable of guiding your content strategy across various industries. 

Download the SEO Content Brief Template

To get you started, we’ve prepared a content brief you can steal, edit and call your own. Feel free to download it here.

Additional Resources

For more insights on creating effective SEO proposals and strategies, check out our comprehensive guide on crafting winning SEO proposals. This guide provides expert tips and strategies to elevate your agency’s success in securing and delivering high-impact SEO projects.