The SEO Brief That Actually Works

Most SEO briefs are a keyword, a word count, and a list of headings pulled from whatever currently ranks. A writer handed that produces a version of the existing results, because that is literally what the brief asked for.

Here is the format we hand writers instead. It takes longer to produce and it is the reason the drafts come back usable.

What goes in the brief?

Element	Why it is there	What happens without it
The query plus the person behind it	Same query, different reader intent	Generic framing that fits nobody
Our answer, one sentence	Forces a position before drafting	The draft becomes a survey
Three source materials	Information gain	Writer uses search results
What we are not saying	Kills generic angles early	Two rounds of editing
Internal links, chosen	Decides architecture up front	Orphan page
One competitor page, annotated	Says what the reader already saw	Six hundred words of repetition

The query, and the person behind it. Not just the keyword. One line on who types it and what has just happened to them. Someone told by a board member that the company should be doing SEO reads that query very differently from a marketer who has run it for three years and is stuck.

The answer, in one sentence, from us. Before the writer starts, the brief states our actual position. Not a summary of the consensus. If we do not have one, the piece should not be commissioned yet. This single line is what stops the draft becoming a survey of other articles.

Three source materials. A recorded interview with someone internal who has done the work, a data point we own, or a specific client situation we can describe without naming anyone. If the brief has no sources attached, the writer will use search results, and the output will read like it.

What we are not saying. The angles to avoid, usually because they are generic or because we disagree. This section saves more editing time than any other.

The internal links, chosen deliberately. Which existing pages this should point to and which should point back once live. Decided in the brief, not left to the writer or to nobody. We audited a two-hundred-post blog recently that had zero internal links between essays, which is what happens when this is never anybody’s job.

One competitor page, with a note on why it ranks. Not to imitate. To make explicit what the reader already saw before landing on us, so we do not spend six hundred words repeating it.

What we removed from the old template

The word count. It produced padding, always. We give a rough range in the commissioning note and let the argument decide.

The heading structure. Prescribing H2s locks the writer into someone else’s logic before they have thought about it.

Keyword density and secondary keyword lists. They shaped sentences in ways that made them worse and did nothing measurable.

If the brief cannot produce one thing a competent outsider could not have found online, the problem is upstream of the writer.

What makes a brief good?

A competent writer who does not work at your company should be able to read it and produce a draft containing at least one thing they could not have found online.

If the brief cannot pass that test, you have not decided what you think, or you have not given them access to anyone who knows. Fixing that is the work. Everything else is formatting.

Is forty minutes worth it?

Ours take about forty minutes each, most of it spent finding and clipping the source material. That is expensive against a two-hour writing task, which is why most teams skip it.

The trade is straightforward. Forty minutes of briefing removes two rounds of editing and produces a piece that says something. Skipping it produces a draft that is technically on topic, needs heavy rework, and would not have been worth reading either way.

What the finished piece should look like is in SEO content that does not read like SEO content.