What is it?
Content briefs can be created for internal use by in-house copywriters, or for external use by freelancers who write on the brand’s behalf.
These tend to consist of an overview of the piece, a suggested title, and keywords to weave into and optimise the piece for.
Tone of Voice and audience personas are excellent additions to any content brief too.
But what is often missing is insight on what actually succeeds in the search results.
Why is it important?
Often brands find it hard to know how to create content that helps them become visible in search compared to their competitors.
This can result in the focus being put on continuously producing content that they believe should rank, rather than what will rank.
Expensive lessons can be learnt with this ‘spaghetti against the wall’ kind of approach to content creation.
Simply put, keyword research and audience research alone are not enough to produce effective content briefs.
You need to learn from what competitors are succeeding with to earn your place in the search results.
By including this content research in your brief, you are arming the copywriters with as much context as possible.
This empowers them to create ‘best-in-class’ content which is geared towards success in organic search.
Doing so gives your content a much better chance of engaging your audience and demonstrating a clear ROI.
What to do next?
- Pay attention to the related ‘People also ask’ results for inspiration of subtopics to cover.
- Review the top five pieces of content that appears in the results: What format is it in? How is it framed? What does it cover? What aren’t these pieces doing well?
- Include a summary of findings in your content brief to give your copywriters the best chance of creating best-in-class content.
