#3 Things to Expect from a White Label SEO Company

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How to choose the best White Label Agency Partner for your business?

Partnering with a white-label agency can prove to be highly beneficial in a number of ways. It is most important to provide your clients with the best value for their money.

White-label agencies are well known to be highly beneficial. A partnership like this can not only allow you to expand your business into new markets but can also increase your brand’s credibility and visibility online. In this blog, will explore the reasons you should consider hiring a new agency.

It is important for digital marketing agencies to run the numbers to see if a partnership with another agency, such as a white label agency partner, will generate benefits for both parties. The question is, who are these partners? Is there a way they can help you grow your digital agency? If they were to be built, how much would they cost?

Brands and companies often approach white-label agencies for partnering and offering their services. Although this may seem like a good idea, it may not always be the best. This is because these agencies often do not focus on your needs and only want to push their own products and services, this is not a great idea. These agencies cost a bomb and your budget may be too small for the service you are offering and are often proved unreliable. Therefore before choosing a white label agency you need to be very careful. A white label business model includes white media marketing through white label seo services and white label websites.

Here are a few reasons why you should consider partnering with a White Label Company:

The 6 best white label software and services for resellers

Distinction Between Content Marketing vs Digital Marketing

1. An all-in-one solution

Is the agency you’re working with limited to a specific category of online marketing services? If so, your business will be limited in terms of scaling up. Scaling up requires having a broad range of different services at one location. The best way to manage your clients and their requirements is to work with one-stop solution white label agencies.

A good example of this would be if your agency is doing PPC campaigns for your clients, but doesn’t have the resources for providing social media marketing. In this case, you will need to hire a new agency. The advantage of working with a one-stop agency is cost-effectiveness. Furthermore, this will save you from signing NDAs with multiple agencies for different services.

A digital marketing agency offers services such as SEO, PPC, Social Media Marketing, Google Analytics, AdWords, Web Development, Graphic Designing, Ad banners and Email Marketing.

2. Cost-effectiveness Isn’t Enough

Before you work with a white label social media marketing agency, you should ask yourself this question – Does your choice of the agency solely depend on their cost-effectiveness? If that is what you are looking for, then you might not be happy with this white label agency because there are many more things you should expect from one. A white label agency needs to provide you with enough expertise needed for your client’s projects. They need to provide you with real results instead of just excuses for what didn’t work well. You need to know if you are being compensated for sending new client campaigns.

3. Help is on the way

In the event that your white-label partner is unwilling to assist you or you are under-resourced, you may struggle to meet the deadlines for urgent deliverables. Do you feel your white-label service provider has the ability to respond to your requirements quickly and efficiently despite its availability? In order to provide such services, a good white-label service provider must be able to do so efficiently.

Clients should be able to count on your company to accept urgent projects and meet tight deadlines. As a result, you become the first choice for your clients when it comes to digital marketing agencies. Choosing an efficacious white label service provider based on their attitude will make a difference in the long run.

4. Modifications in their behavior at the end of the moment

In what situation would you need to satisfy the white label agency for an end-time modification from your client’s end? It isn’t necessary to follow the ‘pleasing’ rule just because they are not accommodating the changes if that is the case. The team has limited resources and is busy with a variety of projects, which discourages them from managing the end-time modifications.

Having a company that is readily accessible at any time will help you achieve your goals, as well as being able to start your project quickly and with a nice variety of resources. They will manage end-time modifications with maturity if they can be reached at any time, and they will not frown upon them.

5. It’s Always Good to Have Options.

When you feel like eating a burger and you go to McDonald’s, the options provided in a restaurant give you a unique sense of satisfaction which allows you to choose between the many.

When your partner agency is no longer able to provide resources or shuts down, you may need to step in. If you have somebody who can handle all those campaigns, you will be able to deliver them to your clients on time. It is at this point that a backup white-label digital marketing agency should be bought into consideration for your company.

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3 Things to Expect from a White Label SEO Company

White Labeling is getting a service done by a third party or an external company but the packaging and presenting the same under your own brand name. In simpler terms, it is basically called outsourcing. There are a lot of misconceptions in partnering with a White Label SEO Company but those agencies doing it the right way would simply agree with the three things that not many people know about.

1.    Reaching Customers-on-the-go

In this age of gadgets, wherein everyone is always in front of their computers, smartphones, and tablets, there is no better way to reach the target customers but means of internet. This is quadruple the coverage compared to a publication. In just a click, your business can reach almost everyone in the world. Anybody who has an access to the internet can actually know and understand your product through advertising of a White Label SEO firm. Thus this means that you already have a targeted audience and a big marketplace. The advertising and sales will just be very easy on your part.

2.   Assured Revenue

Recently, it has been recognized that there is a very high demand for search engine marketing. In fact, it is called a growth industry. This is a growing industry because there is assured revenue. There is an assurance for any agency or entity that there is money here.

The White Label SEO Company will do the legwork in assuring an agency or entity that there is a definite customer. The company will assist in the digital footprint. They will be responsible for the back office delivery and most especially in sales and marketing.

In partnering with a white Label SEO Company, it is a big assurance that you will not fail. You are assured that your business will prosper as long as you do it the proper way. It is expected that there is an open and frequent communication between both parties so that ideas, case studies, and suggestion can be discussed smoothly.

3.   Fast Path to Growth

There are cases when the agency questions whether the White Label SEO Company will have a full control of their business. The answer is No.  White Label Company will serve as your partner in the journey towards success. That is why it is very essential for an agency or entity to choose the best White Label SEO Company.

Before entering into a contract, be sure you have checked the reporting and how it is done. Ask for high-quality sample reports and statistics. There should be transparency.  Try testing their flexibility and how efficient they are in submitting their deliverables on time. It is also appropriate if you ask them if they use a specific platform. You can also do a background check from customer's feedback. The White Label must be responsive to your needs. Do a simple test, you may make a customized request and see how they execute it. Three things to keep in mind are transparency, responsiveness, and flexibility.

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5 Step Guide To Building An SEO Budget

SEO can be complex and time-consuming, but it doesn't have to be expensive. If you're looking to build an effective SEO budget, there are a few key steps you can take to ensure you're getting the most bang for your buck.

But before we go ahead and dive into budgeting tips, let's first take a look at what SEO costs may entail.

What Are The Potential Costs of SEO?

Suppose you're working with an experienced SEO reseller. In that case, the costs of SEO can vary depending on the size of your business, the competitiveness of your market, and the severity of any existing SEO issues.

Generally, larger organizations or those in more competitive markets can expect higher costs. In contrast, businesses with existing SEO challenges may see a few one-time initial costs on the higher end. Once these issues are resolved, your budget should focus more on SEO program maintenance, which can include content creation and link building.

Now that we've better understood what SEO costs may look like let's move on to some tips for building an effective budget.

5 Steps For Building an Effective SEO Budget

You need to understand and consider a few things before allocating a budget for SEO services. It is long-term, it requires strategic thinking and a willingness to commit for the long haul, and finally, you need to understand that it will take time to see results.

Most businesses look for a quick fix, but SEO is not a quick fix. It will take time to see results, and you need to be patient. You will probably require an ongoing monthly commitment to maintain and implement SEO strategies, but the budget can range heavily depending on what needs to be done, such as:

SEO strategy & consulting

SEO audits, both on-page, and off-page

Content strategy & creation

Link building 

Technical SEO

Below are five steps you can take to ensure you're budgeting effectively for SEO.

1. Consider Your Current Digital Marketing Budget

You can start by evaluating your current digital marketing budget and understanding how much of it is being spent on SEO. This will give you a baseline to start with and help you understand what role SEO plays in your budget.

For instance, if you're spending $5,000 a month on digital marketing and only $500 of that is being spent on SEO, you may want to consider allocating a larger portion of your budget to SEO. On the other hand, if you're already spending $2,500 a month on SEO, you may want to re-evaluate your budget to see if you can scale back in other areas.

You could also ask your marketing team to give a breakdown of where your money is being spent and what type of ROI you see from each channel. This will help you make informed decisions about where to allocate your budget.

For instance, you may find that email marketing is not giving you the best ROI, so you could scale back on that and put more into SEO.

The key here is to understand where your money is being spent and what type of ROI you're getting from each channel before making any decisions. Paid marketing looks great on paper, but if you do not see results, it's time to consider other options. Whereas, with SEO, you may not see results as quickly, but the ROI is often more sustainable in the long run.

2. Focus on Precise Areas of SEO

Once you understand where your money is currently being spent and what type of ROI you're getting, you can start focusing on specific SEO areas.

For instance, if you do not see results from your current link-building efforts, you may want to consider outsourcing that to an experienced white label SEO reseller company. This way, you can focus your budget on other areas of SEO that may be more effective.

Your SEO budget should focus on the areas that will give you the biggest ROI. This may change over time as your SEO needs evolve, but it's important to be strategic about where you're spending your money.

3. Compare Your SEO Budget With PPC Budget

Google Ads (PPC) is a great way to get quick results, but it can be expensive. If you're not careful, you can quickly blow through your budget without seeing any ROI. Moreover, the results you do see from Google Ads are often short-lived. Once you stop paying, the traffic stops.

SEO, on the other hand, is a long-term strategy that takes time to see results. However, once you do start seeing results, the ROI is often more sustainable.

When evaluating your SEO budget, it's important to compare it with your PPC budget. If you're spending more on PPC than SEO, you may want to consider allocating more of your budget to SEO.

4. Account For Acquiring External Links

Link building is vital to any SEO strategy, but it can be time-consuming and expensive. Many businesses don't have the internal resources to build links effectively, so they often outsource this to white label SEO reseller companies.

When budgeting for link building, you must account for the cost of acquiring external links. This can vary depending on the quality of the links you're trying to acquire. For instance, a link from a high-authority website will be more expensive than a link from a lower-authority website.

Thus, when considering your link-building budget, you need to account for the quality of the links you're trying to acquire. The higher the quality, the higher the cost.

5. Consider The Cost of SEO Tools

There are a number of different SEO tools available, and many of them come with a hefty price tag. If you're serious about SEO, you need to be using the best tools available. This can quickly eat into your budget, so you need to account for this when planning your SEO strategy.

Some of the most popular (and expensive) SEO tools include:

Ahrefs

Moz Pro

SEMRush

While these tools are not essential for every business, they can be very helpful in achieving better results. If you're serious about SEO, you need to be prepared to invest in the best tools available.

These are just a few things to consider when creating your SEO budget. SEO can be complex and expensive, but investing the time and money necessary to see results is important. By following these tips, you can create an effective SEO budget to help you achieve your desired results. You can also reach out to white label SEO reseller companies to help build your budget and achieve better results.

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The Ultimate Guide to SEO

Making money online is tough for many people, when a person combine the power of post promotion with SEO, or lookup engine optimization, then you certainly have an almost unbeatable mixture. Besides position the website, the SEO group becomes the part of Patient's marketing or sales team simply by converting surfers or visitors straight into buyers. On-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is important since it furthermore helps you appear in additional Search results Page (SERP) functions. The particular truth is that on-site routing hacks such as search pub with intelligent autocomplete, internal connecting with anchor texts or instant customer support boost both UX and SEO. Obtaining on top of SEO developments like mobile optimization, voice lookup optimized content, brand mentions within addition to content intended in order to answer more than one consumer intent, will get you forward of your rivals. SEO is about Search-Results-Ranking, the yr 2018 will see interesting information involved to measure these metrics. The basics of GOOD SEO hasn't changed for years - though performance of particular elements has definitely narrowed or changed in kind of usefulness - you need to still be focusing on creating a simple site using VERY simple SEO best practices - don't sweat the particular small stuff, while all-the-time spending attention to the important things - add plenty of unique WEB PAGE TITLES and plenty of brand new ORIGINAL CONTENT.

These three make certain that the content that we all put out is high-quality, topnoth, and SEO-friendly. Pro tips: From MyTasker, we have seasoned content material writers and SEO experts who else can assist you to upgrade your old blog posts structured on the trend. DA is SEO business Moz's rank showing how respected a website is, based upon its link profile and additional factors (i. e. the amount of backlinks pointing to a few site from another site). Leveraging voice search will be another among the top SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends that will be impacting search engine optimization in 2018. You should outline your NAP data for your business at the start of your Local SEO campaign and keep it consistent. Presently a lot of SEO experts have observed that only building a huge number of links is not going to assist in ranking a website within the long terms. SEO will gain importance over all else as it assists you drive quality traffic, obtain visibility, boost your brand plus lend your business the reliability it requires to succeed. Most of us cover technical SEO in significantly more depth in future articles, but in short, it offers things like site speed, get errors, redirects, duplicate content, canonicalization, mobile optimization, sitemaps, markups, organized data, and various HTML labels, for example rel=nofollow, that might end up being needed sometimes. Traditional SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques are still effective, yet a number of trends are usually in the works that can significantly alter the practice of customizing for search. Whatever you do, be sure you don't fall in the trap and begin doing some black-hat SEO techniques like cloaking or spammy backlink building, it could get you seriously penalized by Google. Unless you upgrade your own SEO strategy and just stay to traditional methods, you may find hard to push your own website pages in top ten results, and even worst, obtain penalized by Google for moving forward aggressive and forceful SEO techniques to gain ranking. The blog post of interest in order to SEOs from is this 1: 4 Search Trends That Produced Waves in 2017” This article begins having a paragraph that would certainly resonate with those who possess searched on Google (or some other search engines like google, with regard to that matter) for many yrs: For the past 20 years, the particular pinnacle of search sophistication had been talking to a search motor like you're Tarzan. As mentioned over, speed will be paramount regarding SEO in 2018, that leads all of us on to Accelerated Mobile Webpages (AMP). Therefore, on top of content marketing and advertising, SEO now should be profoundly aligned with your company's PAGE RANK efforts. For these reasons they have each a huge SEO value (it's one of the most essential ranking factors), plus a clickability” worth (it serves as a inspiration for people to click). The particular SEO trends and technique in order to rank websites higher changes quick because of the emergence associated with new technologies and changing client behavior. It is often used simply by mobile users on a huge scale which made it the powerful SEO trend for this particular year. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends in 2018 considers the particular important issues SEO practitioners require to think about in 2018 as well as the path taken by travel search motors and SEO in general. In the event that you know you have EXTREMELY low-quality doorway pages on your own site, you need to get rid of them or rethink your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy if you want in order to rank high in Google with regard to the long term. That's why a good consumer experience from an SEO viewpoint is more than your web site's speed. For instance, several businesses miss the mark along with SEO and images, and nevertheless rank well. If you want increased rankings, you need to examine his stuff - he's the particular Unicorn among a sea associated with donkey SEOs. Consumer Experience as such has a good enormous influence on SEO. Off-page SEO very efficiently within promoting your company where interpersonal media, bookmarking sites, forums, weblog directory, Q&A, articles, videos, picture and infographic sharing, and record sharing play well. So exactly SEO 2019 Slide how do the SEO masters cope-up with the ever-changing context through the search engines? For instance, let's imagine we want to create a blog post about SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION because we are trying in order to build a inbound link in order to an SEO website. That will number will probably tick upward as SEOs become more advanced in their strategies and Search engines is constantly on the location so much emphasis on hyperlinks. In spite of the fact that SEO offers the highest ROI of any kind of ecommerce marketing campaign, most on the web shops are put together along with little to no consideration associated with search engines like google. Consider these points while developing SEO strategy to get higher ranking in search results. The particular term SEO in relation in order to seo is also used in times to make reference in order to search engine optimizers, who are usually consultants that mange and help the development and completion associated with search engine optimization projects for clients. The faster you realize why Google is definitely sending you less traffic compared to it did last year, the particular sooner you can clean upward and focus on proactive SEO that will begins to impact your ranks in a positive way. Obviously, keyword search positions is another very important metric to track if you are usually analyzing your SEO efforts. Tone of voice search is one of the particular latest SEO trends in 2018. She provides some awesome tips on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION for voice search, including thinking of how people ask questions plus understanding local queries and intention. In addition, when it comes to Nearby SEO, long-tail keywords become actually more important. Nearby SEO will play a excellent role in mobile searches is definitely all about content. That's why optimizing your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION technique for voice search nowadays is of vital importance. To rest guaranteed that the right SEO Organization has been selected, the prior projects must be looked from. See the ranks of the projects on the particular top search engines. Adapting to tone of voice search in your SEO technique calls for careful attention in order to the keywords you try in order to rank for. In other words, content and hyperlinks will still be the creating blocks of SEO in 2018. From the above-mentioned information, crafting link-worthy content seemed in order to be the winning choice, because chosen by 35. 2% associated with the 100+ participants as properly as the close runner-up choice came out to become -- guest blogging on sites along with high Domain Authority for constructing reliable backlinks gaining 30. 8%. Outreaching top influencers of the particular niche to write articles and insert links in this; bagged the support of twenty one. 3% of the SEO experts, whereas the option of damaged backlink although being highly efficient in white-hat SEO practices obtained the selection rate of twelve. 7% of the total sharers in the survey. So, I would certainly declare 2018 is a problem for Google, just as very much as it might be regarding SEOs. We have a few good rankings, but we are usually always planning to improve and observe what the future holds intended for SEO. In 2018, the user experience is the particular center of development as properly as the key point regarding the SEO strategies. SEO continues to be king of the Internet, plus businesses will continue to require valuable, and unique content that will will meet the need associated with their company in the many years ahead. Backlinks are one of the most significant SEO factors. In order to give you a head begin, here are the SEO tendencies and techniques we expect in order to dominate in 2018. Debbie A. Everson is the particular CEO of, experienced SEO Experts and Search Engine Optimization Company to 2, 000 small companies. Off-Page SEO refers in order to all the things that may be done directly OFF your own website to help you much better search engine positions, such since social networking, article submission, community forum & blog marketing, etc. Without a doubt, 1 of the biggest trends that will has already begun to get place and will continue nicely into 2018 is the loan consolidation of niche MarTech players simply by larger content cloud vendors, along with the role and importance associated with SEO increasing significantly throughout this particular transformation. The essential to successful SEO is focusing on long-tail keywords you would like to be along with individuals search results because even when you have thousands even large numbers of social media following, this still won't be as eective as ranking high on the particular SERPs for your target key phrases. While obtaining as many pages indexed online was historically a priority intended for an SEO, Google is right now rating the quality of webpages on your site and the particular type of pages it will be indexing. As mentioned earlier around 95% of general population will certainly not move beyond the very first page SEO search results, therefore as a business you require an in-depth knowledge of the particular latest SEO techniques and begin incorporating them in your company today.

Many electronic natives and marketers alike are usually using SEO to its benefit by incorporating every keyword you can possibly imagine into the content they create. Now that a person understand tips on how to please your customers, how to satisfy search objective, and how to create content material, it's time to move on to Pillar #3 in this SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy. As mentioned previously, businesses could not make the bigger mistake than thinking that will best SEO techniques only rely on content, because the most recent SEO techniques you need in order to adapt depend on greater than simply content. Today that you're on top associated with these 6 SEO trends plus have an arsenal of ideas to manage your strategy, a person are well positioned for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and digital marketing in 2018. In order to obtain a featured snippet, content internet marketers must structure their articles in order to a number of factors, having SEO well beyond the existing competition to reach the number one particular spot on Google. A good SEO strategy in 2018 requirements to consider the way we all consume visual content and exactly how search engines now go past text to explore the transforming habits of search. As a matter of reality, the strength of any website is situated in the DA. Domain Expert is SEOmozs calculated metric regarding how well a given domain name is likely to rank looking results. An SEO expert can tell you this single modification may not improve your web page rankings or authority very very much, however it will get even more clicks. Off-page SEO very efficiently in advertising your business where social press, bookmarking sites, forums, blog listing, Q&A, articles, videos, image plus infographic sharing, and document revealing play well. Even though AMP is not so very much a ranking signal for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, you can imagine that AMP's, when properly utilised, provide the broader visibility. The white hat SEO methods are good for future-proof SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION results Meanwhile, black hat ought to be avoided at all expenses as they strategies are the particular ones that Google and various other search engines are determined in order to root out. SEO a lot more usually discuss domain trust plus domain authority based on the particular number, type and quality associated with incoming links to a web site. As electronic assistance gets more accurate presently there is a great opportunity each for SEO and content, gaining from a growing market that develops the brand with a consumer in a unique but nevertheless relevant and useful way. Not simply search engine algorithm changes yet also the way in which usually people search keeps changing, therefore, considering the above 10 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION trends- digital marketers and company owners could make their web site ready for ranking high within 2018. If you look at huge brand names like Amazon and Walmart, a person see how powerful SEO may be. When you search regarding nearly every consumer product on Search engines, Amazon and Walmart are even more than likely to appear upon top. In the similar vein, you can't go to an SEO blog at the particular moment without seeing a function on Voice Search.

RankBrain is more associated with a ranking signal than a good SEO masterpiece, nevertheless, it will have some effects on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and can be especially helpful if users don't know fully what they're looking for, or even simply can't find the correct words to use. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION - Seo: the process associated with making your site better intended for search engines. Google announced last 12 months that RankBrain had become their own 3rd most important ranking aspect, and our SEO predictions recommend it will grow in significance for 2018. Creating and promoting linkable property is an excellent way in order to increase your SEO through the purchase of backlinks. You can get SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION results by executing Pillar #1 and Pillar #2 well, yet backlinks are fuel on the particular fire. This way, a person and your SEO can make sure that your site is created to be search engine-friendly in the bottom up. However, a great SEO can also help enhance an existing site. Not just is it a great method to get different viewpoints straight into your article and find out there new things, it also assists grow your SEO rankings plus traffic. Use LSI keywords in body (use Seo pressor plugin to get related keywords). All these consequences also lead to better SEO and higher search engine rankings. On-page SEO is the exercise of optimizing individual web web pages to be able to position higher and earn more related traffic in search engines. In the event that you are a local company and want to build upon your local SEO, do that simply by looking for websites that are usually associated with the area a person operate in. You can inquire your local magazine whether these people wish to work together upon online articles and mention your own business in them or enjoy the role of mentioned upon local websites like your neighborhood page. To predict tips on how to surface a business's results within a voice search, SEO experts now need to concentrate upon ranking for the common NL queries around target keywords. While every single client has a different goal, the SEO ranking principles are the very same. In 2018, it's going in order to be increasingly important for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION builders to incorporate longer-tailed key phrases into queries. On-page SEO is the optimisation of the elements that can be found on your own website, which includes content, the code behind each page, visual elements and consumer experience. Only continuous updation of your website with the particular latest SEO techniques will assist to raise it to the particular top most positions within the particular ranking. No matter how many up-dates Google gets released for SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION but without having a correct content for a website just about all these updated will be used up. That makes SEO an perfect leads tool, because when people follow links back to your own site, you have the possibility to convert them to network marketing leads, and later make sales. There's simply no question that focusing on your own business' SEO is critical regarding a successful marketing strategy. The use associated with specific, purposefully chosen keywords will be also important in the procedure as the strategy of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION depends on the ways individuals use search engines like search engines. In this post, coming from divided the top SEO techniques in order to help you skyrocket your ratings and boost your number associated with monthly visitors. Therefore, it's time for mobile search engine optimization for better SEO result. These 2 updates have compelled the SEOs to keep the mentioned tasks in check and work in the direction of Google's mission statement of offering authentic search engine results in order to the visitors. Search engines has emphasized links as the ranking factor since the 1990s, according to Moz, and they will continue to be an important aspect of every great SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy. The ability of web SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION lies in understanding how individuals search for things and knowing what sort of results Google wants in order to (or will) display to the users.

Google, much towards the shock of every SEO pro, is just not obsessed with making our life more difficult, but instead, will be obsessed with providing their customers with the best user encounter possible. Organised data on websites are definitely used by search engines in order to provide more info to users, plus they will continue to achieve this. Using schema markup to supply data about events, payment strategies as well as review ratings to research engines will push local SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION rankings higher in 2018. As considerably as SEO, he offers this particular post from 2017: 18 SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION Tactics that Take Only thirty Minutes Each” Tactics here range between getting set up on Search engines My Business to checking your own site speed (with speed becoming even more important now compared to when Patel first wrote their post), and from enhancing your own site's URL structures to including internal linking to your advertising mix and much more. Our in-depth guide provides the latest SEO most readily useful practices so you can improve how your content appears in search results, and get more traffic, leads, and sales.

In today's rapidly moving world, SEO techniques can alter on the dime—and the most severe part is that you basically might not even know this. Hacks which could have received you a front-page result mainly because recently as 2016 are outdated now, but they may also hurt your website's rankings. It's a really good and knowledgeable blog to enhance your SEO ranking. Take some time plus find out about your Meta titles, description, URL readability plus how to earn featured thoughts and site links SEO's close to the globe are taking click through rate seriously claiming it in order to be one of the best ranking signals. Bing has confirmed that will they track unlinked brand says and use them as the ranking signal — and the patent by Google (along along with observations from many SEO experts) indicates that Google may become doing this as well. I've seen success with producing videos lately and am searching forward to making use of your SEO suggestions to help my videos position on page 1. Plus SEO professionals are absolutely thrilled about this new opportunity mainly because featured snippets provide a opportunity for low-ranking pages to get at the particular top of search results along with almost zero effort. With more than 200 ranking factors in Google's search algorithm, SEO is right now a highly complex process. A SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION process may involve a web site's coding and structure, content plus copywriting, site presentation, as properly as fixing other issues that will will prevent search engines through indexing your company website. Just because Google and other search motors are using personalization more regularly in order to get more accurate search outcomes for their users, user customization has become more prevalent within SEO. The particular need to learn about fresh entrants like Siri, Alexa, Fb, Linkedin, and specialist search motors (like, for example) will maintain SEOs on their toes regarding years to come. It took me plenty associated with time to organize for it, in order to conduct the research and therefore forth. It is very helpful to have the information upon how the very best professionals use SEO at hand. Affected sites along with poor onpage and offpage SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and has a massive impact on location related search.

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5 Resources to Build Your App Idea

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5 Resources to Build Your App Idea

Considering building an app? You’re in good company.

The mobile app industry is expected to be worth more than

$407 billion

(yes, with a B) by 2026.

Meanwhile, the average person has more than

80 apps on their phone

. That represents a ton of opportunities for app builders.

However, if you think creating an app is an easy way to get rich, you are setting yourself up for failure. Building an app requires research, hard work, and a willingness to dive in and learn.

Luckily, there are tons of resources to get you started—including this guide. Below, I��ll walk you through how to build out your app idea and then share five resources to help you launch your app.

How to Build Out Your App Idea

Like any business, creating an app requires laying the groundwork before launch. Here’s a five-step guide for getting ready to launch your app, including how to do your research, ways to

monetize your app

, and what to include in your business plan.

Build an App Step 1: Do Market Research

Before you dive into creating your app, you first need to get a lay of the land. Who is your target audience? What other apps offer similar features or functionality? How does your app stand apart?

Start by creating a

buyer persona map

, which will help you understand who your audience is and what they want. Use this information to create a detailed sales plan, decide what features to include, and choose where to market your app.

Then,

perform a competitive analysis

to understand your competitors. The information you gain from this will be critical as you build and grow your app. Focus on what current apps do well and what they don’t. The areas where they fail can present opportunities for you to improve and take over part of their market.

For example, if your goal is to build an app that offers workout and diet recommendations, take the time to download similar apps and read their reviews. What features do people ask for, and what features do they dislike? Who is using these apps? How are they monetized?

Be thorough—you’ll use this information in the next few steps.

Build an App Step 2: Decide How to Monetize Your App

There are several ways to make money from an app. The right choice for your app likely depends on your industry, target audience, and the type of app you create. For example, games are often monetized by ads and in-app purchases, while dating apps generally charge a monthly subscription fee.

Consider each of the following monetization methods to decide which is right for your app:

Ads: Create a free app and earn money by selling ads in your app. Duolingo uses this model, though they also offer a paid plan.

In-app purchase: Provide a free app and then allow users to purchase add-ons, like Pokemon Go does.

Freemium: Give users access to a limited plan for free and then charge them to access all the features, like the meditation app Mindfulness does.

One-time payment: Charge a one-time fee to access the app. Just keep in mind you won’t have a continuing income stream for updates, redesigns, and marketing.

Monthly subscription: Charge a small fee every month for access to the app. This helps you maintain a steady stream of income, making it easier to pay salaries and invest in marketing.

Many apps use multiple monetization methods. For example, you might offer a limited free plan and then charge a monthly subscription fee to access all features. You might even use ads to monetize the free plan and offer a paid plan that is ad-free.

There are pros and cons to each monetization method. Some users might be annoyed by too many ads or hate paying for subscription services. See what other apps in your industry do, but don’t be afraid to break the mold by trying out a different method.

Build an App Step 3: Create a Business Plan

Most people assume building an app is all about coding, but the real work actually starts long before you create your first line of code (or before you begin building it if you use an app builder).

After you get to know your audience and decide how to monetize your app, take the time to create a business plan. This plan should guide your first few years in business and keep you committed to your app’s core purpose.

According to the

Small Business Administration

, your business plan should include:

Executive summary: A brief outline of your company, what you will offer, and basic information about your leadership team, location, and plans for growth.

Company description: A detailed guide covering what problem your business will solve, who your app will serve, and what competitive advantages your app offers.

Market analysis: A summary of your market research that covers what your app’s strengths are, trends you take advantage of, and how your app stacks up against others in the same industry.

Structure and management: An explanation of who’s in charge of your business and how your company is structured. Are you creating a C corp or an LLC, or are you a sole proprietor? Include a list of key leaders, their CVs and resumes, and even an outline of the benefits each person brings to the table.

Offering: A description of what your app does and how it benefits customers. Include plans for patent filings or copyright, if applicable.

Market and sales plans: An outline of your

marketing strategy and how it will adjust over time

. Cover how you plan to attract and keep customers, the sales process, and where you’ll focus your marketing efforts.

Financial projections: Information about your costs, where that money will come from, and prospective profits. Costs of creating an app may be low (especially using the app tools we’ll cover in the next section), but you’ll still need money for things like web hosting, paid ads, etc. Forecast sales for the first year, five years, and ten years, and make sure to explain how you reached those numbers and outline where funding will come from.

Build an App Step 4: Create the App

Now that you’ve laid the groundwork, it’s time to actually create your app. This might feel a little overwhelming, but it doesn’t have to be. You have three main options for building your app. Let’s explore the pros and cons of each one.

Code the App Yourself

If you are technologically savvy, you may be able to code the app yourself. Make sure you have a deep understanding of coding or the

patience to learn

.

Pros:

cheap (it only costs your own time)

full control over features, coding platforms, etc.

Cons:

requires a deep understanding of coding

time-consuming

Hire an App Builder

Hiring an

app builder might be costly

, but it could help you get the app to market faster than coding it yourself.

Pros:

launch faster

no need to learn coding languages

Cons:

can be expensive

less control over features

Use an App Building Tool

Remember when building a website required expensive programs and in-depth coding skills? Now you can

build a website with just a few clicks

. App building tools offer the same functionality for apps.

Pros:

faster and easier than coding or hiring an app builder

likely cheaper than hiring someone to build your app

get to market faster

Cons:

limited by the app builder’s functionality

have to pay to use most (though they are typically affordable)

Build an App Step 5: Launch & Submit to App Stores

Once your app is built, you’ll need to test it before launch. Ask a few friends to download the app and tell you what you think. Consider using a

mobile UX testing tool

to see how users navigate your app and make adjustments before you launch.

Then, you’ll need to submit your app to app stores, which is where users will download it. The most popular app stores are Apple’s App Store and Google Play. Follow

this guide to submit your app to the App Store

and

this one to submit to Google Play

.

Don’t forget to

optimize for app SEO

! This will help you rank higher so people actually find your app.

5 Resources to Help You Build Your App

Creating an app is easier than ever, thanks in part to the variety of app tools that help you build and launch a mobile app. However, with so many options, it can be challenging to figure out which one to use.

Let’s review a few of the top app tools so you can find the right one for you.

iBuildApp

iBuildApp is a full-featured app builder that provides all the tools you need to build an app using its drag-and-drop functionality. Start with any one of their 1000+ templates, then drag and drop features to add video, images, text, and more.

This tool is ideal for building apps for

e-commerce stores

, education, healthcare, business, media, retail, and financial services. Brands such as the U.S. Navy, Whole Foods, SEGA, and Emory University have used this tool.

Price: Starts at $59.40 per month for one app.

Appy Pie AppMakr

Want to build an app but don’t have any coding experience? Appy Pie helps you build an app in just three steps. Choose from over 100 features, including GPS, in-app shopping, offline capabilities, and push notifications. They also offer analytics so you can measure app performance.

You can use it to create apps for dating sites, customer reward programs, chatbots, retail, restaurants, and more. They’ll even help you submit the app to app stores.

Appy Pie is used by brands like The Home Depot, Southwest, and Nike.

Price: Options start at $18 per month for an ad-free experience, and they also offer a free trial.

BuildFire

BuildFire is a full-featured app development tool that allows you to build an app with no coding. Use their templates and then customize your app with hundreds of features like push notifications, clocks, private portals, loyalty programs, checklists, forms, or media.

They also offer a white-label feature, which allows you to build and sell apps to clients.

Though pricier than other options, this app build tool offers a lot more tools and features, so it’s an ideal choice for building more detailed apps.

Price: Plans start at $159 per month, billed annually.

Usability Geek

Creating an app is just the first step—you also need to test the user experience. Usability Geek provides tools, resources, and

UX testing guides

to help your app succeed. Explore their UX courses and blog posts about usability to learn the skills you need to help your app succeed.

Offered courses cover a range of topics, including the Psychology of E-Commerce, How to Create a UX Portfolio, and Quantitative Research for UX. Some courses even offer certification.

Price: Usability Geek offers free blogs about usability testing as well as paid training courses that start at $16 per month.

GoodBarber

GoodBarber is an easy-to-use app build tool designed for both e-commerce and standard app building. Like many other app tools, it doesn’t require any coding knowledge.

This tool is ideal for building apps for local delivery, retail, grocery, e-commerce, news, business, and community. Features include adding payment options, push notifications, user authentication,

geofencing marketing

, videos, maps, calendars, and forms.

Price: Pricing starts at $25 per month for one app and includes SEO optimization, domain name, SSL security, 200 GB of storage, and unlimited pages.

They also offer reseller plans, which start at $200 per month.

Conclusion

With the help of app build tools, launching an app is easier than ever. With little to no coding knowledge, you can create, launch, and optimize your new app in just a few days.

However, building a successful app is about more than just dragging and dropping features. To be successful, take the time to create a business and marketing plan,

research your target audience

, and make a plan for

funding your venture

.

Have you built an app before? What app build tools were most helpful to you?

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[epackingvietnam]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

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[bfxenon]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[nutrifami]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[xaydungtruonggia]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[ductrungnguyen87]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[camerasieunhovn]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[gamebazu]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/36ZY6sC

[kjt-lawyers]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[noithatotoaz]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[thanhtuandoan89]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[drummcarpentry]

How to Write an SEO-Focused Content Brief Your Writers Will Love

Posted by KameronJenkins

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 someone in an adjacent field — like demand generation, product marketing, or SEO — when they need something specific. However, content teams usually don’t just work off of briefs. They’ll likely have their own calendar and initiatives they're driving (content is one of those weird roles that needs to support just about every other department while also creating and executing on their own work).

What makes a content brief “SEO-focused”?

An SEO-focused content brief is one among many types of content briefs. It’s unique in that the goal is to instruct the writer on creating content to target a specific search query for the purpose of earning traffic from the organic search channel.

What to include in your content brief

Now that we understand SEO-focused content briefs in theory, let’s get into the nitty gritty. What information should we include in them?

1. Primary query target and intent

It isn’t an SEO-focused content brief without a query target!

Using a keyword research tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, you can get thousands of keyword ideas that could be relevant to your business.

For example, in my current job, I’m focused on creating content for retail store owners and others in the brick and mortar retail industry. After listening to some sales and support calls on Gong (many teams use this to record customer and prospect calls), I might find out that “merchandising” is a big topic of focus.

So I type “merchandising” into Keyword Explorer, add a couple more helpful filters, and boom! Tons of keyword suggestions.

Pick a keyword (check your existing content to make sure your team hasn’t already written on the topic yet) and use that as the “north star” query for your content brief.

I think it’s also helpful to include some intent information here. In other words, what might the searcher who’s typing this query into Google want? It’s a good idea to search the query in Google yourself to see how Google is interpreting the intent.

For example, if my keyword is “types of visual merchandising,” I can see from the SERP that Google assumes an informational intent, based on the fact that the URLs ranking are largely informational articles.

2. Format

Dovetailing nicely off of intent is format. In other words, how should we structure the content to give it the best chance of ranking for our target query?

To use the same keyword example, if I Google “types of visual merchandising,” the top-ranking articles contain lists.

You might notice that your target query returns results with a lot of images (common with queries including “inspiration” or “examples”).

This better helps the writer understand what content format is likely to work best.

3. Topics to cover and related questions to answer

Picking the target query helps the writer understand the “big idea” of the piece, but stopping there means you risk writing something that doesn’t comprehensively answer the query intent.

That’s why I like to include a “topics to cover / related questions to answer” section in my briefs. This is where I list out all the subtopics I’ve found that someone searching that query would probably want to know.

To find these, I like to use methods like:

Using a keyword research tool to show you queries related to your main keyword that are questions.

Looking at the People Also Ask box, if one exists, on the SERP your target query triggers

Finding sites that rank in the top spots for your target query, running them through a keyword research tool, and seeing what other keywords they also rank for

And while this isn’t specifically search-related, sometimes I like to use a tool called FAQ Fox to scour forums for threads that mention my target query

You can also create the outline yourself using your research with all the H2s/H3s already written. While this can work well with freelance writers, I’ve found some writers (particularly in-house content marketers) feel this is too prescriptive. Every writer and content team is different, so all I can say is just use your best judgment.

4. Funnel stage

This is fairly similar to intent, but I think it’s helpful to include as a separate line item. To fill out this portion of the content brief, ask yourself: “Is someone searching this term just looking for information? Inspiration? Looking to evaluate their options? Or looking to buy something?”

And here’s how you can label your answer:

Top-of-funnel (TOFU or “problem aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is informational/educational/inspirational.

Middle-of-funnel (MOFU or “solution aware”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to compare, evaluate options, or otherwise indicates that the searcher is already aware of your solution.

Bottom-of-funnel (BOFU or “solution ready”) is an appropriate label if the query intent is to make a purchase or otherwise convert.

5. Audience segment

Who are you writing this for?

It seems like such a basic question to answer, but in my experience, it’s easy to forget!

When it comes to SEO-focused content briefs, it’s easy to assume the answer to this question is “for whoever is searching this keyword!” but what that fails to answer is who those searchers are and how they fit into your company’s personas / ideal customer profile (ICP).

If you don’t know what those personas are, ask your marketing team! They should have target audience segments readily available to send you.

This will not only help your writers better understand what they should be writing, but it also helps align you with the rest of the marketing department and help them understand SEO’s connection to their goals (this is also a critical component of getting buy-in, which we’ll talk about a little later).

6. The goal action you want your readers to take

SEO is a means to an end. It’s not only enough to get your content ranking or even to get it earning clicks/traffic. For it to make an impact for your company, you’ll want it to contribute to your bottom line.

That’s why, when creating your content brief, you not only need to think about how readers will get to it, but what you want them to do after.

This is a great opportunity to work with your content marketing and larger marketing team to understand what actions they’re trying to drive visitors to take.

Here are some examples of call-to-actions (CTAs) you can include in your briefs:

Newsletter sign-ups

Gated asset downloads (e.g. free templates, whitepapers, and ebooks)

Case studies

Free trials

Request demo

Product listings

In general, it’s best to use a CTA that’s a natural next step based on the intent of the article. For example, if the piece is top-of-funnel, try a CTA that’ll move them to the mid-funnel, like a case study.

7. Ballpark length

I’m a firm believer that the length of any article should be dictated by the topic, not arbitrary word counts. However, it can be helpful to offer a ballpark to avoid bringing a 500-word blog post to a 2,000-word fight.

One tool that can make coming up with a ballpark word count easier is Frase, which among other things, will show you the average word count of pages ranking for your target query.

8. Internal and external link opportunities

Since you’re reading the Moz blog, you’re probably already intimately familiar with the importance of links. However, this information is commonly left out of content briefs.

It’s as simple as including these two line items:

Relevant content we should link out to. List out any URLs, especially on your own site, that could be natural fits to link out to in this article.

Existing content that could link to this new piece. List out any URLs on your site that mention your topic so that, after your new piece is live, you can go back and include links in them to your new piece.

The second item is especially important, since adding links to your new post can help it get indexed and start ranking quicker. A quick way to find internal link opportunities is to use the “site:” operator in Google.

For example, the following search would show me all posts on the Moz blog that mention “content brief.” These could be great sources of links to this blog post.

9. Competitor content

Search your target query and pull the top three-or-so ranking URLs for this section of your content brief. These are the pages you need to beat.

At risk of creating copycat content (content that’s essentially a re-spun version of the top-ranking articles), it’s a good idea to instruct your writer on how best to use these.

I like to include questions like:

What’s our unique point-of-view on this topic?

Do we have any unique data we can pull on this topic?

What experts (internal or external) can we ask for quotes to include on this topic?

What graphics would make this more visually compelling than what our competitors have?

You get the idea!

10. On-page SEO cheat sheet

One thing I always like to include in my briefs is some form of an “SEO cheat sheet” — tips and resources for helping your writers with important on-page SEO elements.

Here’s an example of one I’ve used in the past:

Important caveat: Writers have varying levels of SEO expertise. Some content teams are very bullish on SEO (companies like G2 and HubSpot come to mind), so the writers may not need much help in this area. For others, SEO is fairly new to them. Determine what’s necessary for your unique situation so that you can avoid over or under-prescribing in this area.

What to avoid when writing content briefs

Sadly, “SEO” has become a dirty word to many writers. Understanding why will help us avoid the major pitfalls that can lead to ignored briefs and interdepartmental tensions.

Don’t provide suggestions after that asset has been written

When writing for search, we’re creating the output. The keyword is the input. In other words, target queries are questions to be answered, not something to be stuffed into copy that’s already been written.

Google wants to rank content that answers the query, not just repeats it on the page.

For this reason, I would avoid having an optimization step after your writing step. If you don’t, you risk the content not matching the intent of the query, which means it has little-to-no likelihood of ranking, and you’ll also likely upset your writers, who don’t want to cheapen their editorially excellent content by stuffing keywords into it.

Don’t favor keywords with high volume over high intent match

I once saw a brief where the SEO Manager requested that the writer use a certain phrase instead of another phrase because it had search volume while the other didn’t.

The problem? While seemingly similar, the keywords actually had totally different intents.

Don’t do this.

At best, targeting keywords purely for volume’s sake can result in vanity traffic that never converts. At worst, you’ll be trying to fit a square peg in a round hole and likely missing intent-match completely.

Don’t blindly follow keyword tools

Keyword tools are helpful, but they’re not perfect reflections of search demand. For example, because they’re not always updated incredibly often, you may mistakenly think a query has no demand when in fact it has a ton.

A good example of this is COVID-19 related keywords. As a newly trending topic earlier this year, many keyword research tools didn’t register that they had any search volume, when in fact they did. If you would have blindly followed the tool, you may have missed out on the opportunity.

To solve for this, you can use tools like Google Trends or even Google Search Console (if you have content on a trending topic or similar topic on your site already, you should be able to see impressions/interest spiking within a few days).

Don’t instruct writers to “include these keywords” (especially a certain number of times)

When listing out the target query (or queries) in your content brief, it’s important that we instruct our writers that this is the main question to answer rather than this the word I need you to sprinkle throughout the content.

There’s no magic number of times you can stick a keyword in your copy so that it ranks for that term. Instead, instruct your writers to focus on answering the intent of the searcher’s question comprehensively.

Don’t try to jam keywords into articles that weren’t intended for search discovery

Organic search is not the only channel for content discovery. As someone coming from an SEO background, this took me a while to learn.

That means adding search content to your content calendar, not trying to cram keywords into everything on the calendar.

While it’s important to get the on-page SEO basics right (title tag, heading tags, links, etc.) for every piece, not every piece lends itself well to organic search discovery.

For example, if we only created content based on keywords that a tool told us gets searched a certain number of times per month, we’d never write about new concepts. It takes a lot of thought leadership off the table, as well as things like case studies and interview/feature story pieces.

Organic search is powerful, but it’s not everything.

Tips for getting your content team bought in

Even the best content briefs won’t make an impact if your content team refuses to use them — and I’ve heard of plenty of situations where that happens.

As an SEO, it can be mind-boggling that your content team doesn’t want to use this: “Don’t you want traffic?!” But as someone who leads a content team, I understand why they’re often rejected.

Thankfully, in many cases, this can be avoided by taking the following actions.

Involve them in the planning process

No one likes to be micromanaged, and thorough content briefs can sometimes feel like micromanaging. One great way to avoid this is by bringing them along for the process. Make content briefs a joint effort between SEO and Content.

For example, connect with the Content Lead and see if they’d be willing to sit down with you to create the content brief template together. By each of you bringing your unique expertise to the table, it can feel less like dictating and more like collaboration (plus, you’ll probably end up with a better brief template that way).

Make it clear that not all content has to be search content

SEO Managers live and breathe the organic search channel, but content teams have a more varied diet. They take a multi-channel approach to content, and sometimes are even writing content to support post-conversion teams like customer success.

When working with your content team on this, make sure you emphasize that this is a new content type that can be added to editorial planning. Not something that’ll replace or need to change the types of content they’re already writing.

Respect their expertise

Writing is hard. Doing it well requires immense skill and practice, but sadly, I’ve heard many SEOs talk about writers as if they didn’t know anything, just because they don’t know SEO.

As an SEO, you’ll get far with your content department simply by respecting their expertise. Just as many SEO Managers aren’t writers, it’s unfair of us to expect writers to have the SEO knowledge of a full-time SEO professional.

Before you implement a content brief process, sit down with the Content Lead and members of the content team to gauge their search maturity. What do they actually need your help with? Then trust them with the rest.

Show results

One of the best ways to get and maintain buy-in is by showing results. Show your content team how much of their traffic is coming from organic search and how, unlike many other content discovery channels, that traffic is staying consistent over time. Give the writer a shout-out when you notice their article ranking on page one.

Results are a great incentive to keep going.

Teamwork makes the dream work

In the SEO world, there’s a lot of talk about building strong relationships between SEOs and developers. It’s just as important to forge those same bonds with your content team and writers.

Remember, we’re on the same team, and stronger together than we are apart.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!