Marketing SEO Content Brief

Search Content Brief

Purpose

Most content briefs specify a keyword and a word count, which produces pages that mention a term without answering the question behind it. This skill starts from observed intent — what the results page currently rewards — and specifies the page's job, the questions it must answer, and how it will be judged. Keyword density is not a target and is never a brief field.

Prerequisites

• Inputs: the topic or query, the site or section it will live on, the business outcome the page serves, and who will write it.
• Access: a search results page for the target market and language (region and language change results materially); your site's existing pages on the topic; your analytics and search performance data for the site.
• Also required: whether the site already has a page targeting this intent. If it does, this is a consolidation or update decision, not a new brief.

If you cannot observe an actual results page for the target market, say so. A brief written from assumed intent is a guess with formatting.

Data classification

Internal. Search performance exports and site analytics are internal; do not include customer-identifying query data, and do not paste user records or account identifiers into a brief.

Intent classification

Classify before planning. Intent determines page type; getting this wrong is the single largest cause of a page that never ranks.

Procedure

1. Confirm the query is worth a page. Check whether the site already ranks or has a competing page. If it does, the correct output is an update or a consolidation plan — two pages competing for one intent suppress each other.

2. Read the current results page properly. Record the top results, their page type, their format (list, table, step-by-step, tool, video), and what additional result features appear. This is the evidence for intent, not a competitive scoreboard. Note the observation date; results change.

3. Classify intent using the table above, and write the classification into the brief with the evidence that led to it.

4. Extract the questions the page must answer. From the ranking pages, the related-question features, and — more valuable — from your own sales and support records, list the concrete questions a searcher with this intent arrives holding. Six to twelve specific questions beat a topic outline.

5. Decide the page's angle. State what this page will contain that the current results do not: proprietary data, a working example, a specific decision rule, first-hand practitioner detail, an original comparison. If nothing can be named here, the brief should not proceed — an additional undifferentiated page is cost without upside.

6. Specify the brief fields.

   Field	Requirement
   Target intent	One intent, from step 3, with its evidence
   Primary query	One. Secondary variants listed but never as density targets
   Page type	From the intent table
   Questions to answer	The list from step 4, in the order a reader needs them
   Angle	From step 5, stated as a sentence, not an adjective
   Depth guidance	Determined by what the questions require, expressed as coverage, not a word count
   Required evidence	Data, examples, or sources the writer must obtain — with who supplies them
   Claims	Any performance or comparative claim, routed to marketing-claim-substantiation
   Title and description	Written to describe the page accurately, not to include the query twice
   Internal links	Specific existing URLs to link from and to, with intended anchor meaning
   Structured content	Tables, steps, or definitions the format genuinely needs
   Conversion path	What the reader is invited to do next, appropriate to intent
   Author and reviewer	Named. A subject reviewer is mandatory for anything technical or regulated
   Review date	When the page is re-checked against a fresh results reading

7. Set measurement before writing. Name the success measure appropriate to intent: informational pages are judged on qualified sessions and assisted conversions, transactional pages on conversions. State the evaluation window — typically one to two quarters — and the baseline. Judging an organic page in week two produces a wrong conclusion.

8. Run the claim pass. Any statistic, comparison, or outcome claim in the brief or planned for the page goes through marketing-claim-substantiation. Unsourced claims are flagged in the brief and cannot ship in the page.

Failure modes

• Briefing a keyword rather than an intent. Producing an article for a query whose results are all product pages wastes the page.
• Word counts as a proxy for quality. Length copied from competitors inflates pages with padding. Brief coverage of the question list instead.
• Query repetition targets. Instructing a writer to use a phrase N times degrades the copy and does not improve ranking. Never include this field.
• Cannibalisation ignored. New page, existing page, same intent — both lose. Step 1 exists to prevent this.
• Stale intent evidence. A brief acted on months after the results reading may be targeting a page type that no longer ranks. Re-read before writing starts.
• No named subject reviewer on regulated, medical, financial, or legal topics. Accuracy failures here are compliance failures, not content failures.

Boundaries

• Paid media, promotions, and launch campaigns — use marketing-campaign-brief.
• Reviewing finished copy for claim support — use marketing-claim-substantiation.
• Crawlability, indexation, redirects, and page performance work — these are engineering tasks; raise them through it-change-management or the site owner rather than in a content brief.
• Standing editorial workflow and publishing process — use operations-sop-authoring.

Hand-offs

• Receives from: marketing-campaign-brief when a campaign needs an organic component; sales-discovery-preparation for the real questions buyers ask.
• Routes to: marketing-claim-substantiation before publication, and data-analytics-metric-definition where the success measure needs a fixed definition.