On this post you’ll find my favourite template to brief SEO content out to authors and bloggers, even if they don’t know anything about SEO.

The main purpose of this article is to help businesses, websites, publishers and agencies answering a very simple question:

How to scale content optimisation with content briefs?

The answer lies within the creation of a solid content brief. The better the brief, the easier to scale. We’ve collected a list of few important things to keep in mind in the table below.

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SEO brief template

Element	Description
Tone of Voice (ToV)	This should indicate your branding, some sample sentences from your website or wording you’d like your business to be associated with.
Target audience & Persona	This section should clearly explain who the post is crafted for (example: 35-45 year old woman who works in banking and likes beach holidays).
Target keyword (s)	List out your target terms here: – keyword 1 (SV xxx) – keyword 2 (SV yyy) – etc.
Word count	This is the amount of words for the content: this figure can usually vary from few hundreds to thousands.
Header Tags	These are the H1’s, H2’s, H3’s etc. It is good practice to include some target keywords within.
Subtopics	This is not always applicable, but it may be the case for a piece of pillar content that will give an overview on a specific cluster and then link to a more specific and in depth article.
FAQ’s / Questions to answer	Applicable to informational posts or articles, this section should outline long-tail, low volume and very specific questions that are related to the main topic and serve an ancillary purpose to the piece.

Conclusion

In summary, content briefs should not be too complex, however, they should serve the purpose of making your content creation scalable and straightforward.

I hope you found this useful. If you have additional questions, you can contact me on LinkedIn.