SEO

How to Create Content Briefs (with 6 Templates)

Published

10 months ago

November 1, 2023

How to Create Content Briefs (with 6 Templates)

If you want to publish more blog content, you need to create solid content briefs.

Content briefs are simple documents that tell a writer… what to write about. They provide the information and context writers need to understand the goal of each article, ensure they cover all the key points, and turn in an A-grade draft with minimal hassle.

A good content brief should be simple. It should cover the essential information a writer needs without drowning them in SEO jargon or taking away their freedom to write in the way they think best.

Briefs should also be brief—they are not content outlines. Spend too long writing suggested headers, recommending examples to include, and handpicking competitor articles to read, and you may as well have written the article yourself.

With that in mind, here’s our straightforward content brief template, and a step-by-step guide to filling it out.

Every content brief should start with a working title for your article.

This doesn’t need to be a perfect, polished title. The goal of your working title is not to earn clicks or pique the reader’s interest—it’s to help the writer write. Keep it simple, and communicate the core idea of your article.

Examples:

How to create a content brief
Sharing our experience attending BrightonSEO
Why cloud architecture is overhyped
Keyword clustering using Ahrefs

If you’re creating SEO content, your working title should reflect the primary intent of your target keyword. In other words, it needs to give searchers what they want: whether that’s a how to, a list of tools, or a set of templates.

You can check the intent of your keywords with a quick Google search, but if you’d like to see the results for different countries (and make sure the results aren’t being personalised to you), you can check intent in Ahrefs.

Enter your target keyword into Keywords Explorer and scroll down to the SERP overview box. You’ll be able to see the titles of the top-ranking articles for that keyword.

Here’s the SERP overview for the keyword content brief:

Pay special attention to the formats used by the top-ranking content. If they all take similar angles (like, in this example, “how to”), there’s a good chance searchers are satisfied by it.

(Although that shouldn’t stop you from using your best judgment and finding ways to stand out from your competitors—more on that below.)

There’s a reason you want this article written (otherwise, why spend time and money creating it?).

Share your goal with the writer. Help them understand why they’re writing something and they’ll have a better chance at hitting your goal.

Examples:

Explain how to create an effective content brief.
Document our experience as sponsors of the BrightonSEO conference.
Share our CEO’s opinion on cloud architecture.
Teach existing users how to use our new keyword clustering feature for keyword research.

This doesn’t need to be a complicated persona document or a deep-dive into the reader’s awareness stage and demographic data.

Instead, share details that will help the writer choose the correct language and level of complexity for their article, like:

The audience’s experience-level with the topic: are they beginners looking for simple tutorials, or experts looking for advanced tips and tricks?
Their role: are you hoping to reach software engineers or solopreneurs? Junior content marketers or experienced CMOs?

Sometimes the existing search results can help narrow down your audience. If the top-performing articles all include “for beginners” in their title, there’s a good chance you should follow suit.

You can help your writer by suggesting important sub-topics to include in the article.

Common sense is a helpful guide: for an article about content briefs, you’d probably want to include a definition and a tutorial for actually creating a content brief.

You can also take a more more data-driven approach to finding sub-topics. I like using Ahrefs for this.

Start by putting your topic into Keywords Explorer, and heading to the Related terms report. Select the Also rank for tab, and you’ll see a list of additional keywords that top-ranking articles for your topic commonly rank for:

In the example above, we’re looking at the keyword content briefs. From the results, it seems that top-performing articles also rank for keywords relating to templates and examples. For this article, the writer might want to include a section about content brief examples.

(Spoiler: we did, check it out below.)

The point of content marketing is help grow a business (otherwise, it’s just… writing). With that in mind, use your content brief to suggest relevant opportunities to mention your products.

It can feel salesy when products are shoehorned into articles where they don’t belong. Instead, focus on topics where it would be natural to mention your product. This is something we do at Ahrefs (hence the screenshots above).

If your writer isn’t already an expert with your products, help them out with by explaining how your product “fits in” to the topic at hand, and recommending product features that would be helpful to mention.

Examples:

We don’t offer a content briefing product, but here are three ways our data can help with the process.
We spoke to tons of customers at the conference: here was their top product feedback.
For this section on keyword clustering, it would be worth mentioning the new clustering tool in Keywords Explorer.
We recently moved our hosting from the cloud to on-premises installation.

Virtually every article has to compete for attention with similar articles covering the same topic. To help your article stand out, you can suggest unique information to include—things that competing articles don’t cover.

You could recommend experts to interview, or relevant quotes to include. You could include data and statistics to reference. You could even share a few personal experiences and stories that might help the reader understand the topic.

Examples:

Use HARO to find people willing to share their content brief template.
Let’s tell the story of how I used keyword clustering to rank for 1200-keywords with one article.
Here’s some research about the costs of cloud hosting for you to reference.

Last of all, include any nitty-gritty practical details your writer would find helpful, like:

Article deadline
Useful resources (like your style guide)
Editors or reviewers they should communicate with
Internal links to other related articles on your website

Fill out these details for every article, share your briefs with your writer, and await content goodness to appear in your inbox.

Our content brief template is simple, and a great starting point for most people looking to publish more posts. But there are many situations that might call for more (or less) detail in certain areas, like writing extra-technical content, or creating articles that form part of an ongoing series.

I asked a handful of content leads and agency owners to share their personal content brief templates. Check out the templates below, and download any that you might find helpful.

Draft.dev’s technical content template

Creator: Karl Hughes, Draft.dev

Link: Make a copy here

Karl Hughes runs the technical content marketing agency Draft.dev. His briefs contain a huge amount of detail to help a big team of writers cover extremely technical topics.

Screenshot of technical content template

Freshpaint’s product-focused content template

Creator: Mark Rogers, Freshpaint

Link: Make a copy here

Mark Rogers is the Director of Content at Freshpaint. His briefs focus on Freshpaint’s product: providing a product overview, sharing boilerplate about Freshpaint’s HIPAA compliance, and explaining how the product “fits in” to the topic at hand.

Screenshot of Freshpaint’s product-focused content template

Fio Dossetto’s ABCD template

Creator: Fio Dossetto, contentfolks

Link: Make a copy here

Fio is the creator of contentfolks and the head of content at Aura. Her ABCD template shares plain English information across four key areas: audience, brand, context, and details.

Deel’s marketing-focused brief and editing checklist

Creator: Anja Simic, Deel

Link: Make a copy here

Anja Simic’s content briefs for HR platform Deel do a great job at connecting each article back to the bigger marketing strategy. The brief helps the writer to reference case studies, awards, and data from recent Deel studies.

Omniscient Digital’s audience, SEO, brand, and conversion template

Creator: Alex Birkett, Omniscient Digital

Link: Make a copy here

Omniscient Digital is a content marketing agency. Their briefs provide room for their strategists to share expert guidance to writers: recommending ways to bring new information to the discussion, mention the customer’s products, and generally stand out in the SERPs.

Final thoughts

I’ve written hundreds of articles and managed dozens of writers over the years. In both cases, problems with inconsistent quality and endless rewrites usually boiled down to one thing: miscommunication.

A content brief is a simple, straightforward way to provide your writers with exactly the information they need to write great articles. It ensures that both you and your writer understand why and how to create every article—removing most miscommunication issues at the source.

How do you build content briefs? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.

Source link

Related Topics:Briefs Content Create seo Templates

Up Next

Google’s New ING TLD Domains Available

Don't Miss

Data-Driven Decision Making To Optimized Local Digital Marketing Efforts

SEO

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

Published

7 hours ago

August 31, 2024

Max

WordPress Insiders Discuss WordPress Stagnation

A recent webinar featuring WordPress executives from Automattic and Elementor, along with developers and Joost de Valk, discussed the stagnation in WordPress growth, exploring the causes and potential solutions.

Stagnation Was The Webinar Topic

The webinar, “Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?” was a frank discussion about what can be done to increase the market share of new users that are choosing a web publishing platform.

Yet something that came up is that there are some areas that WordPress is doing exceptionally well so it’s not all doom and gloom. As will be seen later on, the fact that the WordPress core isn’t progressing in terms of specific technological adoption isn’t necessarily a sign that WordPress is falling behind, it’s actually a feature.

Yet there is a stagnation as mentioned at the 17:07 minute mark:

“…Basically you’re saying it’s not necessarily declining, but it’s not increasing and the energy is lagging. “

The response to the above statement acknowledged that while there are areas of growth like in the education and government sectors, the rest was “up for grabs.”

Joost de Valk spoke directly and unambiguously acknowledged the stagnation at the 18:09 minute mark:

“I agree with Noel. I think it’s stagnant.”

That said, Joost also saw opportunities with ecommerce, with the performance of WooCommerce. WooCommerce, by the way, outperformed WordPress as a whole with a 6.80% year over year growth rate, so there’s a good reason that Joost was optimistic of the ecommerce sector.

A general sense that WordPress was entering a stall however was not in dispute, as shown in remarks at the 31:45 minute mark:

“… the WordPress product market share is not decreasing, but it is stagnating…”

Facing Reality Is Productive

Humans have two ways to deal with a problem:

Acknowledge the problem and seek solutions
Pretend it’s not there and proceed as if everything is okay

WordPress is a publishing platform that’s loved around the world and has literally created countless jobs, careers, powered online commerce as well as helped establish new industries in developing applications that extend WordPress.

Many people have a stake in WordPress’ continued survival so any talk about WordPress entering a stall and descent phase like an airplane that reached the maximum altitude is frightening and some people would prefer to shout it down to make it go away.

Acknowledging facts and not brushing them aside is what this webinar achieved as a step toward identifying solutions. Everyone in the discussion has a stake in the continued growth of WordPress and their goal was to put it out there for the community to also get involved.

The live webinar featured:

Miriam Schwab, Elementor’s Head of WP Relations
Rich Tabor, Automattic Product Manager
Joost de Valk, founder of Yoast SEO
Co-hosts Matt Cromwell and Amber Hinds, both members of the WordPress developer community moderated the discussion.

WordPress Market Share Stagnation

The webinar acknowledged that WordPress market share, the percentage of websites online that use WordPress, was stagnating. Stagnation is a state at which something is neither moving forward nor backwards, it is simply stuck at an in between point. And that’s what was openly acknowledged and the main point of the discussion was understanding the reasons why and what could be done about it.

Statistics gathered by the HTTPArchive and published on Joost de Valk’s blog show that WordPress experienced a year over year growth of 1.85%, having spent the year growing and contracting its market share. For example, over the latest month over month period the market share dropped by -0.28%.

Crowing about the WordPress 1.85% growth rate as evidence that everything is fine is to ignore that a large percentage of new businesses and websites coming online are increasingly going to other platforms, with year over year growth rates of other platforms outpacing the rate of growth of WordPress.

Out of the top 10 Content Management Systems, only six experienced year over year (YoY) growth.

CMS YoY Growth

Webflow: 25.00%
Shopify: 15.61%
Wix: 10.71%
Squarespace: 9.04%
Duda: 8.89%
WordPress: 1.85%

Why Stagnation Is A Problem

An important point made in the webinar is that stagnation can have a negative trickle-down effect on the business ecosystem by reducing growth opportunities and customer acquisition. If fewer of the new businesses coming online are opting in for WordPress are clients that will never come looking for a theme, plugin, development or SEO service.

It was noted at the 4:18 minute mark by Joost de Valk:

“…when you’re investing and when you’re building a product in the WordPress space, the market share or whether WordPress is growing or not has a deep impact on how easy it is to well to get people to, to buy the software that you want to sell them.”

Perception Of Innovation

One of the potential reasons for the struggle to achieve significant growth is the perception of a lack of innovation, pointed out at the 16:51 minute mark that there’s still no integration with popular technologies like Next JS, an open-source web development platform that is optimized for fast rollout of scalable and search-friendly websites.

It was observed at the 16:51 minute mark:

“…and still today we have no integration with next JS or anything like that…”

Someone else agreed but also expressed at the 41:52 minute mark, that the lack of innovation in the WordPress core can also be seen as a deliberate effort to make WordPress extensible so that if users find a gap a developer can step in and make a plugin to make WordPress be whatever users and developers want it to be.

“It’s not trying to be everything for everyone because it’s extensible. So if WordPress has a… let’s say a weakness for a particular segment or could be doing better in some way. Then you can come along and develop a plug in for it and that is one of the beautiful things about WordPress.”

Is Improved Marketing A Solution

One of the things that was identified as an area of improvement is marketing. They didn’t say it would solve all problems. It was simply noted that competitors are actively advertising and promoting but WordPress is by comparison not really proactively there. I think to extend that idea, which wasn’t expressed in the webinar, is to consider that if WordPress isn’t out there putting out a positive marketing message then the only thing consumers might be exposed to is the daily news of another vulnerability.

Someone commented in the 16:21 minute mark:

“I’m missing the excitement of WordPress and I’m not feeling that in the market. …I think a lot of that is around the product marketing and how we repackage WordPress for certain verticals because this one-size-fits-all means that in every single vertical we’re being displaced by campaigns that have paid or, you know, have received a a certain amount of funding and can go after us, right?”

This idea of marketing being a shortcoming of WordPress was raised earlier in the webinar at the 18:27 minute mark where it was acknowledged that growth was in some respects driven by the WordPress ecosystem with associated products like Elementor driving the growth in adoption of WordPress by new businesses.

They said:

“…the only logical conclusion is that the fact that marketing of WordPress itself is has actually always been a pain point, is now starting to actually hurt us.”

Future Of WordPress

This webinar is important because it features the voices of people who are actively involved at every level of WordPress, from development, marketing, accessibility, WordPress security, to plugin development. These are insiders with a deep interest in the continued evolution of WordPress as a viable platform for getting online.

The fact that they’re talking about the stagnation of WordPress should be of concern to everybody and that they are talking about solutions shows that the WordPress community is not in denial but is directly confronting situations, which is how a thriving ecosystem should be responding.

Watch the webinar:

Is WordPress’ Market share Declining? And What Should Product Businesses Do About it?

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Krakenimages.com

Source link

SEO

Google’s New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Published

1 day ago

August 31, 2024

Max

Google's New Support For AVIF Images May Boost SEO

Google announced that images in the AVIF file format will now be eligible to be shown in Google Search and Google Images, including all platforms that surface Google Search data. AVIF will dramatically lower image sizes and improve Core Web Vitals scores, particularly Largest Contentful Paint.

How AVIF Can Improve SEO

Getting pages crawled and indexed are the first step of effective SEO. Anything that lowers file size and speeds up web page rendering will help search crawlers get to the content faster and improve the amount of pages crawled.

Google’s crawl budget documentation recommends increasing the speeds of page loading and rendering as a way to avoid receiving “Hostload exceeded” warnings.

It also says that faster loading times enables Googlebot to crawl more pages:

Improve your site’s crawl efficiency

Increase your page loading speed
Google’s crawling is limited by bandwidth, time, and availability of Googlebot instances. If your server responds to requests quicker, we might be able to crawl more pages on your site.

What Is AVIF?

AVIF (AVI Image File Format) is a next generation open source image file format that combines the best of JPEG, PNG, and GIF image file formats but in a more compressed format for smaller image files (by 50% for JPEG format).

AVIF supports transparency like PNG and photographic images like JPEG does but does but with a higher level of dynamic range, deeper blacks, and better compression (meaning smaller file sizes). AVIF even supports animation like GIF does.

AVIF Versus WebP

AVIF is generally a better file format than WebP in terms of smaller files size (compression) and image quality. WebP is better for lossless images, where maintaining high quality regardless of file size is more important. But for everyday web usage, AVIF is the better choice.

Is AVIF Supported?

AVIF is currently supported by Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Opera, and Safari browsers. Not all content management systems support AVIF. However, both WordPress and Joomla support AVIF. In terms of CDN, Cloudflare also already supports AVIF.

I couldn’t at this time ascertain whether Bing supports AVIF files and will update this article once I find out.

Current website usage of AVIF stands at 0.2% but now that it’s available to surfaced in Google Search, expect that percentage to grow. AVIF images will probably become a standard image format because of its high compression will help sites perform far better than they currently do with JPEG and PNG formats.

Research conducted in July 2024 by Joost de Valk (founder of Yoast, ) discovered that social media platforms don’t all support AVIF files. He found that LinkedIn, Mastodon, Slack, and Twitter/X do not currently support AVIF but that Facebook, Pinterest, Threads and WhatsApp do support it.

AVIF Images Are Automatically Indexable By Google

According to Google’s announcement there is nothing special that needs to be done to make AVIF image files indexable.

“Over the recent years, AVIF has become one of the most commonly used image formats on the web. We’re happy to announce that AVIF is now a supported file type in Google Search, for Google Images as well as any place that uses images in Google Search. You don’t need to do anything special to have your AVIF files indexed by Google.”

Read Google’s announcement:

Supporting AVIF in Google Search

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands

Source link

SEO

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Published

2 days ago

August 30, 2024

Max

CMOs Called Out For Reliance On AI Content For SEO

Eli Schwartz, Author of Product-Led SEO, started a discussion on LinkedIn about there being too many CMOs (Chief Marketing Officers) who believe that AI written content is an SEO strategy. He predicted that there will be reckoning on the way after their strategies end in failure.

This is what Eli had to say:

“Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO.

This mistake is going to lead to an explosion in demand for SEO strategists to help them fix their traffic when they find out they might have been wrong.”

Everyone in the discussion, which received 54 comments, strongly agreed with Eli, except for one guy.

What Is Google’s Policy On AI Generated Content?

Google’s policy hasn’t changed although they did update their guidance and spam policies on March 5, 2024 at the same time as the rollout of the March 2024 Core Algorithm Update. Many publishers who used AI to create content subsequently reported losing rankings.

Yet it’s not said that using AI is enough to merit poor rankings, it’s content that is created for ranking purposes.

Google wrote these guidelines specifically for autogenerated content, including AI generated content (Wayback machine copy dated March 6, 2024)

“Our long-standing spam policy has been that use of automation, including generative AI, is spam if the primary purpose is manipulating ranking in Search results. The updated policy is in the same spirit of our previous policy and based on the same principle. It’s been expanded to account for more sophisticated scaled content creation methods where it isn’t always clear whether low quality content was created purely through automation.

Our new policy is meant to help people focus more clearly on the idea that producing content at scale is abusive if done for the purpose of manipulating search rankings and that this applies whether automation or humans are involved.”

Many in Eli’s discussion were in agreement that reliance on AI by some organizations may come to haunt them, except for that one guy in the discussion

Read the discussion on LinkedIn:

Too many CMOs think that AI-written content is an SEO strategy that will replace actual SEO

Featured Image by Shutterstock/Cast Of Thousands

Source link