The Perfect Tools to Craft an Excellent Content Brief

The phrase ‘begin with the end in mind’ may have to be reworked when it comes to creating SEO content. Starting with a solid foundation is the way to go.

A well-thought-out brief is the most efficient way to ensure that every project — no matter how simple or complex — is on the right track from the start.

With the knowledge that great content starts with you, it’s important to have a pre-planned content brief to guide your writers when scripting SEO copy.

Let’s go through this simple template that you can use to make your content planning more precise and efficient.

Key Items to Include in Your Sample Content Brief

Intended Result

This is an important aspect that is often left out of content briefs.

You have to specify the main takeaways for your readers after consuming any piece of content.

Make sure your content creator can make a convincing argument that will strike a chord with the reader and encourage them to take appropriate action.

Look at your content as a high-value resource that is designed to have an actionable impact on the reader.

Target Audience

Even if a content creator has a grasp of your general niche market, you shouldn’t assume that they understand your core audience.

Ensure that the final copy is tailored to suit the right clientele. For instance, it would be highly inappropriate to write adult-oriented content for a teen audience.

Let the writer know the purpose of the information and who it’s reaching out to.

Article Length

Always make it a point to determine the appropriate length for each article because it plays a significant role in the SEO process.

Some may argue that the quality of an article outweighs the content length — but if you want to rank better in search engines, you need to find the optimal word count.

Balancing optimal word count and quality content is the way to go.

SEO guru Neil Patel has extensively covered this area; in this in-depth piece, he succinctly states that word count only truly matters when the content is good.

Tone of Content

Your blog is the voice of your brand. The content you post dictates how you interact with your audience — and the language you use matters. Is your content humorous, serious, conversational or eccentric?

Defining your brand voice will make or break your success, so clearly define this from the get-go.

There’s no harm in taking a look at blogs that you would like to emulate and using them as a reference point.

Keyword Suggestions

Using the right keywords determines the impact of your content.

Do your own keyword research and include the list in your brief. Start with the seed keyword and include the long-tail keywords below it.

Using a current keyword guide such as this one from SEMrush will ensure the writer is accessing the latest market data.

Call to Action

Make it clear what you want the reader to do after reading your content by highlighting the call-to-action phrases.

Should they click to purchase an item? Subscribe to a newsletter? Call for more information?

Most internet users are quite savvy so the call-to-action phrases have to be creative and convincing to boost conversions.

Let’s now dig into the actual tools that will help you craft an excellent content brief.

Dynalist

The creators of this application have aptly described it as the most helpful outlining app to produce your best work.

This simple, resourceful tool helps you put together your ideas using a structured outline.

Using this format, you can easily list your ideas and arrange them in a coherent order. Dynalist can be used for the following tasks:

Planning
Writing drafts
Making lists
Creating checklists
Cross linking ideas

When you create a content summary with Dynalist, you can easily share it with your writers using a cloud-based collaboration feature.

The best attribute of this tool is the simple interface and easy navigation. You can also customize your briefing using tags, rich formatting, calendar-syncing and custom themes, among other features.

So, why should you choose Dynalist for your content brief over any other application? Because it’s simple and user-friendly. The tool enables you to nest all of your ideas on one infinitely resourceful, shareable platform.

Market Muse

Market Muse uses cutting edge machine learning to help you build effective content strategies.

This will speed up content creation by providing valuable insights regarding your content decisions.

When creating a content brief with Market Muse, the tool will determine the importance and relevance of topics — which will help you create the best possible content in the long run.

The magic of this tool lies in its ability to crawl the internet and analyze large chunks of related content. This helps you maximise opportunities to leverage your content.

Here are some of the benchmarks used by Market Muse to give users the best results:

Research — The tool searches the internet and finds related content and possible areas to capitalize on.
Compete — Discover the top-performing search terms that you should incorporate in your content.
Questions — The application finds potential questions to answer in your content as a way of creating value for the consumer.
Connect — The application determines the most effective internal links, making it easier for readers to consume content while improving search rankings.
Optimize — Market Muse analyzes your content and provides a content score based on all the suggested tips.

This amazing technology is reinventing how content marketers can improve their content using tried and tested data analysis processes.

Surfer SEO

This is one of the most effective on-page ranking tools that content marketers use for content creation.

The unique selling point of Surfer SEO is its ability to show you all the required metrics for great web content.

With a few clicks, this all-in-one tool reveals the optimal content length, keyword density, number of backlinks for every URL, commonly used words and much more.

The tool also has an excellent suggestion feature that recommends the best metrics for your content.

When you use Surfer SEO to create a content brief, here’s what to expect after a data breakdown:

Optimum number of words per article
Keyword density and frequencies
Partial keyword matching

Instead of guessing one or two content ideas that Google ranks highly, use this data-driven tool to find out exactly what should be included in your content.

Many clients outsourcing work find it difficult to come up with a comprehensive content brief. But with this simple tool, you’ll get all the information you need with just a couple of clicks.