Briefs that settle the argument before the draft starts

Our briefs run six to eleven pages, and the test we hold them to is that a competent freelance writer opens one and starts drafting inside an hour with no call. If your writer emails back asking what the page is supposed to argue, the brief failed and we rewrite it at our cost. Who writes it: Two people write briefs here, and neither is a researcher working from a template. One ran organic acquisition in-house at a Canadian lender for five years and made the call to kill 140 pages before a domain migration; traffic fell for seven weeks and came back on a third fewer URLs. The other has written and ranked in developer tooling since 2018 and still ships drafts under her own byline, which is why she can tell you which sections a technical reader skips rather than guessing. The question a brief answers: Not which keywords go on the page. The question is what this page has to say that the four pages already ranking do not, and whether that difference is worth a writer's week. We read a SERP as a set of editorial decisions other teams made: what each of them chose to define, what they refused to compare, where all of them hedge in the same paragraph. The gap is usually a claim nobody is willing to make in public. The brief tells your writer to make it, and tells them what evidence has to be in hand first. What arrives: A page thesis in one sentence. The questions the page must answer, in the order a reader asks them, each with its source named or a note that you own the data and have to supply it. Entities and named products that must appear for the page to read as informed. Section-by-section structure with word ranges and a line on what each section is for. Internal links in both directions, named by URL. The two or three places where a screenshot, a table or an original number is doing the ranking work and prose will not substitute. Delivered as a Google Doc plus the same content in whatever format your brief tool ingests. When the answer is inconvenient: Sometimes the honest brief is do not write this. We have handed back clusters where three of eleven target terms were held by pages that will not move for anything short of original research the client had no way to fund. You get that in writing, with the reasoning, and we bill the same. We would rather lose the writing work that follows than hand over a brief that quietly sets a writer up to fail. What is not included: We do not write the draft under this engagement; that is separate, and buying briefs does not commit you to it. No keyword research from zero — bring the term list or the cluster you have already committed to. No technical fixes, no schema, no link implementation. We do not review the drafts your writers produce from our briefs unless you add that on, because a half review is worse than none. Who this is not for: Teams publishing to a volume target set by somebody who does not read the pages. Anyone who needs a brief to guarantee a position; we will not write that sentence and it is not true when others do. Categories where legal or medical review holds final say over claims and has not been in the room — the brief will name claims that need sourcing, and with no process to source them the work stalls at first draft. How it runs: A 45-minute call with whoever owns the number this content is meant to move. Within three days you get a written go or no-go on each topic, before we brief any of them. You approve that list. Briefs follow. Revisions cover anything unclear or wrong; they do not cover changing the target topic after approval, which is a new brief. The price sits where it does because a senior person spends real hours inside your category instead of filling in a template. If that is not what you are buying, cheaper suppliers exist and we will say so on the call.