SEO Content Briefs a Writer Can Execute Unaided

A brief works when a writer can execute it without asking a single question. Ours run eight to twelve pages and take about four hours each to produce, and roughly forty minutes of that is an interview with someone at your company who genuinely knows the subject. That interview is the part that cannot be skipped, and it is the part most brief production skips. How a brief is made: It starts from a page-type verdict, not from a keyword. We read the current top ten, then we read what those pages fail to answer, then we book the interview: a product manager, a support lead, a compliance officer, a category buyer, whoever holds the knowledge the ranking pages do not have. The brief carries that person's specific claims with attribution, so the writer assembles an argument rather than paraphrasing the competition at greater length. What is in one: The argument the page makes, in one sentence, and it is the only line the writer may not change. The page type and the modules it needs. Entities and sub-topics with a reason attached to each rather than a term list to hit a score. Three to six source claims from the interview, quoted, named. Internal links in and out by URL, decided from the cluster map rather than guessed at draft time. The title and H1 written out. And what the page must not say, which on regulated accounts is the longest section in the document. Regulated categories: For operators licensed by the ANJ, French-facing briefs carry the compliance boundary explicitly: what may be claimed about odds and bonuses, the mandatory responsible-gambling and age messaging, and the fact that the French licence covers sports betting, horse racing and poker rather than online casino games, so a cluster resolving to casino content is a cluster for another market or for no market. We write those boundaries into the brief because a writer who learns them from a rejected draft learns them expensively. Handover and cadence: Briefs land in batches with a working session on each batch, so your writers argue with us while changing the plan is still cheap. Format is Google Docs, one document per page, plus a tracking sheet. On retainer we re-open any brief whose SERP has moved before the article is commissioned, because a brief older than a quarter is a liability rather than an asset. We do not: Produce briefs from a top-ten scrape alone. If the interview cannot be arranged we decline that brief rather than fill it with received wisdom. Supply outlines with a word count per section. Recommend keyword density, TF-IDF targets or content scores. Write the article, unless you commission that separately. Wrong fit: If your writers are paid per piece at a rate assuming an hour of work, a brief this long makes the economics worse rather than better, because they will skim it and deliver something it did not ask for. If nobody internally can give forty minutes per topic, the briefs come out thinner than they should be and the budget belongs elsewhere. And if your company holds no first-hand knowledge of the subject, we are the wrong supplier: something has to be true and yours for the page to deserve to win. Who does it: One editor writes every brief in a batch so the set holds a single standard, and that editor attends the handover. Interviews are recorded with consent, and the transcripts come to you alongside the briefs, which several clients have found more useful than the briefs themselves.