Content Briefs Built From Interviews, Not Templates

A brief a writer can follow without coming back with questions takes us four to six hours, and most of that is reading rather than writing: the ten results ranking now, every page you already own that touches the subject, and whatever your own people know that the ranking pages do not. Briefs assembled from a template in twenty minutes are the reason so much agency content reads like the results page it was copied from. The brief format: Six pages, plain document, no scoring tool. It opens with the decision the reader is trying to make and the point at which they stop reading if we have not answered it. Then the claim the piece exists to make, in one sentence — and if we cannot write that sentence, the topic goes back on the shelf. Then the section order with the argument each section carries, not the phrase each section carries. Then the evidence slots: which figure, which source, which screenshot, which internal number the writer has to obtain before drafting. Then the URLs this page will link to and be linked from, named. Then the exclusions: the sub-topics this page deliberately does not cover because another page owns them. What we read first: Your Search Console data for the URL cluster the piece will join, so the brief inherits the queries that cluster already half-ranks for instead of inventing a target from nothing. The ten ranking results, read for what they all omit — every results page has a shared blind spot, and that gap is usually the only honest reason to publish. And your own material: sales call notes, support macros, the questions your account team answers every week. On marketplace clients, the seller onboarding FAQ has produced more usable brief content than any competitor page we have read. The interview: Where a topic depends on operational knowledge — freight timelines on furniture, dispute rates on a marketplace, how a consultancy actually prices a retainer — we book thirty to forty minutes with the person who knows, and the brief carries their answers verbatim and attributed. Without that call the brief is a summary of the competition, and we would rather not produce it than hand a writer something that guarantees an average page. We refuse to brief: Topics that are not on an approved intent map, because a brief for a query your domain cannot hold is wasted no matter how well written. Pages whose only purpose is to hold an internal link. Any topic where the honest answer is that an existing page should be edited instead — we say so and do not bill for the brief. And we do not brief to a word count. If the argument closes in nine hundred words, the brief says nine hundred and the writer is told not to pad. What the writer still has to do: This is a specification, not a draft. Someone still writes the piece, and the brief assumes a writer competent enough to push back on it. If your writers need sentence-level scaffolding, briefs will not fix that, and the writing engagement is what you actually want. Who should not buy this: Teams publishing weekly against a calendar fixed a quarter ahead. Our pace is set by interview availability, and matching a calendar would mean briefing topics we have not argued for. Teams whose editorial approval runs through legal or brand review with a multi-week queue: the interview material is the first thing those reviews strip out, and what survives is the template brief we declined to write in the first place.