The content brief is where B2B SEO actually happens

When a piece of content fails, the post-mortem usually blames the writer. In my experience it is the brief about eighty percent of the time, and the tell is that the brief was one page long.

A writer given a keyword, a word count, and three competitor URLs is being asked to do strategy, research, and writing simultaneously, on a freelance rate, about a product they have used for twenty minutes. What comes back will be a synthesis of the three competitor URLs, because that is the only input they were given.

What a brief has to decide before the writer starts

The brief’s job is to make every decision that is not a writing decision. Concretely, that means answering these before anyone opens a document.

What is this piece for? Not the topic. The job. Rank and convert for a commercial cluster, earn links, add depth to a cluster where we sit fifth, or answer a question sales gets weekly. If nobody can state it, do not commission it.

Who is reading it and what do they already know? “Head of Compliance at a 200 to 800 person fintech, has been doing this for eight years, already knows what SOC 2 is and will stop reading if you explain it.” This single line prevents more bad content than anything else in the document.

What is the angle? The specific claim or position the piece makes that the existing top results do not. If the honest answer is that we have no distinct angle, the piece will be a slightly reworded version of what is already ranking and it will not displace it.

What must be covered and what must be left out? Both. Writers over-cover because they cannot tell what is optional, and the resulting piece is exhaustive and unreadable. Telling someone explicitly not to include a history-of-the-category section saves 400 words and improves the piece.

Where does the unique material come from? An SME interview recording, a specific data export, three named customer examples, a support ticket export. If the brief does not name a source of information the writer could not have found in the search results, the piece will not contain one.

Internal links, in and out. Which pages should link to this once it is live, and which pages this must link to, with the anchor text. Left to the writer, this gets done inconsistently or not at all.

The next step for the reader. Which CTA, and why that one for this intent.

The SERP analysis section, done usefully

Most briefs include a list of the top ten URLs and their word counts. That is data, not analysis.

What the writer needs is a paragraph saying what the current results have in common, what they all miss, and what format the results suggest. If eight of ten results are listicles, the search intent is comparative and a narrative essay will not rank, however good it is. If the top three all bury the answer under 600 words of preamble, leading with the answer is an opportunity.

We also note what kind of pages rank — vendor pages, review sites, community threads, editorial. If the top ten are entirely third-party review sites, that is a signal that your own domain may not be able to win the query at all, and the brief should be cancelled and replaced with a plan to appear on those sites instead.

Length, and why word counts mislead

Word count targets in briefs cause padding. A writer told to hit 2,400 words on a topic that needs 1,300 will produce 1,100 words of filler, and filler is worse than a shorter piece.

We give a range with a reason: “1,400 to 1,900. The top results run 1,600 to 2,400 but half of that is throat-clearing we are not going to reproduce.” That tells the writer what the number means and gives permission to come in under it.

The field almost nobody includes

What we are prepared to be wrong about.

B2B content is dull largely because it hedges everything into a position nobody could disagree with. A brief that states the piece should argue that, say, most companies in this category should not buy this software at all until they hit a certain size gives the writer permission to be interesting.

This needs sign-off from someone senior, which is exactly why it should be in the brief rather than left to the writer to attempt and get edited out.

How long a brief should take

Two to four hours for a substantial commercial page. That feels like a lot until you compare it to the cost of a 2,000-word piece that gets rewritten twice and then does not rank.

The ratio we work to is roughly one hour of briefing per 500 words of finished content. It has been consistent across enough projects that I now treat a brief produced in twenty minutes as a warning sign rather than efficiency.

Templates, briefly

We use one template with about fourteen fields, and roughly four of them are optional depending on the piece type. Comparison pages get extra fields for competitor claims and their sources. Link-building pieces get a target publication list. Sales-enablement pieces get a field for the specific objection.

The template matters less than the discipline of refusing to commission anything with empty fields. A brief with “TBD” in the angle field will produce a piece with no angle, every time.