Each piece of content you produce should link to other pages on your website (internal links) and pages from other websites (external links). Both types of links should be relevant to the core topic of your content and lead to pages that reinforce your points or lead to more information relevant to the anchor text.
Let’s imagine a company that sells accounting software and it publishes a tutorial on how to automate bookkeeping. The posts should link to relevant pages on the company’s website for important keywords – so it might link to the homepage using the anchor text “accounting software” and feature pages for terms like.
“VAT returns,” “sending invoices” and “managing payroll”.
The same post should also link phone number database out to third-party sites that reinforce key points made in the article. Stats from reputable sources are always a good place to start, such as data from ONS showing how many hours the average company spends on their books or the number of businesses fined for filing tax returns late and incorrectly the previous year.
In your SEO content brief, specify which internal pages you want your writers to link to, including the keyword-optimised anchor text they should use.
Likewise, include any external links you want to include or a list of potential sources where they can find links to reinforce any arguments, claims or subjective commentary.
10. Competitor examples
Competitor content already ranks for the list of phone number is essential for your success keyword you’re targeting and the aim is to climb above them in the SERPs. So your content producers need to know what they’re up against and what’s required of them to improve upon the content already ranking for your target keyword.
First up, you have to analyse the content you’re looking to beat and find weaknesses that you can exploit. Your aim is to show search engines that your content deserves to rank higher than the competition and, then, back this up with user signals (time on page, pages visits, low bounce rates, etc.) that confirm your content deserves to stay above your rivals.
So your SEO content brief may include the following instructions for your writers:
- 3,000+ word count to provide more depth than the competitor content.
- Include the phrase ‘for small businesses’ in the title as the competitor content is more generalistic.
- Focus on small business challenges to make the piece hyper-relevant to the target audience.
- Up-to-date external links from the previous 12 months (the links in competitor examples are older and less relevant).
- Include more stats than the competitor examples.
- Use a more conversational tone than the competitor examples.
- Include an actionable, step-by-step guide under an h2 subheading using h3 headings for each step with images to illustrate the action and a clear description.
These are the kind of instructions your content producers should be given to ensure they’re creating content that provides Google and other search engines with all the signals they need to rank your page above the competition.
11. SEO checklist
Finally, every SEO content brief list to data should include (or link to) your SEO checklist for writers to run through before they submit or publish their work. This checklist includes all of the on-page essentials, such as titles, headings, basic structure, anchor text and keyword usage – everything you want your content producers to optimise and double-check.
Include any unique requirements that you might have, such as preferred heading structures and a list of priority internal links. Your checklist helps your creatives produce optimised content every time and learn the essential basics of SEO, which will benefit everything else they create for you.
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