What is in a brief?

Every page the plan says to build or improve gets a brief, up to ten per run, in plan order. It sits inline on the page view under The brief, and downloads as Markdown from Download Brief.

The sections

• Title and meta description. Ready to use, within the usual length limits.
• Target keywords. The group's keywords the page should carry.
• Audience. Who is searching and what situation they are in.
• The angle. The one thing this page does that the current results do not. This is the brief's center; everything else serves it.
• Outline. Headings at two levels, each with a note on what the section must contain and why.
• Questions to answer. Taken from what people ask around the topic and from what the ranking pages leave open.
• Must include. Facts and elements from the gap analysis that the page cannot skip.
• Beat each competitor. For each competing top result, one line on how to be better than it.
• Internal links. Pages on your site the new page should link to. For a planned site, the other planned pages.
• Word count. A range appropriate to the page type.
• Notes. Anything else the writer should know.

A map page's brief

A page written from the topical map gets everything above and more, because the map knows where the page sits:

• Macro context. One sentence: what the whole page is about. Anything outside it belongs to another page.
• Contextual vector. The angle as a chain from the representative context to the specific one.
• Heading vector. The headings in order, the definition first, then the context, then the information. For each heading: the one question it answers, the answer format (a paragraph, a definition then a list, a table only where there is data, steps, a comparison), the direct answer that opens the section in about forty words, the entities it must name, and the units the question implies.
• Anchors to place. The planned links with their exact anchor text, target and placement: main text, the closing section, or a list. Never in the first paragraph.
• Images. The featured image and one per list or comparison, with a slug and alt text.
• The closing section. What it covers and which pages of the map it links to.
• Sources to cite. Authorities to name before statements.

See How do I write the pages of a map in batches?.

Grounding

Every element in the brief comes from the research: the gaps from the page reviews, the questions from the results, the links from the site's page inventory. A brief never asks for a fact the research did not find; where one is needed, it says so, and the draft takes it from your business's own facts or from a named public source, or asks you for it beside the draft. See Where do the numbers in a draft come from?.

Handing it over

Download the Markdown, or share the plan link so the writer can read the brief with the evidence beside it. See How do I export a brief?.