Content · build guide
Content Brief
Writer-ready SEO briefs from a target keyword in under 20 minutes instead of three hours.
What it does
Content Brief starts from a target keyword and ends with a complete, writer-ready SEO brief: search intent classification, audience and angle, a structured outline with a word-count target, internal link suggestions pulled from your own site, and a handoff prompt for Claude or Cursor. Every brief lands in the same standardized .md template, so writers stop guessing what a good brief looks like.
Briefing is the bottleneck in most content operations, which is why this compounds. A brief that took a strategist around three hours now takes under 20 minutes, so the same team covers more of the keyword map without lowering the bar. And because every brief follows the same template and logs its sources, the process is inspectable, repeatable, and survives staff turnover.
This version runs on keyword exports, a Google Sheet, and a saved prompt pack in Claude — no APIs, no middleware. It suits teams producing a handful of briefs a week who want the templates and structure proven before wiring anything together. You gather the data; the prompts do the assembly; an editor signs off.
Here the classify → SERP → outline → brief loop runs as an agent workflow. Keyword data, Search Console, and your site inventory connect through read-scoped API or MCP access, and the agent works a queue instead of waiting on a strategist. It suits teams briefing at volume that already have a documented content process and a real editorial gate.
Before you start
Prerequisites.
Path A
Build it with manual data extracts.
This version runs on keyword exports, a Google Sheet, and a saved prompt pack in Claude — no APIs, no middleware. It suits teams producing a handful of briefs a week who want the templates and structure proven before wiring anything together. You gather the data; the prompts do the assembly; an editor signs off.
Set up the brief template and intent rubric
Create a .md brief template with fixed sections: audience, angle, outline, word-count target, internal links, and a handoff prompt block. Write a one-page rubric for classifying keywords as informational, commercial, or navigational. Get your writers to approve the template before anything else — it is the contract the whole workflow fills in.
Export your keyword queue
Export target keywords from your keyword tool into a Google Sheet with volume and difficulty columns. Add a status column (queued, briefed, drafted, published) and an owner column. This sheet is now the single queue every brief comes from.
Capture the SERP by hand
For each queued keyword, run the search and record the top 10 results in a SERP analysis tab: titles, recurring H2 themes, approximate word counts, and whether a featured snippet is present. Ten minutes of structured looking beats an hour of unstructured browsing.
Run the prompt pack in Claude
Paste the keyword, your intent classification, and the SERP notes into a saved Claude prompt that outputs the brief in your exact template. Save the result as a .md file in a shared briefs folder. Keep the prompt wording in a dated doc so you can see which revision produced which brief.
Add internal links from your URL inventory
Check your sitemap sheet or Screaming Frog crawl export and pick two or three genuinely relevant internal links. Paste them into the brief's internal-links section with one line of anchor guidance each.
Editor review and writer handoff
An editor reads every brief before it reaches a writer — checking angle, outline, and links against the rubric. Log the date, keyword, prompt used, and approver in the tracking sheet, then flip the status to briefed and hand off with the Claude/Cursor prompt attached.
Cadence: Batch weekly against the keyword queue; expect roughly 20 minutes per brief once the template and prompt pack are settled.
Path B
Integrate it with MCP connections.
Here the classify → SERP → outline → brief loop runs as an agent workflow. Keyword data, Search Console, and your site inventory connect through read-scoped API or MCP access, and the agent works a queue instead of waiting on a strategist. It suits teams briefing at volume that already have a documented content process and a real editorial gate.
Wire the data sources, read-only
Connect your keyword tool and Google Search Console to the agent using read-only credentials, and point it at a sheet or export of your site's URL inventory. The agent gets no CMS login and no publishing access of any kind — it reads data and writes brief files, nothing else.
Define the queue and the trigger
The brief queue lives in a Google Sheet or your project tracker. A new row with status queued triggers a run — via n8n, Make, or Zapier, or on a scheduled agent check. Anyone on the team can request a brief by adding a keyword; nobody has to know how the machinery works.
Let the agent run the brief loop
For each queued keyword the agent classifies intent, pulls SERP and keyword data, checks Search Console for related queries you already rank for, generates the outline and word-count target, and selects internal links from your URL inventory. It writes the finished brief into your .md template in the shared briefs folder.
Record every run
Each run appends an audit entry: keyword, data sources pulled, prompt used, timestamp, and output file location. If a brief looks off, you can trace exactly what the agent saw and regenerate it against the same inputs.
Hold the approval gate
The agent posts each finished brief as pending — a Slack message or a status flip in the queue. An editor approves it or sends it back with notes; only approved briefs move to writer handoff with the Claude/Cursor prompt attached. The agent never advances a brief past the gate on its own.
Tools & guardrails
Run it safely.
- No CMS access, period: the agent reads keyword, SERP, and Search Console data and writes only brief files — no publishing scope of any kind
- Every brief passes an editor approval gate before writer handoff — nothing enters the content calendar unreviewed
- Per-run audit log records keyword, data sources, prompt used, and output file, so any brief can be traced and regenerated
- Fully reversible: briefs are files in a pending folder — rejecting one discards a document, never published content
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