How To Use AI For Content Brief Creation: Prompts, Best Practices & Software

When you’re running a writing operation that goes above a few articles a week, you’re most likely spending hours creating content briefs for your writers.

I was in that spot not a long time ago – I was running the content operation at Team-GPT and I spent 1-2 hours a week building out SEO-friendly content briefs for our writers.

But then I decided to automate that process with AI while not sacrificing quality – and I’ll show you how you can do it too.

In this guide, I’ll first go over what makes a good content brief for SEO, the best practices for creating effective SEO briefs, and then a step-by-step guide on how to create briefs with AI.

What Makes A Good Content Brief For SEO?

A good content brief for SEO has:

• SEO-friendly heading structure – H2s, H3s, and H4s.
• Semantic keywords for NLP optimization.
• Estimated word count for your writers to aim for.
• Explanation of how to approach each section of the article.
• (Bonus) Insight into how to position your product or service in the context of the article.

Artificial intelligence may not be able to automate all of these steps for you, but it can save you time from 90% of this process.

➡️ This will allow you to focus on the strategic aspect of creating content briefs – the angle of the article for your brand.

How To Create Content Briefs For SEO With AI: Step-By-Step

In this section, I’ll walk you through my process of building out content briefs for our content creation team. 👇

Step #1: Keyword Research

The first step to creating a content brief is getting your keyword research process in place.

This includes the identification of:

• The target keyword – for example ‘’how to do keyword research’’.
• Secondary keywords – for example ‘’common mistakes when doing keyword research’’.
• LSI keywords – for example ‘’SEO software’’.

You can use AI for keyword research to save time and money from expensive SEO tools.

Here’s my prompt: 

I want you to generate 10 secondary keywords and 10 LSI keywords for NLP optimization on the topic of ”how to do keyword research”

I’ll need the secondary keywords when generating the heading structure, and the LSI keywords when trying to optimize for natural language processing (NLP).

Step #2: Generate The Article Outline

The 2nd step in the process is to prompt an AI platform like Team-GPT to generate the article outline with the proper heading structure.

Team-GPT allows you to use your preferred AI model, such as ChatGPT and Claude, and collaborate with your team.

➡️ That will help you invite your writers to view the optimized content briefs when we are finished with them.

Here’s my prompt: 

I want you to take these keywords and build an SEO-optimized heading structure (H2, H3, and H4) and an outline for the topic ”how to do keyword research”. You can use the secondary keywords as part of the headers.

One of the headers should be how our users can do keyword research with Team-GPT, our AI platform that lets you use advanced AI models like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

You can take this a step further and prompt the tool to do competitor research when researching for the content brief.

This will help you cross-reference your heading structure and article outline with what is already ranking well on Google.

Now we’ve got the skeleton of our article but that’s not quite ready yet to hand to our writers.

Step #3: Enrich The Content Brief

The goal is to make it writer-friendly, even if your writers are not experts on the subject.

Here’s my prompt to enrich that heading structure:

I want you to enrich the content brief with a recommended word length and then give explanations on how to approach all of the headers to my writers as if they are new to the topic. That should include the key talking points of each header. I need you to include the target word length for all headers and sub-headers.

Additionally, I want you to include NLP keywords under each header, as well as an example of an NLP-optimized sentence. I also want you to include relevant resources and reading materials for my writers on all complex topics.

The content brief now has:

• Target word length for the article and each section.
• An SEO-optimized heading structure.
• Key talking points under each header, alongside learning resources.
• NLP keywords alongside example NLP-optimized sentences.

Now all that is left for me is to go under the section of ‘’How to Use Team-GPT for Keyword Research’’ and manually insert instructions for my writers.

This has allowed me to scale our team’s article production without having to do all of the keyword research, heading creation, and ‘’key talking points’’ explanations for hours.

(Bonus) Step #4: Feed Your Writing Style To The Algorithm

There are different SEO methodologies stemming from different schools of thought on what are the best SEO writing practices.

If you want to scale your SEO content brief production, you can feed all of that information to your AI platform provider to save time having to explain your SEO writing style to your writers.

For example, at Team-GPT we do not include internal or external links early on in the article.

💡 I’ve found that if I feed all of these ‘’rules’’ into my AI tool, it will duplicate them across all the content briefs for all writers.

For that, I use Team-GPT’s custom instructions to include our content brief writing style rules so they can be duplicated.

Here’s an example output of the beginning of a content brief with our custom rules:

Best Practices For Creating Effective SEO Content Briefs With AI

Now that I’ve spent quite some time generating SEO-optimized content briefs with artificial intelligence, there are a few best practices to keep in mind:

#1: Prompt The AI Tool Multiple Times

When it comes to generating content briefs for writers, the best output does not come from a single prompt.

It’s better to take the process slowly and build a multi-step process of prompting the tools for better output in the end.

I like to first use AI for keyword research purposes to allow myself to figure out what secondary keywords I want to go after, and then prompt the tool to build me an outline with headers.

Finally, when I have decided on the final heading structure, I prompt the AI platform to provide me with the key talking points, target word length, and learning resources for my writers.

Here’s the output if I prompt the tool to do all of the above tasks all at once:

Even though there was a content brief being created, I did not like the level of depth and detail that a content brief should have.

#2: Use Custom Instructions

Custom instructions allow you to spend less time prompting the tool with all of your company’s information regarding writing style and branding.

That enables you to focus on the strategic aspect of the content briefs, instead of having to prompt it all every time.

Here’s how you can do it inside Team-GPT:

• Click on ‘’Custom instructions’’, which sits under ‘’Send’’ when prompting.
• Click on ‘’Create instruction’’. Here you can also browse from your existing ones.
• Choose the type of instruction you want and start writing your pre-made prompt. We need ‘’WritingStyle’’ in this case.

#3: Explain The Key Talking Points Under Each Header

Another core aspect of the content briefs for writers is being able to explain to them what the key talking points should be.

This is why in our content brief creation process we prompt the AI platforms to point out the key talking points under each header.

This is especially important when you are allocating writing tasks to writers who are not experts in the topic and need additional context for each header.

#4: Add Semantic & NLP Keywords

A big part of optimizing an article for SEO is the semantic and NLP keywords that we are using to signal to the search engines what our content is about.

When I was manually creating these content briefs, I’d sift through keyword research tools to dig out secondary keywords to include in my content briefs.

With AI technology, the tools can analyze the SERPs to find what semantic and NLP keywords you need to use to rank for a specific topic.

There are AI tools for SEO like Surfer SEO that let you get that competitor-driven data.

You can then prompt your AI tool to include the secondary and NLP keywords in your content briefs so your writers can know to include them.

I also like prompting the tool to add an NLP-optimized example of a sentence that has included one of the secondary keywords.

#5: Always Have A Final Look

Last but not least, before sending out your content briefs to your writers, it always deserves a final look.

Similar to how you wouldn’t want to blindly trust AI-generated content (no matter how good and on-brand it may be), it’s worth it to have a final look before the send-off.

This is why I have a final read-through of any content briefs generated with the help of AI to make sure that the heading structure makes sense for that topic.

I also make sure that our content briefs have the right positioning of our product.

Best AI Tools To Generate Content Briefs For SEO

Here are the best AI tools that you can use to generate SEO-optimized content briefs based on our experience:

#1: Team-GPT: Customize a Better Version of ChatGPT

Team-GPT lets you use AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude alongside your team and customize it to your needs.

You can use your version of ChatGPT for content brief-related tasks, such as:

• Generating keyword ideas.
• Creating the SEO-optimized article outline with the heading structure.
• Editing and finalizing content brief drafts with Pages and Editing with AI.
• Enriching the article outline with learning resources and key talking points.

You can also speed up your content brief-creating process with our pre-made prompts, use cases, and editable AI Pages.

Here’s why content marketing teams love our platform:

• A shared workspace where your team can collaborate in chats and documents in real-time from a single platform.
• Smart AI-powered editing for improved writing, fixed grammar, and refined text of your content briefs.
• Organized and shared content to ensure quick access to content briefs for all your writers.
• Managing your content by turning any chat into a document or starting a new conversation from a Page.

It is possible to create custom instructions for ChatGPT and other writing tools so that the AI models know how to structure the content brief and what SEO best practices to follow.

You can add instructions for SEO guidelines to scale your content brief production without heavily editing it.

#2: Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO lets you create SEO-optimized content briefs with a suggested heading structure and LSI keywords.

The platform uses competitor data to make recommendations on how you should approach your content to rank for your target keywords.

You can use Surfer SEO to not only generate content briefs but also article content that has a SERP-based tone of voice.

➡️ One of the best aspects of Surfer SEO is that you can generate links for your writers where they can input the finalized article and then get a score from 0-100 on how optimized it is.

#3: Perplexity

Perplexity, similar to Claude and ChatGPT, lets you generate content briefs from prompts.

I’ve found the tool to be particularly useful when you want it to scrap the internet and research your competitors.

The AI platform can also be used for keyword research purposes, which means that you can build competitor-driven content briefs all from the platform.

One of the downsides of Perplexity is that the platform is not very good at following instructions, and when I prompted the platform to provide my writers with the key talking points, it did not go in the right direction.

Generate On-Brand Content Briefs With Team-GPT Alongside Your Team

You can generate on-brand content briefs alongside your team and writers by building a customized version of ChatGPT on Team-GPT.

Our enterprise AI software lets your team generate keyword ideas, article outlines, and entire content briefs by utilizing various AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity.

Apart from that, you can access:

• A comprehensive pre-made prompt library to create efficient workflows.
• Detailed usage analytics to track employee engagement.
• Enterprise-grade security ensures data privacy and the ability to host the platform on your servers.

Sign up for a demo of the platform today!