I’ve been on the receiving end of SEO briefs for fifteen years. The best ones take twenty minutes to write and save months of faffing around. The worst ones take thirty seconds to write, “we want to rank higher on Google”, and guarantee you a mediocre strategy from whoever you hire.

It’s not your job to know SEO. It is your job, if you’re spending $1,000-$3,000 a month on it, to give the specialist enough context to do their job properly. Here’s the brief template I’d love to see more often.

Section 1: Commercials, not keywords

Skip the keywords for a minute. Tell me:

• What does a customer actually pay you? Average order value, lifetime value, cost of goods sold if you know it.
• What’s your gross margin on that order? This changes the entire strategy. A $5,000 lead with 70% margin is not the same as a $50 eCommerce sale with 20% margin.
• How many customers do you want a month? How many do you get now?
• What’s your current monthly marketing spend and where does it go?

If I know the numbers, I can work backwards into a keyword strategy that makes commercial sense. If I don’t, I’ll end up chasing traffic that doesn’t convert.

Section 2: What you sell, in your own words

Not your “offering”. Not your “solutions”. Tell me in plain language what a customer is actually buying from you. If you sell plumbing services, say “we fix hot water systems and do bathroom renos in inner-east Australia wide.” If you sell software, say “it’s a booking tool for dog walkers.”

The more specific you are, the better I can pitch you into the right searches. Vague service descriptions produce vague SEO strategies.

Section 3: Who you sell to

Describe your best customer in two sentences. Where do they live, how old are they, what’s their budget, what problem do they have when they find you. If you have two or three different customer types, say so and roughly split the mix, “70% of revenue is residential home-owners, 30% is small commercial.”

This affects whether we focus on local SEO, national SEO, bottom-of-funnel pages, or content that educates before converting.

Section 4: What you’ve already tried

Honestly, this is the section I value most. Tell me:

• Previous SEO agencies and what happened
• Which pages were created or optimised
• Any links you’ve built or bought
• Tools you already have access to (GA4, Search Console, any SEO tool)
• Any manual actions or penalties you’ve received

I’m not going to judge you. But if I find out six weeks in that a previous agency bought 2,000 shady links to your site, that’s a very different situation than a clean slate.

Section 5: What “success” looks like

Don’t just say “rank #1 for X”. Say what happens in your business if this works. “We’d know this is working if we were getting 20 qualified enquiries a month from organic, instead of 4.” Or “if we doubled organic revenue on these three product lines.”

A clear outcome turns a tactical conversation into a strategic one. It also makes it easy to tell, in six months, whether you’re getting value.

Section 6: Constraints

List anything an SEO should know but probably won’t ask:

• Compliance (financial services, legal, medical, we can’t say certain things)
• Brand guidelines
• Who owns the website and can approve changes
• Turnaround times for content approvals
• Any topics you absolutely don’t want covered

Section 7: Budget and timeline

Be honest. If you’ve got $1,500/month to spend and a 12-month view, say so. If you’ve got $10,000/month and need to see results by end-of-quarter, say that too. A good SEO will tell you if your expectations match your budget, and if not, what the trade-off looks like.

The worst outcome is both sides pretending. You over-promise on budget, I over-promise on timeline, and six months later we’re both disappointed.

The one-page version

If you hate writing briefs, here’s the minimum viable version. Copy this into an email:

If you send that, I (or any half-decent SEO) can give you a thoughtful proposal in two days. If you send “we want to rank higher”, you’ll get a template proposal in two hours. Your choice.

, Zakria