Content brief automation

What this does

You give it one thing: a keyword you want to rank for. The workflow figures out everything else. What type of article should it be – a comparison, an alternatives list, a how-to, a deep-dive? What stage of the funnel are you writing for? What's the working title? What's the outline? What other keywords should make the cut? Which existing article in the top 10 should you reference to understand what the reader actually wants?

In 5 minutes you have a brief that a writer can actually use. Not a "draft this" prompt. A real brief.

The problem this solves

The hardest part of publishing SEO content isn't writing it. It's deciding what to write. The keyword sits in your spreadsheet. You stare at it. Should this be a listicle or a guide? Top-of-funnel or middle? Should you target the exact phrase or a variant? What outline structure does Google reward for this query? Which existing top-ranking post should you study?

Most teams handle this by handing the keyword to a writer with "please write 2000 words." The writer makes all those decisions on their own, badly, because they're not an SEO. Result: a post that reads fine but doesn't match search intent. It doesn't rank.

The other approach is to hire a content strategist to make those decisions before handing the brief to the writer. That works. It also costs $200-400 per brief, takes 60-90 minutes of strategist time, and bottlenecks at 10-15 briefs a month.

This workflow does the strategist's pre-writing work in 5 minutes. The writer still writes. But they're writing from a brief that already nailed the type, the title, the outline, the funnel stage, and the supporting keywords. The chance of the post ranking goes way up.

What you put in

A single row in a Google Sheet:

• Primary keyword (e.g. "best AI writing tools for startups")
• Product or service the blog is for (e.g. "n8n", "Awesomic", "your company name") – gives the workflow context about whose blog this is FOR, so the brief gets the right angle

That's it. Set the row's status to "Planned" and the workflow takes over.

What you get out

A finished brief written back into your sheet:

• Article type (comparison, alternatives, how-to, deep-dive, etc.) – picked from a fixed set so your team's content mix stays balanced
• Working title – keyword-natural, not robotic
• Funnel stage (TOFU / MOFU / BOFU) so distribution knows where to push the piece after it ships
• Goal of the piece – what should the reader do after reading?
• Outline – section-by-section structure with subheads
• Up to 10 supporting keywords picked from your candidate list (if you have one) or generated from scratch
• The best top-10 SERP article for the target keyword, with notes on what the article does well

A writer can sit down with this and produce a draft. Or you can chain this into the article-generator workflow (see "SEO content automation") and skip the writer entirely for content where that's the right move.

How long per brief

End-to-end: about 5 minutes per brief. Maybe a minute longer if the SERP scraping step has to fetch a slow page.

If you brief 10 articles a month, that's an hour of workflow time. Compared to 10-15 hours of strategist time. The math gets more aggressive as your volume goes up.

When this is a good fit

• You publish SEO content regularly and you have a backlog of keywords you want to target
• You already do keyword research (or use the Keyword research automation workflow to generate the candidates)
• You have a styling guide, or you're willing to write one – the workflow uses it to keep the brief on-voice
• You want your writers to spend time on writing, not on figuring out what to write

When this isn't a good fit

• You write 1 article a month. Spend the hour. Brief by hand.
• You don't have a clear funnel structure for your blog. The workflow needs to know what TOFU / MOFU / BOFU mean for your business. If you don't, the funnel-stage call comes back generic.
• You want a final article from one prompt. That's a different workflow ("SEO content automation"). This one stops at the brief.

What's actually under the hood

The workflow runs on n8n. Here's the rough shape:

1. Read the keyword row from your Google Sheet
2. GPT decides the article type (a single call with a constrained list of options)
3. GPT generates a working title aligned to the type
4. GPT decides the funnel stage
5. GPT writes the goal statement based on type + funnel stage
6. The workflow scrapes the top 10 SERP results for the keyword (via a search API)
7. GPT picks the best post from the SERP as the reference article
8. GPT generates the outline using the title + goal + funnel stage + SERP reference
9. GPT picks up to 10 keywords from your candidate list (or generates them)
10. The full brief gets written back to the sheet, status flipped to "Briefed"

The chain matters – each GPT call uses the output of previous ones, so the brief is internally consistent. The article type drives the outline structure. The funnel stage drives the goal. The goal drives the keyword selection. You can't get this from one mega-prompt – the model loses the thread. You need the chain.

The prompts took 20+ rounds of editing against real blogs to get the briefs to a "writers want to use this" quality. Generic prompts produce generic briefs. The output quality is entirely in the prompt chain.

What you own at handover

• The n8n workflow file
• All 7 GPT prompts in plain text, documented so you can adjust them
• The Google Sheet template with the right column structure
• The list of article types your blog uses (pre-configured for your funnel)
• A Loom walkthrough showing how to brief a keyword from scratch and how to interpret each field of the output
• The runbook for adjusting prompts when your funnel structure or product positioning changes

Why I can help

Briefing well is a craft. The reason most "AI content briefs" produce useless output is the same reason most AI articles are obviously AI: one fat prompt trying to do everything at once. The model loses focus, the brief gets shallow, the writer can't use it.

The fix is the prompt chain. Each GPT call has exactly one job. Each job's output becomes the next job's context. That's not something you Google – it's something you tune over real briefs, watching what the writers actually accept and what they push back on. I've tuned this chain across content teams in 5 different B2B SaaS verticals. The prompts that ship to you are the ones that survived that.

What it costs to run

Per brief: about $0.05-$0.10 in OpenAI tokens. SERP scraping API depends on which provider – budget $0.01-$0.05 per brief. Total: under $0.15 per brief.

Build cost: 1-2 weeks of my time to wire the workflow, tune the prompts to your editorial voice + funnel structure, set up the sheet, and train your editor.

How to start

Book a call. Bring 3-5 keywords you've been wanting to publish on but haven't. We'll run the workflow on them in real time during the call, and you can decide on the spot whether the output is what you'd hand to a writer.