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The report ends with a list of pages and a brief for each. This is how to turn that into pages that exist, in what order, and what to do when you can only manage one a week.
Who does the work
Plainly, and first, because it is the thing to be clear about: the report is the plan and the briefs are the instructions, and the work is a separate choice. You can do it yourself, or hand it to your writer or your agency, or have us do it at €50 an hour: the fixes, and the pages written from the briefs and put on your site. There is no retainer and no ongoing SEO.
The report is the same document whichever you choose, and it is written before anybody quotes you for the work. That is why it can tell you that eleven of your pages are missing.
How to read a brief
Every brief has the same four parts, and they are in the order you should use them.
- Who it is for
- A specific person with a specific problem. Write to them and the page writes itself; ignore this line and you will write to nobody.
- The questions it answers
- Each one has to be answerable from the finished page. This is the test of whether you are done.
- What goes on the page
- The contents, in a sensible order. Not a structure you have to follow, but you will want a reason to depart from it.
- What you have to supply
- The facts only your business has. This is the part that stalls the work, which is why it is the part to start with.
Start with the evidence list, not the first page
Nearly every brief ends by asking for something only you can produce: a tolerance in millimetres, a certificate number, a photograph of your own work, a customer who will let you name them. In the sample it is all 18 of them. A writer sitting down to one of those pages without the thing it asks for will either stop or invent it, and inventing it is worse.
So the first session is not writing. Go through every brief, collect each *what you have to supply* line into one list, and work out which of them you can answer this week and which need somebody else. Most of them are minutes of your time: a figure off a drawing, a photograph you already have, a customer saying yes.
The report gathers this list for you in its *what we need from you* table, precisely so it can be done in one pass rather than four times over.
If you can only write one page a week
Then take them in the order the report gives, which is not the order they are listed in. The order of work is its own section and it is built on a simple rule: the pages that carry the things you sell come first, because until each of those exists there is nothing for anybody to optimise, find or link to.
- One page a week is a real pace and it finishes a twelve-page list in a quarter
- Do not start the second page until the first is published, because a folder of drafts helps nobody
- A short page that answers its questions beats a long page that does not
- If a page is blocked on evidence, skip to the next one rather than stalling the run
Handing a brief to somebody else
A brief is designed to be forwarded. A copywriter needs the brief, the evidence for that page, and nothing else from you: not the whole report, and not a meeting.
What they do not need is your opinion about what should be on the page; that is what the brief is. What they will come back for is the evidence, which is the argument for collecting it first.
The PDF is yours to forward, and the private link can be shared with whoever is doing the work.
When to bring in an agency, or start paying for SEO
Once the pages that carry what you sell are live. That is the whole answer and it is the same one the pre-SEO argument makes: optimising is work done to a page, and until those pages exist there is little for it to work on.
An agency handed the list of pages your business needs has a better first meeting than one asked to find it. A rank tracker pointed at pages that now exist starts earning its subscription.
And when the pages are live, a second report reads the site again and says which of the questions your buyers ask have an answer now.