A customer guide to helping best utilize content outlines to build blogs, landing pages, and web pages around the topics you want to rank
DemandJump assembles the world’s data, around any topic or keyword, and tells you exactly what content to write to improve your search engine rankings.
Your content outlines are powered by a DJ Score which ranges from a very high to a very low ranking depending on the strength of the keyword or question within the network of customer behavior for the starting query. The DJ Score is calculated based on how connected a keyword is within a network of similar searches, how closely it is related to the initial topic, and the estimated volume.
All of that data goes into the DemandJump Content Brief tool, which is a writer’s best friend when it’s time to outline a piece and begin the work of researching and writing content. DJ Content Briefs take the guesswork out of keywords and questions to use. Today, we’re going to focus on how to use the Content Briefs tool to guide your writing process and maximize your ability to align with your reader’s pressing questions and give them exactly what they want.
Creating a Content Brief
To generate a content brief you can use any keyword within a DemandJump dashboard. Look for the three dots next to the keyword or question, click here, and then click “Write about this” to generate a Content Brief. If you’ve built your own strategy, you might have created Content Briefs once you finalized the pieces in your Pillar Strategy, or the strategist on your team may have done so.
Using a Content Brief
Click on Manage Content in the left-hand menu to find a list of every Content Brief that has been generated within your DemandJump account. Here you have the ability to:
- Open a Content Brief
- See what date a given Brief was generated on
- Archive a Brief you no longer need
- If a Brief is still in progress, track its completion
To open the Content Brief, simply click on the name of the topic.
Here we find a simple text editor. Inside it contains a list of recommended keywords to include in an article about this topic organized into several categories. Above the text editor are options to:
- Download the Content Brief
- Share it
- Assign it to other users inside this DemandJump account
- Save any edits you might make within the text editor
Additionally, to the far right of the dashboard there is a summary of keywords to include; think of this as a high-level overview of the different categories of keywords featured in the main list of recommendations.
At the top of the dashboard, there is a slider you can use to adjust the number of keywords presented in the brief to the length of content you plan to write. Effectively, the farther to the right the slider goes, the longer the list of recommendations below will become. The word count indicator is not an indicator of a potential final piece of content, but simply reflects the number of words currently contained within the text editor. This way you can quickly understand how big the list of recommendations becomes as you move the slider over. Naturally, for longer content, you will want more keywords and questions to help as you write.
Writing Your Web and Blog Content
There are many ways to use your outline to begin writing your web and blog content.
First things first: when opening a Content Brief, set the content length slider to an appropriate scope depending on whether you are writing a supporting blog, sub-pillar, or pillar. For a blog, you may be able to find plenty of content within a shorter content brief, while pillar pages may require the slider to be set all the way to the right. Once you have the slider set, begin reviewing the recommendations, looking first at questions that you will want to include as headings in your article.
Using the text editor, you can isolate a short list of highly relevant questions, starting with broad questions about your topic. Now that you have some idea of what you will actually be writing about, you should review the recommended keyword phrases on the list to find keywords that will fit organically into the answers you provide to your questions.
Building Pillar Pages
If you are creating a robust Pillar-Based Marketing (PBM) strategy you can also use your outline to find supporting sub-pillar and blog topics to write about.
Consider using the keyword phrases found on the right-hand column as sub-pillar or blog topics to support your primary pillar page.
Now that you understand how to best leverage the DemandJump-powered keywords and questions in your content, you have the foundation you need to help your web pages and blogs rank higher.
Writing Tips
While your content ranking high is critical to driving traffic to your websites, here are a few additional tips to consider:
- Ensure your content is helpful to your customers by providing education, entertainment, or another helpful benefit that reassures them your brand is the authority on a topic
- Only write about the topics, headlines, questions, and keywords within your outline that are most relevant to your brand, service, or product, so you can truly support those as a thought leader
- Be mindful of your brand voice and tone in your content, so all your touchpoints are consistent and aligned with your overall branding strategy
- Find the right balance of writing for SEO and delighting your audiences
- If you find your content briefs generating branded keywords or phrases that are adjacent to your specific product or service, don’t discount those terms as useless to you. Rather opportunities to bring traffic in and then redirect their attention. For example, if you worked for Microsoft during the rebrand of Office 365 to Microsoft 365, your content brief might be populated with keywords and questions related to Office 365. Using those keywords you can write things like “Microsoft 365, formerly known as Office 365,” to create whatever narrative suits your needs.
Please note that free users have access to one content brief while all other plans have unlimited use.
If you have any additional questions, send us a note using the blue message icon in the bottom right of your screen. We’d love to chat with you!