The SEO content strategy template

What's inside

Eight tabs. Work them in order — section one decides the topic, and nothing downstream works until that is settled.

1. Cluster selection Which topic you should own, what it covers, and what it explicitly does not — plus the existing-coverage check most teams skip.
2. Article plan One row per article, with the angle written as a claim on territory rather than a summary.
3. Brief Five fields, one sentence each, and a weak-versus-strong reference for every one of them.
4. Cadence A weekly rate, a hard completion deadline, and a tracker that reads from the article plan.
5. Link map Every pillar link and cross-link planned, with the anchor phrasing checked for repetition.
6. Review triggers Five triggers and a live log, so review happens when something changes rather than when a calendar says so.
7. Method and sources Where every rule comes from, with the production heuristics labelled as heuristics.

What it checks for you

These are live formulas, not instructions in a margin. They turn amber or red the moment the plan breaks a rule — every one of them cheap to fix before drafting and expensive to fix after publication.

• One primary keyword per article, never reused. Two articles chasing one keyword compete with each other instead of compounding.
• Exactly one pillar. Two pillars is two clusters wearing one name.
• Draft to roughly 60% of published length. Median growth from draft to final runs about 59%, so a draft briefed at full length arrives long and late.
• Anchor text varied across the cluster. The strongest measurable internal linking signal, and the one most teams spend twelve times on the same phrase.
• Triage at weeks six to eight. Pages that break through mostly do it early, so this is a decision point rather than a patience point.