Content Briefs That Win AI Search and Google: Competitor Insights, AI Overview, and Smart Linking

All right. So we have some great updates to the content brief generator when you're accessing them directly from the Topical Authority Planner. Here we're on the scorecard page where you can see your scores, rankings, your main competitors and everything. Let's click over to the planner page. Now in this topical map, 225 topics under the digital marketing for law firms. On the side here, you can always see the icons for content briefs. If it's green, it means that you've already generated a content brief for it. You can always click it, view it, and see which version it is, the date. You can always generate multiple content briefs for each one. So you can always see the whole content brief right from here, along with the different versions. If you have multiple versions, you'll have a dropdown list. From here, you can also click on the content outline and just look at the quick outline. Here's the full content brief that's ready to hand off to any writer. If you want to download it, you can download it as a text file or as a doc. You can always click here to regenerate. Now here's where we've really made a lot of big changes. From the generate content brief window, you'll see the preselected competitors that you used in the previous content brief. So you can always change these. You can keep them the same, up to you. You can select up to 7 competitors to keep your content briefs more focused. Then you can also see that an AI overview is detected here. So the Google AI overview summary, the content, all the sources will also be sent to the AI agents for use. Now with each of these competitors, the agents will go through the full content of all of these competitors. We'll look at the headers. We'll look at the content itself. We'll look at the topics that they discuss. We'll look at the keywords they use, the entities that they use, the internal links, the external links they use. We look at everything. We don't just look at the headers. Many tools look at just the headers for a content outline. And that's what they call a content brief, but that's not what we're doing here. We're actually going in analyzing and researching all of your competitors so that we come up with a consensus as well as find the gaps in the competitor content and see what information gain opportunities there are. Then here we select our buyer personas, and these were the buyer personas that were used before and say, I want to focus on larger law firms here. So I'll select senior partner. Managing partners. And from here, you can see the keywords and entities. You can add any that you want. We'll let it go for now because our AI agents will actually find a whole lot of keywords, a whole lot of entities from your competitor content and generate ideas themselves based on the gaps from their content. And here from our link suggestions, and this is really cool. So here you can see the internal link suggestions. You have your parent topic. You have your related topics. So in your topical map, in your topical hierarchy, you have your higher level parent topic. You have your same level related topics. You have your lower level subtopics and they're all in that silo. So now you're really driving the topical relevance through all of your topics, top to bottom, bottom to top. So from here, you can select your topics based off of the percentages here, which is a relevant score. So let's just say lead generation. We'll do a couple down here. And from here, you'll be able to select your anchor text. And now look here, you can see there's only one anchor for the selection. And that's because it comes from the topical map. Because we didn't analyze a whole lot of keywords during our clustering phase. There's only one option here, but not to worry. In a second, I'll show you how to generate a whole lot more anchors. Our selected internal links here. And then here with our external links, you can choose whatever you want. Here, you also have an option to include external links that are commonly referenced by competitors. So if all your competitors are linking to a specific piece of research or a specific lawsuit, This is where the agents will comb all the external links from all your competitors and find the common ones. A lot of times they're just one-offs and those are not the ones that we really need to worry about. We're worried about the external links that all your top competitors are using. Here, I've added a couple external links from just past ones. If you want to delete them, you can always delete them. Now let's go back to our internal links here and generating more anchor text. So from here, we can see that digital marketing for law firms only has the matching topic name itself. So what we want to do is we can close this. All our settings will be saved here. Here we find the digital marketing for law firms, and we can always do a quick search for it here if you ever need to. So digital marketing for law firms, click the eye icon here to bring up the sidebar of settings. Under link management here, a new section, we'll be able to see our top relevant parent topics, related topics on the same level, and subtopics. The same thing you see in the content brief generator with the links. So here you can see there's only one anchor text. And it comes from the map. Now here's a button here where you're able to generate more anchor texts that are directly relevant to the same topic that we have. And you'll want to review any that the agents come up with. But for the most part, there's slight variations. They're the same types of keywords you would get if you put it into any Ahrefs or Semrush or keyword tools. You put in a certain keyword, digital marketing for law firms. And what you'll get is you'll get these types of keywords, digital marketing agency for law firms, digital marketing services for law firms, right? Law firm digital marketing. So you'll get a lot of those similar ones that earlier on in topical research, you didn't need to sift through, right? Because during our topical research and building of the topical map phase, you don't want a lot of wasted credits. You don't want to waste a lot of time and energy sifting through basically duplicate keywords, duplicate look at topics. So what we're doing here is we're generating those keywords to use for anchor text. Here you can see the anchor text that was generated. Here are 5. And then we also get the search volume and CPCs for them. If you don't like certain ones, for example, we don't want to talk about digital marketing agencies. You can always delete it. And there's a little confirm button here just in case of any accidental clicks. So you do have to click it twice and you'll see anchor text deleted. Now, if you want to add any, let's say we want digital marketing agency back. You can click, you can add it manually, add it. And you can also do separation. So let's say we want a slight variation. We want the plural here. Digital marketing agencies for law firms. Let's add them too in here. And so you could see that they are user added and you give it a second. It will fetch the search volumes and CPCs. And sometimes it'll show that little blank just because it also means a zero. It also means it couldn't find anything. Now that we have those anchors created, coming back to our Content brief for, I think it was local SEO. So click on regenerate brief and you'll see everything is still here. Now, coming back here is where we'll be able to see all those different anchors. So digital marketing for law firms is what we added anchors to. And now you can see. Here are the 2 user-added anchors. And then here are the other 4 anchors generated by the AI. So you'd be able to select whichever ones you want. Then you could do the same thing with all the others. You can go back to the planner and generate more anchors, add more anchor text options for the content briefs. That way you're not getting the exact same anchor text. If every single anchor text linking to the digital marketing for law firms page is exactly this, digital marketing for law firms, that will hurt your visibility. That'll hurt your rankings. That'll hurt your SEO. So here you have your external links that you can add, and then you just click generate brief. Now, once you get this popup window, you know that the content brief generation has started in the background. You'll get an email when it's complete and you can close it and start creating another content brief. Or if you want to create a whole bunch of briefs at the same time, we have the bulk briefs option here. And it'll bring up your whole topical map hierarchy. Here you can see we only have one pillar, one main topic. From your topical map, you can click the expand all. You can see all the ones that you can create briefs for. You can also see your rankings here. So if you're already ranking for one, you won't obviously need to create anything for this local link building strategies for legal websites. But from here, you can see we don't have any rankings or anything published for local research for legal services. So that's one we may want to write about. Maybe we want to write about case study writing for law firms. And that's another one. And down here, you could see the 2 topics selected. And then we still select your target personas, your top 2, keep it focused target personas. And for keywords and entities, there's no need to add any. The agents will already add in the keywords and entities that are in through all your competitor content, as well as ones they deem directly relevant to the individual content briefs. So you don't have to worry about that. Here, all the internal links are automated as well. It will choose your parent topic because there's only one parent topic for each one. They'll choose the related topics. They'll use the relevance scores to decide which topics to use for internal links. And same with subtopics. And here in external links, you have the option for the agents to include any external links that are commonly referenced by competitors. And here we have add your own external sources. So let's say you are an agency and you also have another tool on the side, or you have another agency that specializes in something else, you can add the, your URL here, a description to let the agents know what you're linking to. And then here in anchor text, you can choose whatever anchors you want to use. And then you just click queue briefs and it'll get started. I'm not going to do that here just because I want to show you what else is going on with what we have. So let's go check out a content brief. Let's check out this one here. Email marketing campaigns for law firms. Now we could see everything that we were doing earlier. Here we could see the details of what our Flowy agents are really doing. Here you're able to find your brand. You get your content title, you get your meta description. Then you get the strategic foundation, the why and the who of what you're creating, right? The why of creating this piece of content. You get your goal, the search intent, the buyer journey stage, who you're targeting, the general target audience, but then you get the more detailed target personas that you selected when creating this piece of content. So then you could see the content approach that is based off the SERPs and the top competitors. Here it recommends creating a comprehensive guide. For this topic on email marketing law firms. For the agents here, analyze the competitors and analyze the SERPs and recommend a comprehensive guide. The competitors use long-form guides and step-based content. So a thorough implementation-focused guide best matches user intent and ranking signals. And this is all the work that you used to have to do. By yourself when creating these content briefs. Then you can see the topical focus. You can see the content structure that they are using to generate this piece of content. These are all the topics that they use. So you can see MailChimp here. That most likely means that all your competitors were mentioning MailChimp whenever they talked about email marketing campaigns. Here's the content structure. It covers the baseline competitor topics of strategies, tools, templates, while adding law-specific compliance practice area benchmarks, step-by-step automation flows, downloadable assets, and measurable case studies that competitors commonly lack. Gives you the point of view, the tone of voice, and a lot of that is also influenced by your brand as well as what type of content the competitors are putting out there. Same with the writing style and readability. Then you can see the recommended word count and your competitor ranges and the competitive analysis, the market research that we all do manually whenever we're creating pieces of content. And a lot of this is stuff that you do yourself or you have your writers do. And sometimes it takes them a while to do the research. We referenced 5 competitors here. So to go through each of those pieces of content and analyze them and look for similarities, look for the core topics, look for the key entities that are mentioned and look at what kind of differentiation strategy you're going to have with your piece of content. One is you want to cover the same topics that is expected of the search engines. Then you also want to add on top of that to make yours uniquely different so that you're adding on. And that's the information game. So here's a unique angle opportunity, implementation-first law firm tailored guide. And then it gives you what competitor gaps there are, lack of downloadable email template packs, No specific compliance checklists, absence of real-world law firm case studies. And then it also gives you the opportunities based off the gaps and based off the competitor analysis. So there's a lot of information here that you don't get with any other tool. Other tools just give you the clear list of what competitors there are, who's ranking at the top, the list of sources or citations now with AI search engines. There's no analysis. Our Flowy agents are always analyzing the why. If you don't know the why, then what are you creating it for? Who are you creating it for? And that's huge. Now you see a lot of tools trying to add on brand voice and buyer personas, but with Flowy, you're doing that from the start. So your brand and your audience are always aligned with what we're creating. Everything downstream is all about your brand, your audience. So you can see the competitors referenced here. You can click on them to go to their pages. Here are all the different keywords and entities that are used. Here are the internal links that were selected. And if you went through the bulk generation of content briefs, you'll be able to see which ones the agents chose. And one more thing, you can see your map topic here, the anchor text you selected or is defaulted to if you don't have any other anchor text options. Then you also have the full URL that includes your domain for the writers to use for the internal link. So you don't need to go searching for a relevant article because it's all there. It's all directly relevant to what you're writing about. And those URLs, anchors, and the topically relevant connections are what no other tool provides. Then we get down into the external links section. You'll be able to see your external links here. So here we can see that CanSpam is something that is referenced by 3 different competitors: Docketwise, LawPay, 8 AM. Here are your user-provided anchor text. Here is where you get to really see the differentiation of what Flowy content briefs give you. You have your heading, then you have the goal of what that section is about. That's usually all the other tools and everyone gives you. That's not a lot to go on for writers or for your VAs or for you yourself. If you're writing it yourself, there is a whole lot more detail that you can get into when generating your content briefs. And so you can see that the Flowe agent is suggesting to open by listing the 4 primary goals for law firm email campaigns: client acquisition, client retention, referrals, and brand authority. And pair them each with 1 to 2 measurable KPIs. This is something where it will keep your writers on target. Specific and not offer any real fluff, right? Because the more directed you are, the better your content is going to be. The more specific your content is, the more engaged your readers are. And when I say readers, I mean search engine algorithms, the ChatGPTs, the Perplexities, the Clods, the Google AI Overviews, the AI Mode. They all love specificity. The more specific you get, the better. The more data you're able to provide, the better. Here you can see call to action and note target metrics. Open rates of 20+% click-through rates of 2 to 5% and baseline of lead to client conversion goal. Now we have our keywords for this section. Then we have our internal links to use in this section. Then you have your word count suggestion. This brief is as ready to go as your own detailed content briefs that would take a day to write or a few hours at the least because of all the research you need to do. So here, let's scroll through more and more. You could see all the different headers and you could see how detailed each one is. You start with the clear metric definitions and the core ROI. Then you see exactly how to calculate it. You see what metrics to use. And these are things that you otherwise would have needed to research, or you can ask your favorite chatbot. But then a lot of times they don't actually know who your audience is. They don't know about the general goal of this piece of content. You'd need to go in and give your whole spiel about your brand, your audience, What your main topic is here. Then you need to give them your whole outline. Then you need to give them, hey, I'm working on this one, how do you measure email ROI section? And then they will hopefully give you something that's useful. And that's a whole lot of work that you would need to do. So here you can see that the email templates and sequences is a big section because that is what's going to really differentiate you. Then you can see the facts that they have. You can see the 5 different questions. And you scroll back to the top. If you just want a quick overview of the outline, there you go. You can see everything that was suggested and how it breaks down. If you want to copy this whole content brief to clipboard, just click the copy button here or down here, and it copies it in markdown format. So you're able to put it into any tool. If you want to download, a couple of download buttons at the top and bottom as well. You can download it as a text file or as a .docx. Again, Markdown format. And if you prefer Google Docs, you can always click the copy button to copy it to clipboard, head over to your Google Doc, right-click on it and paste from Markdown. And then you'll see everything in markdown format. How cool is that? And that's how you create a content brief directly from your topical map. Everything in your topical map is laid out here. It lays out how your topics are organized hierarchically, how Google search engines, Bing search engine, all the different AI LLM models, how they understand topics. And then you could see where you're ranking in Google SERPs. You're able to see whether you're mentioned and cited or not present in the AI overview in Google, if it even has an AI overview. You can see the whole AI overview content. And this is actually what goes into the content brief generator as well. And then you get all the different sources. Right. Hopefully that gets you going on generating content briefs and really speeding up your workflow and your content creation process.