Website brief template with an SEO section (PDF)

A website brief is a few pages of answers a company prepares before it asks an agency or a freelancer for a price. It explains what the business does, what the new site is for, who will use it and what it has to include. It is not a technical specification. It is the starting point for the first conversation and for the proposal.

Without a brief, every vendor guesses. One agency prices five pages with no copywriting, another prices twenty pages with copy and a photo shoot. Both proposals say “company website,” yet you can’t compare them. A brief levels the playing field: every vendor works from the same facts, so price differences reflect their approach, not their assumptions.

A good brief also cuts the cost of surprises. The expensive items are the ones discovered halfway through: an integration nobody mentioned, a second language “for later,” copy that doesn’t exist yet, or an old site with Google traffic whose URLs disappear at launch. Each of them can be priced up front if it is in the brief, so the schedule and budget cover the full scope from day one.

Brief, questionnaire or specification?

Some agencies send a website design questionnaire instead of asking for a brief. The content is much the same: your goals, audience, pages and constraints in plain business language. The functional specification and timeline come later, written by the vendor after you discuss the brief, and the agreed scope goes into the contract. If you are collecting several quotes, send everyone the same brief and ask for proposals in the same format.

Our website brief template has 12 sections. Each one answers a question the vendor would ask anyway before quoting. Here is what goes into each section and why it changes the proposal.

You don’t need every answer. “Not sure” is useful information too: the vendor can propose a solution and price it, instead of assuming the topic doesn’t exist.

The SEO section tells the vendor how the site should earn traffic from Google and from AI search. Without it, a new site can look better than the old one and still bring fewer leads, because the pages customers used to land on are gone.

Keywords and pages

List your services and products the way customers describe them, not the way your industry does. Good sources are the questions customers ask your sales team and the suggestions Google shows as you type a service name. Add the cities or neighborhoods you serve. Map each main keyword to one page: two pages targeting the same keyword compete with each other. Every important service deserves its own page, because a single “Services” page with a long list usually loses in Google to sites that give each service a dedicated URL.

Current traffic and data

If you already have a site, attach an export from Google Search Console (top pages and queries for the last 12 months) and a list of the pages that generate leads, tracked as key events in Google Analytics 4. Those are the URLs you can’t afford to lose. Your company should own these accounts, the domain and the Business Profile, with the vendor added as a user. If you are not sure who has access, say so in the brief. Recovering access takes time, so start early.

Redirects from the old site

When page URLs change, every old URL should point to its closest equivalent on the new site. Google recommends permanent server-side redirects (301 or 308) straight to the new URL, without chains, kept for as long as possible, generally at least a year. It also warns that sending many old URLs to one unrelated page, like the new homepage, can be treated as a soft 404, and it says to expect temporary ranking fluctuations during the move. Note in the brief who will prepare the redirect map. Our website migration checklist lists the steps before, on and after launch day. You can check the current site with our free SEO audit (up to 25 pages), and for a larger site start with a full SEO audit before the rebuild.

Local SEO

If you serve customers in a specific city, add your address, service area and a link to your Google Business Profile. Your business name, address and phone number should appear on the site exactly as they do in the profile. A business with several branches usually needs a separate page for each one, with its own content: the team, local projects, directions. Don’t order city pages “just in case.” Google’s spam policies list pages targeted at specific cities that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse.

Visibility in AI answers

Some customers ask ChatGPT about services or read an AI Overview in Google instead of the list of results. Google says there are no additional requirements, special files or markup needed to appear in AI Overviews: a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown in Search with a snippet. What matters is solid SEO and content that answers the customer questions from section 3 directly. State in the brief whether you want to track if AI assistants mention your company, and which questions the site should answer.

SEO requirements at handover

Add acceptance criteria the vendor will check at handover and on launch day. They turn “SEO-friendly website” from a sales line into something you can verify:

• page content and links are in the HTML that Google sees (you can check this with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console);
• the mobile version has the same content as the desktop version, because Google indexes the mobile version of a site;
• Core Web Vitals meet the web.dev thresholds: LCP up to 2.5 s, INP up to 200 ms, CLS up to 0.1. At handover you can check LCP and CLS in a PageSpeed Insights lab test. Results from real users, including INP, appear in the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console once the site has enough visits;
• every page has its own title, meta description and a single H1;
• the staging site is password-protected, and noindex tags and robots.txt blocks are removed from the new site on launch day;
• a sitemap with the new URLs is submitted in Search Console, and GA4 key events work from day one.

If your site is already live and you only need a brief for an SEO agency, use sections 1–4, 8 and 11 of this template and skip the design and feature questions.

1. Pick an owner and gather inputs. One person owns the brief and collects the questions customers ask from your sales and support teams. Check who has access to the domain, hosting, Search Console and Analytics.
2. Describe the business, goals and customers. Complete sections 1–3: what you do, what should change after launch and how you will measure it, who your customers are and what they look for before contacting you.
3. List competitors and inspiration. Add a few competitor sites and a few sites you like. For each one, write a single sentence on what exactly you like or want to avoid.
4. Map the pages. In the section 5 table, list every page with its purpose and one main keyword that no other page targets. Mark which content you already have and which needs to be written.
5. Complete the SEO and technical sections. Attach the Search Console export, the list of URLs to redirect, your Google Business Profile details and information about the domain, hosting and content management system.
6. Add budget, deadline and decision makers. Give a budget range, the launch date and why it matters, and who approves the work. Send the same brief to every vendor you want a quote from.

If you don’t know an answer yet, write “to be decided” and move on. A brief with a few gaps sent today beats a perfect one sent next month. You can fill in the blanks at the first meeting.

The most common problem with a brief is answers too vague to price. The table shows the difference using a fictional custom kitchen workshop in Warsaw.

A useful answer says what should happen, for whom, and how you will check it. From a brief like this, a vendor sees the scope at once: six page types, a form with file upload, a migration that preserves traffic, and local SEO.

• A goal that is just an adjective. “Modern,” “professional” and “clean” are promised in every proposal. A goal is a change you can measure: more inquiries, bookings or applications.
• No sitemap. Without a page list, each vendor quotes a different scope, and the gap shows up later as an invoice for “additional pages.”
• “We’ll send the copy later.” Missing content can stall a project whose design and code are finished. Agree who writes it and by when.
• No SEO section. The site launches without redirects, old URLs return 404 errors, and traffic the company built over years drops.
• A hidden budget. Without a range, the vendor can’t tell whether to propose a basic or an extended version, so they guess what you can afford.
• Integrations discovered mid-project. CRM, payments, booking or an export to your accounting system are extra work that changes both the timeline and the price.
• Inspiration without comments. A bare link says little. The designer can’t tell whether you mean the colors, the layout, the photos or the way the offer is written.
• No single decision maker. A project approved by several people with no one in charge stalls at every stage.
• Logins “with the previous agency.” A domain, hosting or Google accounts registered to a former vendor are a common launch blocker. Check them before you send the brief.
• Launching in peak season. Google advises moving a site when traffic is lower, so any problems affect fewer people. Rankings can also fluctuate for a while after launch. If the site gets traffic from Google, plan the launch outside the period when you sell the most.

A website’s price depends mostly on the number and types of pages, the content to be produced, integrations and the migration from the old site. A brief answers each of these questions, so the vendor doesn’t need to pad the quote for unknowns. Our article on how much a business website costs explains what goes into the price.

At AI SEO COMPANY, a Next.js company website starts at €1,400 net. The price depends on the number of pages, integrations (such as CRM or payments) and the content to prepare, and you get a quote within 24 hours on business days. Fill in the website brief template from this page and attach it to an inquiry on our web design page.

If the look is hard to describe in words, start with a free AI website redesign mockup: enter your current site’s address and get a homepage concept built from your own content. It makes a good attachment to the “Design and brand” section.