Keyword research tells you what people search for. It does not tell you why they are searching or what they need next. Better briefs start from the situations your audience is in.
The result is the pile of 300-word articles written between 2015 and 2018 that teams are now cleaning up. It is why every accountant in the U.S. has an FAQ answering "what's the fiscal year?" somewhere on their site — chasing the impressions and clicks that answering such a question seemed to promise.
For a specialist service like accounting, answering basic questions like that does your expertise a disservice. You are lining up against the government agency that defines the standard and telling Google to serve your answer instead. That is never going to happen.
Contributor Amanda King poses them directly:
Step back from that and you see the bigger picture keywords were always trying to convey: what journey is our audience on, and how do we answer their concerns along the way?
Conversational search with large language models is a reminder that humans do not natively think in keywords. It is not "best new sweet snacks 2026." It is:
The situation aligns far better with topic-level thinking than with individual keywords — and with how large language models are trained to reason alongside the person using them.
Topics are the first step into category entry points (CEPs). CEPs are qualitative and people-based; they are the jump from the topic back to the situation that created it. Jenni Romaniuk's Better Brand Health frames them as the 7 W's:
Why · When · Where · While · With whom · With/for what · How feeling
Answering those is the exercise to run when building a brief — and honestly, before creating anything new for your website or brand at all.
The people best positioned to help are the ones who interact with your audience most: support, sales, in-store staff, or anyone who has become a public brand representative.
This process is grounded in brand science and marketing principles, so it does not compress into a single metric the way keyword volume does. But keyword volume has always been abstracted away from your actual audience and their concerns.
The 7 W's force you, your team and your leadership to ground choices in real people. "This is the feedback our support team gathered over six months" versus "this has the biggest search volume in the U.S. for our vertical." As a business owner, which would you rather act on?
This gives content a shape focused on the situations your audience is in, and cements — with feedback from real people — where your brand is not answering their concerns.
Test it. Write one traditional keyword-based brief and one built around the 7 W's and scenarios. Compare the quality of what comes back from your writers and, where possible, A/B test them on the site for scroll depth, interaction and impressions.
The 7 W's work because they remove the average customer from the process. Keyword volume flattens demand into one number, and content built from that number fits nobody's situation exactly. It is the same failure described in Your Customer Journey Doesn't Work Because It Was Built for an Average Customer.
The approach also survives whatever search becomes. When results shift from links to answers, content that started from a situation is still the raw material those answers are built from — which lines up with the argument in Build Your SEO Strategy as if Search Engines Didn't Exist. Long term, an audience whose concerns are answered before purchase is worth far more than ranking No. 1 for "what's the fiscal year" for your entire tenure.
A framework from Jenni Romaniuk's Better Brand Health: Why, When, Where, While, With whom, With/for what, and How feeling. They move you from a topic back to the situation that created it.
The people closest to your audience — support, sales and in-store staff, or anyone who acts as a public brand representative. They hold the raw material that keyword tools cannot show.
No. Keyword data still tells you what people search for. Situation-based briefs add the part it never covered: why they are searching and what they need next.
Write one keyword-based brief and one 7 W's brief on the same topic, compare writer output quality, and A/B test the published pieces for scroll depth, interaction and impressions.
To apply what you just read to your own site, start with a free audit of where things are now.
A strategist replies within 24 hours on business days.
AI made words cheap, moving content’s value to ideas, expertise and judgment. Why the AI content backlash misses the point, and where writers and marketers should go.
Views without sales usually means you're making only one kind of content. A four-stage content funnel framework — with a skincare brand example, a pass/fail test for each stage, and a fill-in-the-blank planning sheet.
Organic clicks are down 42% since AI Overviews expanded. Traffic data from 30 major publishers shows top-of-funnel content collapsing in YMYL while growing in B2B tech — and points to three TOFU strategies that still work.