# How articles are written

> What Seovyn reads before it writes, how it decides the format and length, how long articles are built section by section, and what comes with every article: links, cover image, structured data and search snippet.

Seovyn never writes from a bare prompt. Every article starts with research, is written to a brief made from that research, and arrives with the pieces a page needs to rank: links, a cover image, structured data and a search snippet.

## What it reads first

| Input | What Seovyn takes from it |
|---|---|
| **The pages that rank** | The top Google results for the article's keyword, read in full: their length, their outline, and whether they answer follow-up questions |
| **Reddit discussions** | The questions and complaints real people post about the topic, in their own words |
| **Vendors' own pages** | For comparisons, each product's own pricing and product pages. A figure is kept only if it's printed on the vendor's page |
| **The source** | For an idea from a source: the competitor's page, the subreddit thread, or the YouTube video's transcript |
| **Your site knowledge** | The facts on your own pages and your team's notes that fit this topic. See [Site knowledge](/docs/site-knowledge) |
| **Your brand voice** | Audience, tone, point of view, call to action, banned phrases. See [Brand voice](/docs/brand-voice) |
| **Your other articles** | What you've already published on nearby topics, so the new article doesn't repeat them, and links to them where they help |

## The brief

From the research, Seovyn writes a brief, which you can read in the draft's **Research** card:

- **Built to rank for:** the keyword, with its monthly searches where they've been measured.
- **Intent:** what the person searching wants, and the **promise** the article makes them.
- **Format:** a how-to guide, a list, an in-depth guide, a comparison or a landing page, following what already wins that search.
- **Length:** taken from the pages that rank, so an article is as long as the search needs, not as long as possible.
- **FAQ:** included when searchers ask follow-up questions, left out when the winning pages don't use one.

## Writing

Short articles are written in one pass. Long articles on a keyword target are built **section by section**: Seovyn first assembles a fact sheet (looking up each product an article compares on its own pages), then writes each section from it, then writes the introduction, the summary table, the verdict and the FAQ around them. Each section gets the research it needs instead of one prompt carrying everything, which is what keeps long articles specific all the way down.

Articles open with a direct answer before the first section, so a reader (and an AI answer engine) gets what they came for straight away.

## What every article comes with

**Sources.** The pages the article drew on are listed with it. Every outbound link is requested before you see the draft, and links that are provably dead are removed.

**Links to your own site.** Seovyn keeps a map of your site's real pages, refreshed weekly, and links to the ones that fit. Any internal link the writer invents that isn't on the map is removed, so a link can never 404 on your own site. Later, when the article is live, older related articles get a link to it as well.

**A title, meta description and slug.** The meta title is aimed at 40 to 60 characters and the description at 120 to 155, so neither gets cut off in Google. You can edit both in the draft's **Search preview**.

**Tags.** Three to six.

**A cover image.** A 1200 × 630 typographic cover with the article's title, ready for social sharing and as the page's hero image. Titles in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai or Arabic scripts don't get one yet.

**Structured data.** A ready-made schema.org graph (the article, its breadcrumb and your organization). Seovyn-hosted sites and GitHub sites with Seovyn's Next.js routes include it in the page; the webhook sends it for your site to embed. See [Webhook reference](/docs/webhook-reference).

**A byline and dates.** Your author byline from brand voice, the publish date, and an updated date when the article is refreshed.

## Languages and markets

Articles are written in the language set in [brand voice](/docs/brand-voice), and keywords are researched in its search market: search volumes, the Google results that are read and the competitors that are studied all come from that country.

## How long it takes

A draft takes from about a minute to a few minutes, depending on its length: a long comparison that reads several vendors' pages takes longest. Every draft is checked and scored before it reaches your queue. See [Quality score](/docs/quality-score).