How to Build a Content Brief in Surfer SEO

Surfer hands me a content score and a list of terms within about ninety seconds of typing a keyword. That's the demo. It's also why so many Surfer-optimized articles read like someone filled in a form. In a lot of cases, someone did.

This tutorial covers the workflow I use to produce a brief a writer can work from: what I keep from Surfer's output, what I throw away, and where my own judgment has to override the tool.

Before you open Surfer

I decide two things first, in a document, on my own:

1. The search intent. Is the person searching this trying to learn something, choose something, or do something? A comparison article aimed at an informational query underperforms no matter how good its content score is.

2. My angle. This article needs to say something the ten pages currently ranking cannot say already: my own data, my own test, a real contrary opinion, or a specific audience the others ignore. Without an answer here, I don't write the article. It would only become a slightly better version of what already exists, and that's not a reason for anyone to link to it.

Step 1: Run the Content Editor on your primary keyword

I create a new Content Editor entry with my primary keyword and the country I'm targeting. I add secondary keywords only if they share intent. Piling in loosely related terms produces a muddled term list and a brief that tries to be three articles.

Step 2: Prune the competitor set by hand

This step separates a useful brief from a generic one, and I see it skipped constantly.

Surfer analyzes the pages currently ranking for my keyword. Some of them don't belong in my comparison set. I open the competitor list and deselect:

• Marketplace, category and product pages, if I'm writing an article
• Pages from sites with authority I can't realistically match
• Anything ranking for a different intent that happens to share the keyword
• Outliers: a 6,000-word page in a set of 1,200-word ones drags the word-count target somewhere unhelpful

I aim for five to eight closely comparable pages. Every recommendation downstream (length, headings, term frequency) recalculates from this set, so five minutes here changes the entire brief.

Step 3: Read the outline suggestions as questions, not headings

Surfer shows me the headings used by the pages in my set. I don't copy them. I read them for what they reveal: the questions this audience expects an answer to.

I write them out as questions in the brief:

• What does it cost, including the tier most people end up on?
• How long does setup take?
• What is the alternative if I do not want to pay?

Then I structure the article around answering those questions in order, with my angle running through it. That naturally covers the same ground as the ranking pages without producing the same article.

Step 4: Turn the term list into coverage, not a checklist

The term list is where content scores go wrong.

Surfer gives me terms with suggested frequency ranges. I read that as: these are the concepts the ranking pages discuss. If a term appears in that list and my draft never mentions the concept at all, I've found a genuine gap worth filling.

The harmful reading is: I must use "best ai writing software" between four and seven times. That produces sentences no human would write, and helpful-content systems catch it.

Practical rule for the brief:

Step 5: Treat the word count as a floor with a reason

Surfer's word-count target is the average of my competitor set, which means it describes the current consensus rather than a requirement.

I use it as a sanity check. If Surfer suggests 1,800 words and my outline naturally comes to 900, either the topic needs more depth than I planned or my competitor set still contains an outlier. If my outline comes to 3,000, I ask whether I'm writing two articles.

I never pad to hit a number. Padding is the most reliably detectable form of low-quality content there is.

Step 6: Write the brief document

The deliverable is a short document a writer can work from without opening Surfer at all, not the Surfer page itself:

1. Target keyword and intent. One line each.
2. The angle. Two or three sentences, non-negotiable.
3. Audience. Who this is for and what they already know.
4. Questions to answer, in order. From step 3.
5. Topics to cover. The grouped themes from step 4, in plain English.
6. Internal links. Which of my existing pages must be linked, and why.
7. What this article must NOT do. The fastest way to prevent a generic draft.

That last section does more work than any other. A line like "Do not open with a definition of AI writing tools" saves an editing round nearly every time.

Once I've written the brief, the next stage is handing it to whoever (or whatever) drafts the piece. See How to Write a Blog Post With ChatGPT for turning a brief like this into a first draft without it reading like a form.

Step 7: Optimise last, briefly

Once I've written and edited the draft on its own merits, I paste it into the Content Editor and look at what the draft still lacks. I add the concepts I skipped and ignore the score.

A draft that lands somewhere in the sixties with a real angle and first-hand detail outperforms an eighty-something that reads like a form. The score measures similarity to what already ranks. Similarity to what already ranks isn't a competitive advantage.

Is it worth the money for a solo blogger?

It depends almost entirely on publishing volume: the brief-building time it saves only pays back once I'm producing enough briefs to justify it. Below a handful of articles a month, the subscription cost outweighs the time saved. Above that, the math flips. I haven't published a full Surfer SEO review on this site yet to work through the pricing tiers in more depth. If brand-voice consistency across a team matters more than the brief-building workflow itself, a tool built around that exact problem might fit better:

Jasper AI Review

For the rest of my AI Writing Tools coverage, see the full hub.

Where This Fits in the Wider AI Writing Toolkit

This walkthrough sits in the AI Writing Tools section. A brief is the input to a draft, and Write a Blog Post With ChatGPT, Not Like ChatGPT is the next step once you have one. For the assistant doing that drafting, see the ChatGPT Review, or Best ChatGPT Alternatives if you would rather not pay for it.