The Writing Phase: How to make the most of Surfer's AI-backed Content Editor
The robots are coming! Well, not exactly. In this lesson, we'll get a step-by-step tutorial of how to use Surfer's Content Editor and its AI to streamline your content creation process.
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Well hello there! Don't you look refreshed! Danni from Surfer here! Welcome back to Module 2. The writing phase. In this lesson we're going to talk about, well, robots... Have I got your attention yet? Robots are cool, but basically in this lesson we're going to talk about how to streamline your content creation process. Are you ready? Let's get started!
Surfer's Content Editor is thee go-to tool for SEO content optimization. It provides you with topics to write about, terms to use, questions to answer, heading structure with unique, AI-generated content and so much more!
To make the best use of it, create a query on the main panel... pick location (country or city), choose mobile or desktop scraping (our crawler will then crawl SERPs from mobile or desktop agent, keep in mind that SERPs might vary due to device, however we encourage you to stick to default settings – because of mobile first indexing).
Now it’s time to input our keywords. Have you done your keyword research already? If not, don’t forget that you can rely on Surfer’s content planner for dozens of neat and relevant content clusters!
Anyway, what's super cool about Surfer’s content editor is the multi-keyword analysis.
You know, every piece of content ranks for dozens, hundreds or sometimes even thousands of keywords. If you did your research, and found keywords that you would like to rank for with one piece of content, type them there and create a multi-keyword analysis.
Now, Surfer will crawl all of the SERPs, and prepare advanced guidelines to help you achieve your goal – to rank as high as possible for all of these keywords.
What I need to mention here is... by running multi-keyword analysis you will get many more topics and questions to answer recommendations. It’s the most efficient way to reach your goal.
Let’s go through it all together, shall we?
I’ll break it down section-by-section for you!
- 1.Content Score Do you see that half circle with red, yellow and green? That’s the content score. It will go up or down as you write and make the suggested changes. If you click the details tab, you’ll get even more information. It’ll break down structure, headings, terms and NLP. Now, you don’t need to aim to get 100. Getting in the green is awesome, or aiming between 70 and 85 is also a good goal!
- 2.Words, structure, images… Below that you’ll see suggested amounts for word count, structure aka how many paragraphs you include, images and heading. You should try your best to get in optimal range. These suggested numbers are based on your competitors that we analyzed from the Serps. Don’t worry, we’ll talk more about competitor analysis soon.
- 3.Terms to use Next we have terms to use. This section is super important. We’ve added many new features so that you can customize this section and make it to your liking. Click the two dots, and turn the toggles on or off according to your needs. You can highlight them, focus on the terms which aren’t optimized yet, show ranges, etc.
- 4.Outline builder Let’s move onto the outline builder. Here you’ll find titles, headings and questions. Don’t forget that the more keywords you’re ranking for, the more information and suggestions you’ll find in this section, hence the importance of multi-keyword analysis.
So you see those paragraphs under the headings? They are there for you to add to your text. They’re AI-generated, and unique, that said– keep in mind that they’re not always perfect, BUT they do directly impact your content score. Hopefully it helps you get in the green easier!
Lastly, the Brief section. Customization is important in this section. By default we look at the top 5 competitors based on their content score, but of course you can adjust the range. Let’s have a look at content structure. Imagine you’re writing an article that needs to be longer than what we’ve suggested. No problem. You can adjust the word count here, and the others will also update. You can adjust word count or even character count. Doesn’t matter, as the terms to use will update to match appropriate density and everything!
You can hide the terms to use that you want to ignore, or import your own list if you’ve done your keyword research outside of Surfer.
In the topics and questions area, there are three main sources we pull from: Surfer’s database, competitors and the “people also ask” section. You can also add your own if you want!
Lastly, there’s a section where you can leave any notes! You know to leave deadline specifications or target audience briefs you want to communicate.
So now, how do you share all of this information? You can share using Google Docs, Webflow, Wordpress or Jarvis. There’s also a link you can copy and share! If you share this link, the person can just get to writing without having to worry about logging in. Cool, huh? This is great for ClickUp or Notion or Asana– to keep you and your team organized!
Let’s write some content together!
So I promised that we’d talk about robots, and I always keep my promises. Inside of the content editor you have the Outline Builder that generates paragraphs for you based on your keywords. So here are 3 tips to make the most out of your AI-generated content:
Remember it’s not perfect, it’s a starting point! You’ll want to edit to match your tone and voice. There’s no integrated lookback! What does that mean exactly? You’ll be generating stand-alone paragraphs, not one beautifully flowing text. So the paragraphs won’t all be perfectly related as the AI can’t read what was written in the paragraph before. And lastly, remember that the point of AI-generated content is to save you time, and help the ideas flow, but nothing can replace you as the very human expert that you are. Keep in mind that Google likes natural language, so do what you do best and make awesome content! The more you write, the more your content score will change. Your goal should not be unnatural keyword stuffing, or even to get 100%! If you shoot between 70% and 85% you have a great chance of ranking for your keyword. Patience and persistence over perfection, people!
So I think we've reached a pretty natural stopping point for this lesson. In the next lesson we'll talk more about links, and how to make your text in your articles more attractive based on psychology. I'll see you there! Happy Surfing!