Fatrank Podcast

Dan Grant: Hi guys, it’s Dan here. Today I’m going to be showing you how to use the Content Editor tool in Surfer SEO.

Before we get into it, the Content Editor tool is essentially a way to scale your content. If you’ve got content writers working for you, you usually have to prepare a lot: H2s, structure, the type of content you want, style guidelines, and all kinds of criteria. Doing this manually for every single article, sending it over, managing it, and checking it all can be very time-consuming.

I’m going to show you how quickly and easily you can create a content brief for someone to write an article for you, how seamless it is to watch them do it, get it back, and have it meet all your criteria without you needing to do everything you used to.

All you want to do is go to the Content Editor tab, then enter your keyword. For the first example, we’ll use the same niche as before: tennis court maintenance. This is basically the main topic your article needs to be about. If you’re in the dental niche and want an article on “top five dental services,” that’s what you’d type here. In our case, we’ll type tennis court maintenance, then select the location.

You can choose very specific locations within a country, which is really great, but if you want it to be a nationwide term, just select the country. We’ll choose United Kingdom and then press Create.

It’ll load at the bottom and takes about 20–30 seconds as it pulls in all the keywords and data for you. Once that’s done, just click your keyword down there. That takes you to the main Content Editor setup screen.
What this does is pull in content ideas and themes from articles that are already ranking for that keyword. It shows you the top-ranking pages for tennis court maintenance and, by default, ticks a selection that it feels are a good fit. You can customise this — untick results that aren’t relevant, like eBay or Gumtree listings, if they show up, and only keep the pages you want to model.

For this example, we feel all of these are relevant, so we’ll keep them ticked and press Save Changes.
Now, down here it shows the average word length of those top articles. For our example, it’s recommending around 960 words, based on what’s ranking. You can change this if you want to do a skyscraper approach — e.g. bump it to 1,000 words. That sets the target word count for your writer.

You’ll also see default settings like headings, paragraphs, bold words, and images. These are there as general guidelines, but you don’t have to obsess over them. The main concern here is making sure your target word count is set correctly so your writer knows how long the article should be.
Once that’s done, Surfer pulls in primary keywords — in this case, tennis court maintenance and its component words — and then automatically pulls in secondary keywords from the top-ranking articles. This is brilliant, because instead of spending hours digging through keyword tools, you’ve already got a list of proven relevant terms that Google clearly likes.

You can add or remove these secondary keywords by clicking them or using Add Term. That brings up a big list of suggested keywords, like tennis court servicing, along with their search volume. You don’t have to add every single one, especially if some aren’t relevant or are too location-specific. Choose the ones that make sense for your article and your niche.

For example, we might add: tennis court repair, tennis court resurfacing, cost of tennis court resurfacing, tennis court cost and similar. You decide based on your own logic and structure. The key point is that these are all terms the top ten are already using, so including them in your article is only going to help.

There are also prominent terms and other terms, which are extra relevant phrases around the topic — things like repairs, contamination, condition, and similar. Again, these are all pulled from the currently ranking pages, which saves a huge amount of time and guesswork.

Scrolling down, you’ll see Topics and Questions to Answer. These are commonly asked questions around the keyword, such as “How do you maintain a tennis court?” or “How much does it cost to maintain a tennis court?” Each has search volume, and they’re fantastic to include as subheadings or FAQ sections in your article. You can also add your own custom questions by clicking Add Question or Topic and typing whatever you want included.

At the bottom is the Notes section. This is really important for instructing your content writer. If there’s anything specific you want them to do or avoid, put it here. For example, you might say:
Embed one of our YouTube videos
Add an internal link to a specific page
Ignore the bold-word requirement and let us handle styling later
Basically, anything not covered by the automated guidelines — internal links, embeds, tone, or special instructions — goes into Notes.

So, to recap: you enter your keyword, Surfer pulls in ranking pages, suggests word count, primary and secondary keywords, topics, questions, and allows you to add notes. You now have a detailed, data-driven content brief built in just a few minutes.

When you’re happy with the setup, click Finalize Customisation. You’re taken to the editor page.
This is where it can feel a bit confusing at first, because it looks like a writing tool. But this page is really for your content writer — not necessarily for you. You can write in it yourself if you want, but the main idea is to share it with your writer.

On the right-hand side, you see:
Word count target and progress
Headings and paragraph recommendations
Keyword usage targets for your primary and secondary keywords
For example, it might say: use tennis court maintenance 11–20 times, and tennis court repairs 1–2 times. As the writer types and includes those phrases, the counters update and turn green when they’ve hit the recommended frequency.

All you need to do to hand this over is click Copy link to share. That creates a shareable link your external writer can access without logging into Surfer. They open the link and see exactly the same editor, with all the requirements, and can write directly inside it.

As they write, everything updates in real time — word count, keyword usage, and progress against your targets. You can even open the same URL and watch it update as they go, like a Google Doc. It makes both your lives easier: they know exactly what to do, and you know they’re following a clear, SEO-led brief.
Once they’ve written the full article, hit all the word counts, included the keywords, questions, and terms, your content is fully structured, on-topic, and optimised around your chosen keyword. It then appears in your Surfer account, and you can copy it out to publish it on your blog, money page, or wherever you need it.

The quality of the final piece will always depend on the writer, but this system removes a huge amount of the manual, time-consuming setup. It’s very “set and forget” — once the brief is created, your writers just get on with it.

And once you’ve got a good bank of writers ready, this becomes incredibly scalable. You can spin up dozens of these editor briefs, send each writer a link, and have them all working from structured, data-backed guidelines — making their job easier and your results better.

I hope you guys enjoyed this video, hope you learned something, and hopefully you’ll implement this into your content strategies. Thanks a lot for watching, and we’ll see you on the next one.