Playbook: Build a review content brief that actually beats the SERP

Playbook: Build a review content brief that actually beats the SERP

Most brief tools (Frase / Surfer / MarketMuse-style) hand you a term list and call it done. For a "best X" review page that's not enough. Here's the build order.

— Scrape the top 8 ranking pages and count how many products each reviews. Match the median, don't pad to 25.
— Extract every H2 that appears on 4+ competitors. Those are non-negotiable sections ("how we tested", "how to choose").
— Pull the comparison-table columns competitors use. If 6 of 8 show price AND a spec you're missing, that's your gap.
— Note which pages have a named tester / methodology block. If they do and you don't, that's the ranking wall, not word count.
— List the People Also Ask questions; each becomes an FAQ entry with schema.

Gotcha: term-frequency tools push you toward keyword stuffing the product names. Google reads a review page by structure (table + verdict + methodology), not term density.

Bottom line: brief from competitor STRUCTURE, not a word cloud. Match product count, steal the methodology section, fill the table gap.