What is Surfer SEO: A Comprehensive Review and User Guide

Have you ever thought about how your page will rank in search engines? It'd be a waste of your time to write a highly engaging long-form article only to be neglected since it won't rank in search engines. After all, a good writer only thinks about how to keep their audience engaged, while SEO writers must also make sure that the content ranks in search results.

If you're a content editor or a content writer, you have two choices to increase traffic quickly. It's either you manually do on-page optimization by following advice and your intuition which would eventually take more of your time, or you have the option to automate the process with Surfer SEO.

But first, we answer the question: What is Surfer SEO?

Introducing Surfer SEO

If you're a website owner, you're likely looking for ways to optimize your content for search results. There are free popular SEO tools over the Internet to help you optimize SEO content, and one of which is Surfer SEO.

But what is Surfer SEO exactly? According to its website, it's an all-in-one platform for keyword research, content creation, optimization and SEO growth management.

To put it simply, it's a tool that helps you create SEO content and optimize content for search engine results pages (SERPs). Rather than using your intuition in determining what search engines like Google prefer to rank, Surfer SEO performs a data-driven analysis to show what your website or content is missing.

Surfer SEO's analysis looks for what you need to do to outrank other websites for keywords. It assists you by providing on-page SEO recommendations to create new content or optimise already published pages.

Surfing to Number 1

There are elements that Surfer SEO's content editor analyzes on your pages to compare them with the top-ranking pages for the same keywords. These elements may be your content structure, the use of keywords, or the wording in your content. The SEO tool will then provide guidelines on creating new content with ample structure and wording to appear on the top pages.

It would generate the ideal number of words, keywords, paragraphs and even images to add to your content. Even as we write this article, Surfer SEO generates the ideal content to rank number one in search results.

A Dive Into Surfer SEO

As we're diving deep into Surfer SEO, a question might pop into your mind: How does Surfer SEO know how you can rank number one?

Surfer SEO analyzes over 500 different factors and metrics across keyword results at any given time. Here are some of these factors and metrics:

• Word Count
• Headline Structure
• Media Elements
• Page Speed
• Keyword Density
• Partial Keyword Density
• Incoming Backlinks
• Outgoing External and Internal Links
• Meta Tags Structure (Meta Description, Schema, etc.)

With these factors and metrics, Surfer SEO builds an optimal model of what a search engine wants to see for your content creation process.

What makes Surfer SEO one of the most popular SEO tools, however, lies deeper than helping in content optimization. It has a lot of tools to help you in optimizing content such as its keyword research tool, analyze SERPs, and optimize your whole website to name a few.

Let's dive more into these specific tools.

Dip Down to Surfer SEO: The Best Features

Content Editor

As we've said, Surfer SEO is a tool that helps with your on-site search engine optimization. Its Content Editor feature contains a great bulk of its offer. There's nothing to fear if you're using it for the first time, however, as it's pretty straightforward with its pleasing user interface.

In creating your content, you first pick one or several keywords and wait until Surfer SEO has scraped and analyzed the top results. From there, you can now start creating your new article.

On the right, you'd see the rich-text editor and in-depth suggestions, including word count, headline count, paragraph count and images under the 'Guidelines' tab.

At the top, you'd see your content score which assesses how search engine-friendly your content is compared to others. When you click the "Details" button, you'd see your specific score per factor and which factor you need to improve on. You can also see the average and top content score for that specific topic. In the example below, you'd see our current score as compared to other articles related to Surfer SEO review.

These indicators are guidelines by Surfer SEO but don't 100% indicate what Google deems as important. It's perfectly fine to not abide by these indicators, but they would be useful in keeping you to SEO-optimized content.

Below the Content Score and metrics, you'd see Surfer SEO's unique keyword suggestions which give the particular keyword or keywords to be used in your article--including how many times they should appear.

You can see from the image above that these keywords are colour-coded with green, yellow and red based on the number of times you've used them in the article. If you've used the keyword enough times, it would appear as yellow first before green. The keyword will then appear red if it's not yet used or if it's overused.

You'd also notice that there's an "Insert terms" button that's visually highlighted with purple. Upon clicking the button, the Terms Assistant will help you in the terms optimization process and would give suggestions on where to insert certain terms. It can only be used when your word count is 50% of the suggested length and your article is already well-structured. The suggested terms are auto-populated with the top priority terms least optimized.

When you click on a specific keyword, it would show recommendations on how to use it in your article. However, there are times that a suggestion won't appear so you have to rely on creativity in inserting the keyword in your article.

There are times that these keywords would be hard to use in the article such as when it's grammatically incorrect or it doesn't make sense when used in an article. They don't appear often, and it's perfectly fine if you don't use them. As we've said, these indicators are suggestions. But if you're adamant about using them, you can use different methods to work around and place these keywords such as using bullet points or an em dash. It takes a lot of creativity but is satisfying when done.

If you want to go beyond Content Editor's help, you can also visit our guide on the best on-page SEO techniques.

Helping With Writer's Block

From the 'Guideline' tab, we now move over to the Outline tab. The Outline Builder is a basic AI writing software that creates sections of your content based on a competitor's content. However, we don't recommend using this as it's not always unique and so your content may be flagged for plagiarism.

You can use the Outline section however for suggestions and inspiration on what to add to your content. At the bottom, you'd see Topics & Questions which you can use as additional headers on the topic you can add to your content.

This helps especially if you're looking for ways to make your article unique or if you still can't reach the word count generated by Surfer SEO. Aside from this, it also generates a title, headings or subheadings that can be used in your content.

However, since Surfer SEO scrapers sometime take into account the sidebar and FAQ sections, the suggestions can appear as messy and illogical. We don't suggest using them as is, especially at the risk of getting flagged for plagiarism. You can instead use them as inspiration or reference in writing your content.

Brief Look at Competitors

The Brief Tab, on the other hand, is a summary of competitors you've selected and the notes you've added which can be useful if multiple people are collaborating on the same article. You can always edit the results Surfer SEO takes into account when making suggestions. For example, competitors can be excluded from the suggestions.

You can also edit the content structure, keywords, topics, and questions you want Surfer SEO to consider. It can be easily edited from your account, and Surfer SEO will change the number of occurrences of the keywords to avoid over-optimization.

You can check out the competitors list every time you create a new document as sometimes, they might not be relevant to the article you're writing.

Editing Text From Another Site

Of course, there would be times when you'd prefer a particular text editor in content creation or when the editorial process will run in another text editor before they're transferred to another site for optimization.

You can rest easy, however, as Surfer SEO's Content Editor is available also in Google Docs and WordPress' Gutenberg Editor. You can directly edit and optimize your content from these sites without transferring them.

You can also use third-party applications or extensions to check your grammar, spelling and phrasing in Surfer SEO's Content Editor.

Content Audit

You might have old existing pages that have been at the top in search results at their prime, however, have already dropped from rankings over time. Surfer SEO can help you update and optimize existing content to conquer the SERPs again.

From their Content Audit feature, Surfer SEO gives you suggestions based on its analysis of your URL, and the SERP of your existing content's main keyword. It shows you internal link suggestions based on the relevant pages from your domain as well as missing common backlinks, where you can see the domains that link to the top 20 results but don't link to you. You also have the option to filter competitors to get more accurate results.

If you feel that a certain article can still rank in the SERPs, a little sprucing up based on Surfer SEO's suggestions would do the trick. However, take note that these are suggestions on how to improve your content. It's still best to write content based on a user's search intent.

SERP Analyzer

The SERP Analyzer tool is one of Surfer SEO's features that's great for learning about the competition for a main keyword from a content-first point of view. It shows you a graph of a word count about the position in search results over time.

If there are other metrics you'd like to see from the graph, you can easily edit them on the left sidebar. You have over 500 different factors to choose from, depending on what you needed to see.

The graph compares you to the first 48 ranking sites, but you also have the option to filter by URL located at the bottom left part to check the comparison between you and a specific competitor. You just have to provide a URL for the graph to run the results.

You can also get insights on the popular words used in your article, a breakdown of each page and its content score, and common backlinks for the SERP you're referencing.

We highly recommend utilizing this tool as it offers an in-depth SERP analysis of how you fare against other websites. This can be proven helpful for your SEO strategy, especially if you're trying to get into the best parts of the SERP.

Surfer SEO Keyword Research

We've already covered a lot of Surfer SEO's features. From its easy and pleasing interface to its helpful suggestions, it seems like it doesn't run out of pros.

However, it still has room for improvement in its Keyword Research Tool. If we can compare, it's not as effective as its other features such as the Content Editor and Content Planner.

The Keyword Research Tool helps you find keywords with similar SERPs. If the same URLs are listed for the same keywords, it indicates that they are relevant even with the same content.

The Keyword Research Tool analyzes and suggests related keywords based on your primary keyword, or runs a multiple analysis for a few related keywords. All of these are represented by percentages.

But what is its problem? Low-volume keywords. For other on-page SEO tools or sites, this is their most efficient tool, but Surfer's Keyword Research tool seems to have little data on them. Instead, the site gives better results for high-traffic keywords.

If you're planning to use low-volume keywords to try out if your website is relevant by topic or to build brand awareness, Surfer SEO might prove a little too tricky. This doesn't mean it's outrightly bad, it just leaves Surfer SEO with room for improvement in the future.

Content Planner

We all have our bad days, and even the best finds it hard to plan content for their website. If you're unsure where to start planning your content or you just need ideas, you can use Surfer SEO's Content Planner.

You can start by feeding a seed keyword that you want to focus on and then the tool will give you clusters of related content based on the keyword. Each cluster represents one article.

You can also get preliminary data for each cluster such as the monthly search volume or the keyword difficulty, or create an individual content editor that considers all the keywords in one cluster.

As we've said, all of these are suggestive but it doesn't mean you neglect this option altogether. It's always best to know which clusters make for a good article.

Grow Flow

Grow Flow is Surfer SEO's AI Growth Management platform. How does it work? First, you connect your Google Search Console to Surfer SEO. It will then generate tasks such as adding keywords to your articles, identifying keywords you can use for your website, discovering topics relevant to your niche, or providing suggestions in internal links. It allows you to enhance your on-page SEO on the fly.

It's not, however, a substitution for your expertise in SEO audit. While Grow Flow can identify tasks that you could do to improve your SEO, it can't replace the knowledge and experience of an expert. Since it's AI, it can generate suggestions that don't work for you.

Keyword Surfer

If Surfer SEO's Keyword Research Tool doesn't fare well, how about Keyword Surfer?

Keyword Surfer is an extension in Google Chrome, which displays search metrics.

From the search bar, you'd be able to see the search volume for the country you've selected and the cost per click for Google Ads campaigns. You have the option to click the box beside the country flag to add the keyword to your keyword collection, which makes it easier for you to track them.

On the main pop-up for Keyword Surfer, you'd see keyword ideas, their overlap (which is the percentage of search results shared with your main keyword), and the search volume per keyword idea.

In the search results, just below the title tag, you'd see three different symbols that come with a number or N/A. Starting from the left, they represent the estimated monthly domain traffic, the number of words, and the number of exact keywords on the webpage. It also shows if the title tag has been changed. This helps you get an overview and an insight into how the top-ranking pages do or how your competitors do.

It's a quick way to do keyword research as you don't need to open complex sites or tools to see metrics on new topics or a given keyword. We like this feature as it gives us the liberty to search during our downtime.

If you want to know which keywords you could use for this free extension, you can also visit our article on the best keyword research tips here.

Surfer AI

Surfer AI is Surfer SEO's latest offering to help in your SEO efforts. We've already had a fair share of AI-operated features of Surfer SEO throughout this article, and this is just one of them. After its launch last May, it gained traffic for its helpfulness in terms of generating content. After all, some businesses require publishing numerous topics each day.

According to Surfer SEO, Surfer AI is a software that uses natural language processing to generate text and write complete articles optimized for SERPs. It promises to deliver quick drafts optimized for rankings and helps you publish articles easily. Surfer AI analyzes pages that rank well based on the primary keyword you've provided and then writes an article that is on par with your competitors.

You also can instruct Surfer AI on how to write your article. First, you input your target keyword and then it'd generate content. After that, you'd see a pop-up window which gives you options to customize your content such as:

• Select a target market
• Change the tone of voice
• Edit article outlines
• Select organic competitors
• Anti-AI detection

Surfer AI will then generate an article in 15 - 20 minutes. You can edit the article to incorporate more keywords and fact-check the whole article before publishing it.

AI-written content vs. Google

We've talked about numerous times in our previous articles how Google prioritizes high-quality people-first content.

Danny Sullivan, Google's public search liaison, has already talked about AI-generated content in the past. According to Sullivan, AI-generated content is not bad but the nuance comes from the fact that the content isn't going to feel written by people without human review.

Take note also that Google can penalize you for creating spammy auto-generated content that serves search engines and not users. So if you're planning to use this feature, you have to heed caution in making sure that it abides with Google's guidelines and that it's not plagiarizing any existing work.

Surfer AI is advertised to be cheaper than hiring writers. While it's generally recommended for websites that generate numerous pieces of content each day, we still highly recommend that a qualified writer makes the content rather than AI. It can do so much in mimicking what a writer can do, but not what they can convey.

Other Notable Features

We've already talked about the main features of Surfer SEO to help you with your SEO strategy. However, there are other noteworthy features it possesses that are worth mentioning in this review. Here are some that we liked:

Collaborative Work

Surfer SEO allows collaborative work in its Content Editor tool. Multiple people can edit and write on the same content. This can be helpful for websites that are employing collaborative work or an editorial process in their content creation.

Your writer can see the real-time results of optimizing their content, and it would save hours of editing on the part of the editor.

Location-based Content Creation

Different countries call for different optimization. You'd find that some articles would work in one country but not in the other. If you want to rank high in a specific country, then your content must be optimized based on its SEO metrics.

Surfer SEO's databases contain different languages and countries. If you're looking forward to using local SEO to rank in SERPs, then you can freely change the location in optimizing your content.

You can see from the image above that the article is optimized for the United States. In your Content Editor tool, you can check it from the flag beside the primary keyword, or you can press the small info button to check the location.

Ranking for Multiple Keywords

Nowadays, creating content for just one target keyword won't work to do wonders for your SEO. A multi-keyword analysis helps you rank in SERPs and increases your chance for more organic traffic. Surfer SEO helps you review search volume for your primary keyword and other potential target keywords for your past content.

True Density Optimization

SEO seems like a war on keywords, and we're not joking when we say that it partly is. When you're optimizing your content, there are times when essential terms might be missing from your content.

Surfer SEO's True Density can help you find out if you're on or off-target in content optimization and help you compare with your competitors. It suggests the optimal density for a keyword so you can rank higher in SERPs.

Is Surfer SEO Worth the Subscription?

How much does Surfer SEO cost? Surfer SEO has different pricing for yearly or monthly billing. Its minimum yearly plan offers a 180-article yearly limit for the Content Editor tool and 100/day of Keyword Research. Certain features such as Grow Flow, Content Audit and SERP Analyzer can be included or excluded depending on the plan. All plans include a no-risk 7-day money-back guarantee.

Here's their pricing for the yearly and monthly plans respectively.

If you're wondering which plans contain which feature, you can also refer to the Surfer SEO pricing below:

If you opt to subscribe to their minimum plan, it would cost you around 4.6 USD per article. Taking into account the features and tools included to optimize your content, it's good to include Surfer SEO in your SEO strategy investments.

Surfer SEO vs Surfer SEO Alternatives

There are a lot of keyword research tools available over the Internet. If you can't afford Surfer SEO, there are other available alternatives you can use. However, as we've said, Surfer SEO is worth the investment especially if you're investing in your on-page SEO.

What sets Surfer SEO apart from other tools is its Content Editor feature. It gives you a visual representation of your progress in optimizing content and gives you a variety of suggestions based on other ranking pages.

Surfer SEO Trade-offs

As all things should be, no on-page optimization tool is perfect. Considering what we've talked about, what are then the trade-offs in using Surfer SEO?

Advantages of Using Surfer SEO

• The interface is simple and pleasing, which helps anyone navigate its features easily.
• There are available options to create customized charts and comparisons with other ranking pages.
• There are more than 500 different factors to help you optimize your content.
• Surfer SEO provides suggestions on how to optimize non-ranking existing pages.
• Surfer SEO suggests keywords and content structure in optimizing content.
• Surfer SEO has a dedicated content editor where you can optimize your content in real-time.
• There's a free Chrome extension to use when checking search metrics.

Disadvantages of Using Surfer SEO

• There's a limit on Content Editor credits which can be used in a year or a month depending on your plan.
• The keyword research tool doesn't work as well with low-volume keywords.
• There are times that its suggestions and competitor backlinks are irrelevant to your article or niche.
• It doesn't provide a keyword difficulty score.

Why We Love Using Surfer SEO

As we've laid down, Surfer SEO's interface is clean and easy to use, which makes it easy for anyone to navigate its features. Aside from its user-friendly interface, it also provides different suggestions for optimizing your content, whether it be new or existing, based on the ranking pages and your competitors. You can create customized charts and check how you do versus your competitors.

Taking into account all the benefits you can get from Surfer SEO, it doesn't take long for any SEO specialist or boutique SEO company to love it. It's worth adding to your on-page SEO investment and will benefit you in the long run.

Surfer SEO FAQs

What is NLP?

NLP stands for Natural Language Processing.

It enables Google to understand natural language like how humans do based on the meaning, structure, and sentiment of the text. Google assess the relevancy of your content to your niche, which then affects your rankings. NLP in Surfer SEO provides the terms you should use along with its quantity.

Who uses Surfer SEO?

Surfer SEO is used by individuals, in-house teams and agencies to optimize their content and increase their ranks in SERPs. As it stands, it's used by over 233,422 active users.

Do I need to have a valid reason to claim the 7-day money-back guarantee?

If you purchased any of Surfer SEO's subscriptions, you can have it refunded regardless of the reason.

How can I buy add-ons?

You need to have an active subscription to buy any add-on. Take note that White Labelling and API can only be purchased through Surfer SEO's Support, while other add-ons can be purchased on the left-side panel of the in-app dashboard.

Surfing On-Page SEO with Surfer SEO

There's no perfect app out there. Each tool provides different trade-offs based on its features and cost. The 'perfect' tool only exists based on how well it complements your needs and wants. If you need a tool that helps you optimize content for SERPs and at the same time, helps you rank from the rest of your competitors, Surfer SEO is an easy choice to pick. Whether you're a known SEO specialist or one that's starting, it can help you achieve great results.

Meanwhile, if you remain undecided on how to optimize your content, a reliable digital agency might help you reach your goals.

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