• Post last modified:February 20, 2024

Surfer SEO Review 2024: Climb the SERP Wave Effortlessly

Surfer SEO Review

Find out if Surfer SEO is the missing piece to your SEO puzzle. Read our comprehensive review and take your rankings to the next level.

Disclaimer: This article contains affiliate links where I may receive a small commission at no cost to you if you decide to purchase a paid plan.

On-page SEO optimization can sometimes feel like a guessing game, but it doesn’t have to be.

Surfer SEO tools enable users to analyze their content, check the search volume for specific keywords, identify potential target keywords seed keyword name, and more. Surfer SEO takes the guesswork out of optimizing your content by providing keyword ideas for your content and on-page SEO best practices.

What Does Surfer SEO Do?

Surfer SEO is a data-driven optimization tool meant to assist website owners and digital marketers improve their website’s search engine ranking and visibility.

The tool includes several features and tools that enable users to assess their website’s content and compare it to the best-performing material in their niche or sector. This includes keyword density and usage, text length, internal linking, header tags, and so on.

Surfer SEO also makes recommendations for increasing the on-page optimization of a user’s website based on a review of top-performing content. These ideas could include optimizing text length, keyword usage, internal linking, and other on-page components.

surfer background 1

Surfer SEO, in addition to on-page optimization, has functionality for assessing backlinks and other off-page optimization elements that may influence a website’s search engine ranking.

Surfer SEO offers comprehensive tools for optimizing a website for search engines and increasing its online visibility. Users can make informed decisions about how to increase their website’s search engine ranking and attract more traffic by using data-driven keyword research tools and recommendations.

Surfer SEO takes a scientific approach to on page SEO and makes optimising your content a painless process regardless of previous experience.

Consider Surfer SEO to be your personal Data Scientist. Analyzing competitors, performance data, and technological aspects that favorably influence search rankings in a timely manner. Using that data, you can reverse engineer your way to the top of the search and search engine results pages.

 

Who Is Surfer SEO Best For?

Surfer SEO is the board you need if you’re looking to ride the waves of search engine success. It’s perfect for SEO pros, digital marketers, and website owners who want to catch the biggest swells of online organic traffic ever.

It is particularly useful for those who are looking for a data-driven approach to optimizing their website’s content and on-page elements. Surfer SEO offers a range of features and tools that allow users to analyze their website’s content and compare it to top-performing content in their niche or industry.

 

Surfer SEO Key Features:

Content Editor

Arguably, the best part about Surfer SEO is the built-in Content Editor.

Surfer’s Content Editor will provide you with relevant keywords and a real-time measure of optimization.

Use the built-in Outline Builder to structure your content into a detailed outline complete with unique potential headings and questions.

Surfer Content Editor Outline

You can generate a shareable link in any Content Editor which can be used an unlimited number of times. Users with a shareable link can review and edit the work directly in the tool.

Content Score

In the Content Editor, you can use Content Score to choose competitors from top 20 pages ranking for your target query and include them in your analysis.

content-score

How is it calculated in the Content Editor?

content score

Adding up all their individual values gives you your Content Score and will serve as a comprehensive guide on what to work on to improve your content.

  1. Structure – match the length, the number of paragraphs, headings, and images count to get the high score in structure.

  2. Headings – make sure to use the exact keyword in H1 and recommended terms in subheadings.

  3. Terms and NLP – focus on including terms Surfer suggests in the content starting from the top of the list, it’s prioritized by relevance.

Audit

Audit is one of Surfer’s tools that is limited by credits. It is a go-to tool if you want to:

  • Check if your old content is up-to-date and relevant

  • Find SEO errors

  • Revise your newly published article in the surroundings of your website elements.

Audit will provide you with a set of suggestions to help you bring your content higher in the rankings.

How to create an Audit query?

Surfer’s approach is based on finding similarities between the top-performing pages. In order to fetch those pages, we need you to provide some parameters first – to let us know who your competitors truly are.

To create your query, you will need the following:

  • An active Surfer subscription with at least one Audit credit available in your limit

  • An URL of your targeted website. Surfer’s Audit will base its suggestions on the exact page you enter in the dashboard.

  • A targeted location. You can pick a country or city from the list available when running your query. Surfer will then mimic a query run from that place so you get results relevant to the location.

  • A targeted keyword. What keyword do you want people to find your article by? That’s the one you should use.

You can also choose between Mobile and Desktop Crawlers and decide whether to include the sentiment for NLP Entities. By default, Surfer SEO will use the Mobile crawler as Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites.

SERP Analyzer

SERP Analyzer is a tool that will allow you to explore your niche by providing you with details about your competitors’ pages. It breaks the details about a specific SERP into prime factors to allow you to analyze the correlations and similarities in structure, visibility, performance, and others.

serp-analyzer

Use the SERP Analyzer to:

  • Explore different niches before deciding on targeting a specific keyword

  • Explore your own niche to analyze the correlations between different factors and ranking positions to be able to focus on the highly correlated factors only

  • Compare your not-yet-ranking URL to URLs that are already ranking in the SERP

  • See how your already ranking URL is doing in comparison to the other pages in the SERP

How to Select Competitors

Analyzing your page against the incorrect rivals may be detrimental. Search intent is crucial to doing it right.

What does Google think the searcher wants? Are they shopping? Perhaps they want feedback? Or do they want information? This question determines Search Intent.

In the world of SEO, search intent refers to the motivation or purpose behind a user’s search query. Understanding search intent is crucial for creating content that meets the user’s needs and provides relevant information.

Don’t Skip This SEO Step.

Don’t simply pick your top 5 organic competitors; pick your true competition.

How to choose top-10 competitors:

  • know your goal.

  • Avoid non-essential pages.

  • Exclude authoritative pages like Amazon, eBay, Wikipedia, etc.

You should only compare your page to pages ranking above you because they likely have superior on-page optimization, which we want to examine to improve ours.

When you launch a new SERP Analyzer, all competitors are selected by default. Thus, you’ll need to exclude them and choose them individually. “Exclude all pages” is under the graph.

 

Keyword Research Tool

The Keyword Research Tool uses machine learning to discover the search intent for every topic. It can help you determine if a potential customer is ready to buy, weighing their options, or just looking for general information.

keyword-research-tool

Surfer’s Keyword Research Tool gives you dozens of relevant topic clusters. These clusters depend on your primary keyword, and it just takes a few clicks to find every keyword you need, saving you hours of research and grouping.

  • Topic clusters typically consist of a pillar page or post, which provides an overview of the main topic, and a series of related content pieces, such as blog posts, articles, or videos, that dive deeper into specific subtopics. Each piece of content is optimized for a particular keyword or keyphrase, which helps to signal to search engines the relevance of the content to user search queries.

Use it to:

  • Analyze your organic competitors’ content structure

  • Discover new topics and find secondary keywords to rank for multiple target phrases in one page

  • Build topical relevance and authority and get keyword difficulty and relative difficulty for your domain.

Choosing the right keyword

Choose a relatively broad keyword and don’t waste your queries on narrow, long-tailed ones as they will generate very few suggestions for your website. A good keyword doesn’t necessarily have to be your target keyword. It can be a category of your blog, business, the main topic of your next blog post, etc.

Here and other tools are good examples to use in Keyword Research:

  • Examples of broad keyword that you may or may not want to target: toys, kitchen furniture, dentist, online marketing, outdoor fashion

  • Examples of category, eg. for business, cooking class, traveling. For SEO blogs, influencer marketing, social media

 

Domain Planner

Domain Planner helps you organize the content optimization process for your domain based on Google Search Console and Surfer content data. It audits your domain and finds pages that require content optimization, and you can get Content Scores for multiple pages from your domain.

Enter a keyword, and this tool generates keyword clusters to guide you in creating multiple pieces of content to help you rank for the target keyword.

Using the Domain Planner

1. Pick Domain Planner from the toolbar on the left.

Screenshot+2022 11 16+at+13.13.37

2. Connect your Google Search Console (GSC) – This step is optional, but it will provide you with much more accurate data for your site.

If you choose to create a Content Planner for the domain without GSC, the data will be provided from Surfer’s own database.

Click the “Google Search Console is not connected” button and Sign In with Google. It does not have to be the same e-mail you are using to log in to Surfer.

domain-planner

You will have to go through the Google authentication process and give Surfer all permission to see your Search Console data.

You can disconnect your Google account any time you want.

google search console 3

3. Pick your domain and country.

You can either type/paste in the domain URL or you can click the URL bar to see the list of your Google Search Console domains.

Next, choose the country you want to run the planner for.

Finally, click “Create Domain Planner.”‍

domain planner 2

4. Analyse the data for your 100 best-performing pages.

image

You can now analyze multiple different points for your pages: user intent, the presence of featured snippets related keywords, impressions, position, traffic, and monthly search volume.

 

Grow Flow

A recent addition to Surfer’s toolset is Grow Flow, which is designed to provide you with weekly suggestions for improving SEO on ranking pages on your site. How it works is simple. You connect your Google Search Console account and Surfer will provide you with a list of the following kinds of suggestions each week for your site:

  • Keywords you can optimize for in existing content Internal linking opportunities

  • Content creation ideas

  • New backlinks for your competitors’ content that you might go after

What is required to create a Grow Flow project?

You will need to purchase a Grow Flow slot to connect to a domain. 1 Grow flow slot costs $9, but you can purchase as many slots as you want if you have multiple high impression domains. If you’re on a Max plan, your plan comes with 1 free Grow Flow slot.

To connect your domain to Grow Flow, you will need the following:

  • a domain that is generating at least 100 impressions per day

  • a Google Search Console with the domain connected as a property

  • the same Google Search Console integrated with your Surfer account

Surfer will only pull the domains from your Google Search Consoles that are generating enough traffic to generate the tasks, so please first make sure that your domain does meet these criteria.

Additional Features

Surfer SEO Chrome Extension
surfer icon

There’s also a Chrome extension if you don’t want to use the website. This lets you investigate on-page SEO elements whilst on a website—without cutting and pasting the URL into Surfer.com.

Google Docs Integration
Google-Docs-Icon

This extension powers up Google Docs with Surfer, allowing you to use your Content Editor guidelines directly in a Google Document.

With the Content Editor extension for Chrome, you can use Google Docs as your main writing program and share your guidelines with a copywriter through the Google Docs link while your content is saved directly on Drive.

You can also export to Google Docs or copy a shareable link for your team.

Jasper Integration

Jasper is a standalone artificial intelligence tool that writes content based on guidelines like briefs, keywords, and titles.

jasper ai

Writesonic Integration

Writersonic is a standalone tool that allows you to generate content through AI for different formats, such as articles, blogs, product descriptions, etc.

writesonic icon

Surfer SEO Pricing

For a price that is on the lower end of the spectrum, Surfer SEO will provide you with a highly in-depth examination of your on-page SEO and provide recommendations for improving it based on the analysis of top-performing content.

When writing this Surfer SEO review, the basic package starts at just $49, which is a steal compared to competitors.

32 Surfer SEO Pricing

Surfer SEO Alternatives

Here are The 7 Alternatives to Surfer SEO in 2023

  • Frase.

  • Page Optimizer Pro.

  • Clearscope.

  • Marketmuse.

  • Topic.

  • Content Harmony.

  • WriterZen.

Surfer SEO Pros and Cons

pros n cons
Pros:
  1. Data-driven analysis: Surfer SEO provides data-driven analysis of web pages, which can help users understand what factors are contributing to their website’s ranking.

  2. Comprehensive reports: Surfer SEO generates detailed reports that provide insights on keyword usage, content length, structure, and more. These reports can help users optimize their pages for better search engine rankings.

  3. Easy to use: Surfer SEO has a user-friendly interface, making it easy for users to navigate and understand the data provided.

  4. Saves time: Surfer SEO can save users time by automating the process of analyzing web pages and providing recommendations for optimization.

Cons:
  1. Price: Surfer SEO can be expensive for some users, especially for those who are just starting out.

  2. Limited keyword research: Surfer SEO’s keyword research feature is not as extensive as other tools, such as Ahrefs or SEMrush.

  3. Limited backlink analysis: Surfer SEO’s backlink analysis feature is also not as comprehensive as other tools in the market.

  4. Limited language support: Surfer SEO is only available in a limited number of languages, which can be a disadvantage for users who operate in non-English speaking countries.

Conclusion

This Surfer SEO review is based on my own personal experience with the product. It is, without a doubt, one of the most effective search engine optimization applications that I have personally utilized for my company.

The ideal option for search engine optimization specialists who want to improve their on-page SEO by using data-driven analysis tools is Surfer SEO, which can be purchased for a monthly fee of $49.

I optimize each of my blog entries with Surfer SEO, and as a result, I am able to observe significant improvements. I strongly suggest that you give the Surfer SEO for your websites a try and see for yourself how useful it is.

Surfer SEO Review FAQs

Is Surfer SEO easy to use?

Surfer Search Engine Optimization. Pros: The interfaces and functions are intuitive. A unique tool for creating a chart for keywords. Helping your SEO strategy to optimize on the Web. It is a great way to optimize your current content to increase ranking.

What is a good score on Surfer SEO?

Generally 0 to 34 is considered warning about a lack of content. 35 to 66 represent good quality and relevance, or high quality with low relevance, or lower quality with high relevance. 66 to 97 indicates optimal quality and relevance.

How does Surfer SEO work?

Surfer SEO provides a cloud platform for optimizing pages to get you in the top search rankings. Instead, it does the data analytics that determines the exact missing information on your page.

Can you use Surfer SEO for free?

Wherever you are, Keyword Surfer will help you validate your content ideas and streamline your content creation research process with data relevant to your location. There’s a reason this is Surfer’s most popular and most used tool! It is surfer’s keyword research tool is 100% Free.

Build your dream business without the technical headaches.

Get Weekly AI Prompts and WorkFlows, Templates & Actionable Strategies

Lowell Thomas
Follow Me
Latest posts by Lowell Thomas (see all)