Surfer SEO Review – Save Hours of Keyword Research and Outline Preparation

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Last Updated on February 24, 2023 by Mandy Schmitz

Surfer SEO Blog Title Image

This piece will put the Surfer SEO tool to the test, and with that, you will know how it compares to other popular keyword research tools on the market and if it is worth buying.

As you already know, keyword research is the basis of any online marketing campaign. It requires brainstorming seed keywords to write about and building-related keywords to those seed keywords. But it doesn’t stop there because you have to use keyword research tools like Google Keyword Planner or SEMRush by plugging several keyword ideas into them.

And if you think that is all, you’re wrong!

It is time to eliminate those keywords that don’t meet the criteria for monthly search volume, CPC estimates, keyword difficulty scores, and other metrics. Sounds familiar? Then, you can start creating a landing page or writing a helpful piece about the best keyword on the list.

For us, marketers and bloggers, this process is very time-consuming and tiring! But what if you could speed up your keyword research process using Surfer SEO? Our team uses this tool and is amazed by its performance.

What is Surfer SEO?

Surfer SEO is a cloud-based SEO tool geared towards marketers, writers, and developers who need page-by-page website optimization. The keyword research tool will optimize your blog posts, website pages, and website online presence to increase your site traffic and reach the highest ranking on search engines.

There is more and more competition in any industry or niche regarding running a scalable and profitable online business. In addition, organic SEO traffic is getting more complicated as more big brands invest in search engine traffic and content marketing.

This SEO tool solves all these problems for you as a perfect on-page SEO tool that can help with your content generation process, including creativity, editing, and auditing for the best SEO optimization.

Let’s take a look at some Surfer SEOs features:

1. Surfer SEO Features

Solving Your Keyword Research and Outline Preparation Headache

Surfer SEO has an intuitive interface where you can generate keyword ideas for your posts regarding content marketing. First, enter the primary seed keyword you intend to target into the software. Then, get results for that keyword by clicking on ‘Content Planner.’

The querying process takes a few seconds. Then, the software will present you with some specific keyword clusters. Then, it will group these clusters based on some keyword ideas. Next is filtering these clusters using each cluster’s keywords, average search intent, and volume. You will have product comparisons, listicles, informational content, or local search as the intent.

Keyword Research

surfer seo
surferseo.com

This feature is not the main one for Surfer SEO. However, you can perform basic keyword research with the built-in keyword research module and find related primary seed keywords. This feature can help in many ways, including:

  • Identifying country-specific search suggestions and volume
  • Filtering to discover question-based keywords
  • Seeing the same keyword volume as your primary search term
  • Finding multiple or single keywords’ search volume simultaneously

Click here to start getting relevant keywords quickly for your site.

SERP Analyzer

surfer seo SERP Analyzer
surferseo.com

If you want to dive into in-depth information on your target keywords, this feature has you covered. It will show you a graphical display of the entire parameters affecting your ranking, between the average number of words and the ranking position. The feature considers more than 500 ranking factors, including:

  • Number of headings
  • Meta tags
  • Referring URLs and domains
  • Keyword density
  • Page speed scores
  • Word count

Check out the SERP Analyzer Now.

Content Planner

surfer seo
surferseo.com

The software will show you all the domain’s posts with a content score detail overview with the Content Planner. Awesome! It provides you a bird’s eye view of your posts. Thus, selecting those you intend to optimize further becomes pretty easy since the feature states the source of the difficulty score.

Content Audit

surfer seo audit
surferseo.com

While Surfer SEO helps write fresh content, the tool also helps optimize or test current published content or content you intend to publish. Get a detailed insight into those posts by inputting your target keyword or article’s URL into this feature. The feature can also help break down:

  • Meta description and title length suggestions
  • Time to first byte and page load-time
  • Whether there are sufficient images and headers
  • Suggested ranges, bolded word count, heading word count, or word count
  • Missing LSI keywords
  • Missing essential backlinks that competitors have

Content Brief

surfer seo keywords
surferseo.com

The Content Brief allows you to create your post outline. This process includes getting the H1, H2, H3, and the rest through the AI-generated content suggestion. If you are looking to generate your post outline quickly and get your posts up and running in a short time, you will find this feature quite handy.

Other Features

surfer seo
surferseo.com

Other features include:

  • Visibility and backlink analysis – they are in the SERP Analyzer’s beta, but you can find additional backlink information with it.
  • Keyword surfer extension – this free Google Chrome extension gives you the chance to research monthly keyword volume and related keyword ideas.
  • User-friendly interface – reports can be complicated at times. However, it is pretty intuitive to use this tool to dig into data.

2. Pricing and Free Trial of Surfer SEO

PlanFee
30 Day TrialFree
Basic Plan$59/month
Pro Plan$99/month
Business Plan$199/month

The free trial should give you enough time to verify if Surfer SEO is for you or not, but I am sure you won’t be disappointed. Even this article outline has been prepared with the help of Surfer SEO.

3. Surfer SEO Advantages – The Things We Love About It

Surfer SEO has everything covered with its competitor-based content audit feature, which visually shows you what will move the ‘SEO needle.’ One of the crucial things that endear our team is moving several of our pages in the SERPs.

While you can carefully add chosen pages, you can also exclude all pages when doing audits. The tool allows you to use the eye icon to exclude URLs. With that, you can filter out non-related blog posts and product pages to improve the success rate.

Note: If you and your team need the perfect tool to manage your projects and workflows, take a minute to read this comprehensive post here.

Other things our team loves about this tool are:

Ranking Factors

This tool utilizes over 500 ranking factors to compare any site with its competitors, ranking high on SERPs.

Multiple Views

You can access the tool through chart view, table view, or SERP view.

Semantic Analysis

Identify keyword comparisons used among the top sites.

Easy SEO Audit

surfer seo audit
surferseo.com

A game of trying and failing is SEO optimization, except you have a reliable tool like Surfer SEO by your side. Its exceptional auditing tool enables you to compare your competitors’ pages to yours within seconds. In addition, you will get ‘warnings’ on the strength and weakness pages when auditing your pages.

Content Structure Assistance

Page structure is quite vital to the on-page SEO keyword and frequency. Your pages must have accurate elements like proper media, H tags, meta descriptions, meta tags, titles, and more. This tool gets you covered for all these. Additionally, you don’t have to scrape data from any different software, as you can see all errors in a single dashboard.

Specific LSI Keywords

You will only see related searches taken from Google from most available software that provides LSI keywords. This software offers specific LSI keywords like primary keyword-related phrases or contextual keywords.

Easy to Use

Our team believes that it can be pretty challenging to use any tool with a complex or hard-to-navigate interface, regardless of how helpful they can be. As such, the user-friendly interface is one of the main reasons for loving this tool. With it, you won’t spend your time searching for the right button to click on and focus on the work. Ultimately, you get your results in a visually appealing mode, making it easier to see their meanings.

4. Surfer SEO Disadvantages – Things We Don’t Love About It

First, we used to have some drawbacks to this tool. However, the team behind the software has improved on people’s feedback on the software and made it better step-by-step. However, even with that, there are some issues with the editor. Here are some of the things we don’t like about Surfer SEO.

  • In the Google Add-on, the editor’s right side has no toggle. It would be helpful if that gets updated in the future for ease of use.
  • It’s not combinable the Grammarly Chrome extension.
  • Unaligned bulleted lists.
  • The keyword tool features are not the best on the market. For us, it is an underdeveloped part of the tool. The metrics are not clear enough, and results differ when rechecked on Ahrefs or other keyword tools. However, the software will work well for you if you have no metrics or are okay with broader terms.
  • There can be readability compromise due to some suggestions from the tool. For example, while it is perfect for editing some words here and there, too many tips can impact the content readability.
  • Your chosen plan will determine the number of queries you can perform. The business plan has 50 queries per day, which is the most considerable number of queries. Big agencies won’t find this limitation funny, even though it could be too much for small businesses.

5. Who Is Surfer SEO For?

It isn’t anything groundbreaking that this SEO tool is helpful for some companies and businesses. Many marketers know that the data any SEO tool builds gives them their SEO knowledge. Businesses that use these tools want a more robust SEO strategy by accessing easy-to-use, reliable, and accurate SEO tools like Surfer SEO. In addition, they can gain insight into how their competitors make their SEO efforts and how their website performs.

Therefore, businesses that use it include:

  • Agencies
  • Freelancers
  • Copywriters
  • Webmasters
  • Bloggers
  • eCommerce

6. Who Is Surfer SEO Not For?

Any offline businesses that don’t need to acquire leads and sales online may not need Surfer SEO. It will not give them any benefit since the tool works primarily to boost SEO.

Customer Experiences With Surfer SEO

While users’ experiences differ, these Surfer SEO users benefit from this SEO software by gathering and grouping keywords into clusters and topics. With that, they can find article topics. On a site like g2.com, users confessed to getting value from the tool as it provides them with objective scores, and they can analyze on-page scores. They also get value for data amount and analysis types under a subscription.

On Capterra, the story is the same, as users claim that it is the best SEO tool for SEO professionals and copywriters. They use the software to offer services to clients and even rank their website pages for their targeted keywords. They find this tool pretty easy to use, and following keyword directions is like playing a fun game.

Even with that, users’ experience reviewed on the two sites is filled with some drawbacks, including keyword features that are not robust enough, and others talked about the NLP credits that are not unlimited. Many of them claimed they would like more queries/credits per month, and there are only 20 content planner queries in the Basic Plan.

Somewhat wonky interface sections are one of the users’ complaints on the two platforms. For others, the software doesn’t enable them to find any black spot, which boils down to the limited NLP.

Generally, most of these users find the SEO tool a great tool that saves them work hours. They can repair their years of SEO damage, and many cannot write any content with the software.

How to Use Surfer SEO

You can use Surfer SEO for most of your on-page optimization processes. However, if you intend to use it for finding targeted keywords, it is a straightforward process. First, type the keyword you want to target into the dashboard and click enter. You have the choice of desktop and mobile. Next, click on country or flag to select your search location. With that, you can get well-matched results for any given area.

You have the option of using the complete analysis that applies to each URL’s Google bot screenshot. You can also send the team at Surfer SEO an email on support@serferseo.com if you can’t find your desired location, and they will help to add it instantly.

1. SERP View

surfer seo SERP view
surferseo.com

Using the tool to get SERP view means getting all results you list in SERP. You can identify Google’s displayed description and specific meta titles. With that, you can exclude any URL from the chart or highlight them. Other features you can use in this view are:

  • Eye icon to exclude URL
  • Chart icon to highlight URL
  • Icon to spy competitors’ content

2. Using It for Writing and Optimizing

surfer seo optimzing
surferseo.com

The Surfer Content Editor will let you cover your targeted topics as detailed as possible. This feature can even generate a list of phrases and words required for ranking based on Surfer’s original algorithms and top-ranking pages.

Essentially, you will need to pick your targeted phrase before creating your first draft. Surfer offers several ways of doing this. You can discover information about multiple related terms and the main keyword with the same result level in the Keyword Research tool.

3. Create a Draft

It is time to create a query in Content Editor after getting your targeted keywords. You can generate multi-keyword or one-keyword analysis with Content Editor. First, type your query in the dashboard to create a query for a keyword, and click on the ‘create a query’ button. Then, type some phrases in the query to create a multi-keyword analysis. In addition, you can create one joined query or three separate queries.

The Surfer SEO Google Add-On

One of the most dependable SEO Chrome extensions is the Surfer Google Chrome extension. It helps content creators optimize their content while writing it. Load the extension as you draft your content, and then add your keyword content to the software.

You can identify an optimal number of required images, paragraphs, headings, and words with it. In addition, the tool will show you the primary terms you must use with their frequency for post-optimization. You will also get some headings you will need to add to your post. Generally, the tool provides question lists for your post’s FAQ section.

Click here to add Surfer Google Chrome extension

1. How to Install the Surfer SEO Google Add-On

Installing the Surfer SEO Google add-on is not rocket science. You can download and install the tool and start using it. It will install when you download it. Then, click the browser icon to set your desired country.

2. How to Use the Surfer SEO Google Add-On

Surfer uses Google’s interface to provide detailed insights for users. Since this Google add-on is completely free, you don’t need to pay for other applications or log into them before analyzing Google search results.

The extension also allows you to get required data inside SERPs, an excellent part of the software. You can also type in a targeted phrase or keyword and get tons of data, including:

  • Estimated organic traffic
  • Quality backlinks
  • Related terms
  • Keyword suggestions
  • Search volumes

With planned and specific keywords from this extension, any user can plan a valuable and solid content marketing strategy based on all the detailed data.

What Are the Best Surfer SEO Alternatives and Competitors?

While we believe that you can use the Surfer SEO tool to create and optimize content for search engines based on topics, structure, and length. Therefore it may not be perfect for some people who claim that its SEO audit and content optimization features are subpar. That is why our team presents you with some alternatives.

1. Topic

Topic
usetopic.com

You can use Topic’s content optimization and content briefs to streamline your content workflow. It is simple to use, and you can uncover questions your audience may ask, analyze competing articles, and search intent. In addition, the topic will help you automate time-consuming and manual research processes. With that, you can work on how to have valuable and informative content.

Key Features

  • Content grader
  • AI-powered brief generation
  • Research section

Pros

  • Easy-to-use, minimal, and sleek
  • Powerful content optimization
  • Unmatched AI-driven content brief generation

Cons

  • Sometimes inaccurate AI-generated headlines
  • Expensive compared to other SEO tools
  • No technical SEO features

Click here to get Topic today.

2. Clearscope

clearscope
clearscope.io

One of the content optimization tools that revolutionized the SEO sector is Clearscope. You can use this tool to create content that Google and readers will love. Its strength lies in the AI-driven optimization feature. You can eliminate guesswork and save time while getting tips on what to provide your readers. Identify and discover actionable insights on LSI keywords, content depth, and content relevance by putting your draft into the software.

Key Features

  • Competition analysis
  • Content insights
  • Technical SEO
  • SEO change tracking
  • SEO auditing
  • Search rank

Pros

  • Easier to use than Surfer SEO
  • It uses writing assistance features
  • Exceptional quality content optimization

Cons

  • Pricey than some other tools
  • No competitor analysis feature
  • No technical SEO features

Get started with Clearscope today.

3. Frase

frase
frase.io

Frase uses chatbot integration to answer any questions readers can have, which is where its strength lies as a content answering engine platform. You will get content brief generation using the tool. It also delivers a massive list of subtopics where you can select relevant ones as you sift through them.

Key Features

  • Custom reports
  • Data visualization
  • Competitor analysis
  • Localization
  • Content insights
  • SERP rank tracking
  • Keyword research
  • SEO auditing
  • SEO alerting

Pros

  • Content optimization
  • Topic modeling
  • Content brief
  • Questions to answer
  • Robust Q&A features

Cons

  • Lacks a keyword research tool
  • Weak content optimization
  • No technical SEO features

Click here to start using Frase for free.

Our Verdict

To wrap up this guide, our team believes that Surfer SEO is one of the top-performing and best SEO tools to add to your stack if you want to start getting the best results from your on-page optimization efforts. It’s a helpful software to track your posts’ optimization, and it also offers you comprehensive insights on how to optimize your content effectively.

Even though you will get limited NLP credits with the basic plan, try this tool for your overall SEO strategy since it provides excellent content optimization results. On top of that, it will save you hours of keyword research and outline preparation, valuable time which you can use to focus on more strategic aspects of your business.

Register now for Surfer SEO to optimize your content

Now go and check out Surfer SEO, but we encourage you to come back later to read this in-depth article about how to unleash the magic of marketing and scale your business to another level while remaining on top of the competition.

Mandy Schmitz
Mandy Schmitzhttps://mandyschmitz.com
Mandy Schmitz is a freelance consultant and project management expert with 10+ years of experience working internationally for big brands in fintech, consumer goods and more. Join me here on Changeaholic.com to learn how to optimize your business operations and find the latest product & software reviews.

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Mandy Schmitz is a freelance consultant and project management expert with 10+ years of experience working internationally for big brands in fintech, consumer goods and more. Join me here on Changeaholic.com to learn how to optimize your business operations and find the latest product & software reviews.

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