Surfer SEO

Surfer SEO is an online tool for optimizing your web pages to rank high among search engine results.

I will tell you about my experiences using Surfer SEO to improve my ranking on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs), what I like about Surfer SEO, and what could be improved.

As a business development manager at a small business looking to expand its client base, my website’s SEO couldn’t be more important to me.

If you are like me, you’re looking for an SEO tool that will get you high rankings without being too complicated or cumbersome to use.

You likely want an SEO tool that informs you about your website’s performance while ensuring you know which changes can optimize your website ranking across search engines.

Let’s explore Surfer SEO so you can learn more about what it offers and whether it is the right product for you.

What is Surfer SEO?

Surfer SEO is an online optimization tool that promises to make your website “rise to the 1st page of Google with less than 30 minutes of Surfer optimization.”

Surfer SEO features include a content planner, a brief or outline generator, a content editor, and an auditor that work together to help you create on-age SEO that will improve your site’s performance on SERPs.

This Surfer SEO review will cover these features and more.

Keep in mind that SEO is a multi-pronged strategy that involves much more than on-page SEO; you also need to establish authority for your site through backlinks and structure your site in a way that it’s easily crawlable and indexed.

You can consider Surfer SEO just one tool in your SEO toolkit.

While Surfer SEO can help, it’s not a magic bullet for getting your site to the #1 spot on Google.

What you will get with Surfer SEO is a set of features that will help you identify topics and keywords for your content, guide you through content creation and editing, and assess how optimal your pages are.

Unlike industry giants that offer all-in-one SEO packages, like Semrush and Moz, what you will get with Surfer SEO is a finely honed tool for improving on-page SEO content to optimize your website’s discoverability for keywords and click-throughs to your pages.

Surfer SEO History

Surfer was founded in Poland in 2017 by a group of five friends who worked in marketing, engineering, and development.

This group of friends wanted to create a combined platform for entrepreneurs that provided content creation, keyword research, website optimization, and growth management through SEO.

Their commitment was to accessibility and making products usable by anyone regardless of education, location, or business type.

Surfer SEO was born out of this commitment, ultimately becoming a product used across sectors by many professionals and content creators.

Since 2017, Surfer has grown tremendously.

Today their products are used by over 15,000 businesses in 140 countries across the globe.

The team has grown as well, from the original five to what is today a team of over 50 developers, designers, engineers, and marketers.

How Much Does Surfer SEO Cost?

Surfer SEO is available in three different plans: basic, pro, and business.

The basic plan costs $49 per month and will get you access to the Grow Flow feature for one website that will allow you to put your website on SEO autopilot; tools to write and optimize up to 10 articles each month; auditing of 20 pages each month; and Natural Language Processing (NLP) enhanced guidelines for the first month only.

At the basic level, only one member of your team will be able to access Surfer SEO.

If you upgrade to the pro plan, you will be looking at a bill of $99 per month.

With this plan, your Grow Flow access increases to five websites; you can write and optimize up to 30 articles and audit up to 60 pages per month; you have unlimited access to NLP enhanced guidelines and; up to 3 team members can access the platform.

At the business level, the cost increases to $199 per month.

At this level, you get Grow Flow access for 10 websites; the ability to write and optimize up to 70 articles per month; auditing of 140 pages per month; unlimited access to NLP enhanced guidelines; the ability to invite up to 10 team members to access Surfer SEO; white labeling, Application Programming Interface (API)  and much more.

Is Surfer SEO Worth the Cost?

In my opinion, Surfer SEO is worth the cost if you’re looking to optimize your search result ranking so that people ultimately click through to your website and buy your product or service.

Why Surfer SEO Is Worth the Cost

You can think of Surfer SEO as an investment that will ultimately pay off in more sales for you and higher revenue for your company.

Remember, the purpose of SEO is to get found by more potential customers and clients so that your sales increase

On the other hand, if you’re a content creator who is not in the sales business, and who will not immediately see results in increased revenue, Surfer SEO may not be worth the cost for you.

You will get higher ranking results and more click-throughs with Surfer SEO, but only you can tell if that’s worth the cost when no sales are involved.

Pros of Surfer SEO

• This product is intuitive and easy to use, especially for those new to SEO.
• Surfer SEO is a comprehensive tool for on-page SEO, with features for planning your content, outlining before you write, and editing for high optimization.
• This product is also less expensive than products offered by competitors.

Cons of Surfer SEO

While Surfer SEO is great for on-page SEO, it doesn’t have much to offer in the way of technical and off-page SEO.

You will also find that Surfer SEO is not customizable to your business; you get the tools as they have been honed by developers.

While I love Surfer SEO’s integrations, you will find they are limited only to Google Docs and WordPress, so you can’t integrate the product with other word processors or web hosts.

The Problem Surfer SEO Solves

Surfer SEO solves the problem of not being found online.

If your potential customers or clients can’t find you online, you might be missing out on product and service sales because people don’t know who you are or what you have to offer.

If you’ve searched for keywords related to your products or services online and don’t see your company at the top on SERPs, your website isn’t as optimized as it could be for search engine ranking.

Surfer designed its tool to address this exact problem.

Why Would Somebody Want To Use Surfer SEO?

Surfer SEO will help you identify keywords to include in your content, outline and develop content that will target those keywords, and identify where your website is lacking in SEO so that your pages rank better.

If you want to see your company among the top results on SERPs when you search industry-related keywords, Surfer SEO may be just the product for you.

Who is Surfer SEO Best For?

Surfer SEO is best for those who are new to the SEO game, meaning those who have not yet considered how to optimize their website for ranking on SERPs.

Why Surfer SEO is Best for Newcomers?

This is because Surfer SEO will take you from the ground up in terms of identifying keywords and generating the kind of content that will rank higher than your competitors.

Surfer SEO is also best for those who don’t already have a content creation plan in place.

Surfer SEO will tell you everything you need to know about content creation that produces results in terms of ranking and click-throughs.

Who Should NOT Use Surfer SEO?

Surfer SEO is not the best product for those who already have an SEO or content creation strategy in place.

If you’ve already identified all the keywords you want to target, including short-, medium-, and long-tail keywords, you don’t need the basic tools Surfer SEO provides.

Similarly, if you’ve already developed a content strategy for inserting keywords optimally into your website and generating new content that will rank on searches, Surfer SEO may not be the best product for you.

Why Seasoned Bloggers Should Not Use Surfer Seo?

This is because you have already done the work Surfer SEO can do for you.

Additionally, if you’re already ranking high across all your keywords, if you’re seeing rich results for your website when you search or analyze, or if your potential customers are clicking through to your site on most of their searches, you probably don’t need Surfer SEO.

This product exists to improve your ranking and click-throughs; there is no need to buy it if there is no room for improvement.

What to Think About Before Buying Surfer SEO

Before buying this software program, there are a few things to consider.

1. Where are you in your SEO strategy?

If you haven’t yet identified your keywords, created content around those keywords, or analyzed your pages for SEO, you need the kind of help Surfer SEO or a similar product can provide.

• What are your goals for SEO?
• Do you want to increase traffic to your website?
• Get more clicks on internal links with fewer bounces?
• Convert visits into sales?

Your answers to these questions will tell you whether you need a product like Surfer SEO.

2. What are you looking for in an SEO product?

Surfer SEO is not primarily an analytics tool.

While it can analyze your pages for SEO, it is not designed to tell you how your site is performing overall.

If you’re looking for a content-generating tool, Surfer SEO may be right for you.

If you’re looking for an analytics tool, you may want to consider another product.

3. How familiar are you with SEO?

If you’re already highly familiar with SEO, you likely know how to identify your target keywords, determine why your competitors are ranking higher than you, and generate a strategy to increase your ranking accordingly.

In this case, Surfer SEO may be too basic a tool for your needs.

4. What type of SEO are you trying to target?

Keep in mind, Surfer SEO’s creators designed it to improve on-page SEO.

If that is your goal, Surfer SEO is a great product.

If on the other hand, your SEO needs are primarily off-page or technical SEO, you will want a different tool and different strategy than Surfer SEO will target.

Features and Benefits of Surfer SEO

Let’s look at Surfer SEO’s four primary features to understand what they do and if they would help meet your SEO needs.

1. Content Planner

This feature will create a months-long content development plan for your website based on identified keywords to target on your pillar pages and articles.

Surfer SEO’s algorithm will identify the most auspicious keywords to target for your intended market and will generate multiple topic areas on which you can write content.

Once Surfer SEO develops your content plan, you can use this feature to track your progress in creating content according to the plan.

This feature is great for developing topic clusters for your site because it takes potentially thousands of keywords and organizes them into groups so that you can create the right content for the right sections of your site, from your landing page to your pillar pages to your articles and blogs.

What’s more, Content Planner will identify the projected intentions of searchers using the keywords identified for your niche market.

Whether your potential customers are just seeking awareness, considering whether to purchase, or are ready to buy, Surfer SEO’s Content Planner will recommend how to write content so it matches the intentions of those searching your identified keywords.

2. Brief

Surfer SEO’s Brief feature will generate outlines for your content organized around the best header and title tags to get your site ranking high on SERPs.

Once you have identified headers, you can write content that best targets your keywords and gives your potential customers the right information at the right time.

With the Brief feature, you can copy and paste Surfer’s suggested outline into your word processing program of choice, or you can write directly under each header inside Surfer SEO.

You will also be able to identify which headers your competitors use so that you rank higher than them on searches.

Brief assures you that all titles and headings are unique, allowing you to generate tailored content for each of your identified keywords under each heading.

With unique content targeted to your various keywords, your potential customers will be able to find you on SERPs and from there, they will discover the content they want, encouraging more click-throughs and higher sales conversion.

3. Content Editor

Once you have developed your strategy using Content Planner and created your outline using Brief, you are ready for Surfer SEO’s Content Editor tool.

I love this feature because Surfer offers extensions that allow you to plug the Content Editor directly into Google Docs or WordPress, so you have the feature available in real-time as you write.

Content Editor is fine-tuned to identify what kind and level of keyword use are getting your competitors highly ranked so that you can emulate their content and beat them in the rankings.

Surfer SEO uses AI technology to determine how prominently keywords feature in your competitors’ content.

From there, this feature will give you real-time feedback to optimize your keyword use as you write so that you don’t under- or overuse keywords, which might minimize your ability to rank highly.

Surfer SEO’s Content Editor gives your work a content score based on your keyword usage that changes in real-time, so you know how well each piece is performing on its keyword use as you write it.

Content Editor offers a multi-keyword analysis so you can target more than one keyword with each piece, encouraging more click-throughs and organic traffic on your site.

4. SEO Audit

If you’re wondering how well your existing site is performing on keyword optimization, speed, backlinks from other sites, and broken or missing links, SEO Audit will tell you.

Unlike Surfer SEO’s other features that only target on-page SEO, this feature will also tell you some things about your site’s technical and off-page SEO.

This will allow you to make changes that improve your discoverability and authority, leading to a higher ranking on SERPs.

With SEO Audit, you will know how well your existing site is performing so that you can make changes to optimize old content for a higher ranking.

What’s more, if you choose a plan that allows you to audit multiple websites, you can offer this feature to your clients or customers so they can optimize their websites.

If you opt into the business plan, you can even whitelabel audit findings and present them to customers as your own.

SEO Audit assesses your site by comparing it with those of competitors who may be outranking you on SERPs.

I love this feature because you can fine-tune this assessment, choosing which competitors with which to be compared.

SEO Audit will also improve your backlinks and link usage, suggesting authoritative sites to which you can link your content and telling you how many pages link to yours.

Surfer SEO Customer Service

If you are unsure how to use Surfer SEO or if you’re having trouble accessing any of its features, you may need to use customer service.

Does Surfer SEO Offer Customer Service?

Surfer SEO primarily offers responsive customer service in the form of an email.

I have found Surfer SEO is responsive; you should expect to hear back from someone within a business day if you reach out to the support team.

In addition to responsive customer service, Surfer SEO offers many learning tools that will help you best navigate the platform and troubleshoot any problems that arise.

What Types of Customer Service Does Surfer SEO Offer?

Surfer SEO maintains a free, online knowledge base you can search on topics related to using the software.

In addition, you will find many YouTube videos on how to use Surfer SEO’s various features, including a free masterclass on SEO writing.

On Surfer’s site you will also find a community option where you can pose questions to other users or view answers to questions already asked; a blog that is regularly updated with new topics related to SEO performance and using Surfer SEO; and an Academy that offers live and recorded training on how to use the platform.

Why Should You Trust Us?

I based this Surfer SEO review on my use as a business development manager looking to improve my website’s SEO. In addition to trying Surfer SEO myself, I scoured the internet to learn more about others’ experiences with Surfer SEO.

Here is what other users have to say.

What Surfer SEO Users are Saying

• “I tried just about every tool that tries to solve on-page problems…
  Thanks to the great complementary content, I managed to pull off good results within a day of using surfer.” – Matthis, SEO Manager
• “I like it a lot. It’s my secret weapon and cuts research time down by half or more.” – J.L.H., Reddit User
• “No one needs to blindly follow every SEO best practice like writing 2,000+ blog posts…
  You can verify the number of words to write in a post with a tool called Surfer SEO.” – Precious Oboidhe, Twitter User

Surfer SEO Alternatives

Here are some of the best Surfer SEO alternatives.

1. MarketMuse

MarketMuse uses AI to help businesses and content creators optimize their content for higher search ranking and greater reader satisfaction.

With MarketMuse, you will get a tool that helps analyze your existing content, identify content topics, generate outlines and briefs for content creation, create marketable content, and plan your keyword usage.

How Does Market Muse Differ From Surfer SEO?

The primary difference users care about between MarketMuse and SurferSEO is the price tag.

MarketMuse paid plans start at $600 per month, making it a much more expensive option than Surfer SEO.

Who Is Market Muse Best For?

MarketMuse is best for larger businesses that can afford the hefty price tag as well as those who want more tools for off-page and technical SEO.

2. Frase

Frase is an AI-powered SEO tool that has two primary features: content creation and search term questions and answers.

With content creation, you will get identified keywords and content suggestions based on what users are searching.

With search term questions and answers, Frase crawls common sites for questions and lets you know what your customers are asking and the answers they seek.

How Does Frase Differ From Surfer SEO?

Frase has fewer features than SurferSEO; you won’t get outline briefs, content editors, or website audits.

Like Surfer SEO, it focuses primarily on on-page SEO, so you won’t learn much about your site’s performance when it comes to SEO that is off-page or technical.

Who Is Market Muse Best For?

Frase is best for freelancers and small businesses looking for a basic SEO package that will help them target keywords with their content

3. Clearscope

Clearscope is a content creating and editing tool that will tell you how well your written content will perform on targeted keywords.

Clearscope uses competitor performance to grade your content according to its likely performance on SERPs.

How Does Clearscope Differ From Surfer SEO?

Clearscope is similar to Surfer SEO’s Content Editor feature in that it will give you a real-time score for your content as you write.

What you don’t get with Clearscope are additional features like website auditing and briefs (although you can create briefs from Clearscope’s suggested keywords).

Who Is Clearscope Best For?

Clearscope is best for those with some SEO experience already under their belt.

It is less intuitive than Surfer SEO and won’t do the work for you by creating your briefs and headers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Here are some of the most common questions about Surfer SEO.

Wrapping Up

If you are a business looking to improve your web traffic and sales or a creator who wants to drive more viewers to your content, Surfer SEO is a great product.

Too often, we create quality content our potential customers will love, but they cannot find it because it does not rank highly enough on SERPs.

If you want potential customers or viewers to find your content and get the right information at the right time to meet their needs, Surfer SEO has a lot to offer.

With three pricing plans tailored to meet your business needs, you can choose the right package for your size, scope, and market.

If you want to explore Surfer SEO or you are ready to purchase the product, you can learn more on Surfer SEO’s website.

By Brett Helling

Brett has been starting, growing, and monetizing websites since 2014. While in college, he began to learn about digital marketing. After graduating, he continued to build a diverse portfolio of websites while working a full time job. After years of building the portfolio on the side, he made the jump to run his websites full time.