Surfer SEO Review- Does It Work

Surfer SEO is a website-based application that gives you a precise method of correcting a page in the search results. Surfer SEO analyzes more than 500 search rankings to determine what to do to rank high in Google SERPs. Surfer SEO is a great tool for ranking high in data-driven search engine results. There are a lot of aspects that go into search ranking factors. Surfer SEO, based in Poland, has found a way to include these in its content score metrics.

Beware though the greenlight from SurferSEO does not equal a high ranking page. I have used SurferSEO for months now and have not found a correlation between going for the greenlight and a high-ranking post. Google is not run by SurferSEO and it uses different criteria than SurferSEO does to rank pages.

I have written on other AI-related tools such as Jenni.ai and Scalenut too.

SurferSEO helps you to write optimized content and refine your SEO strategy and create a better content strategy. This will help your agency or business grow your audience and maximize your SEO efforts. SurferSEO has a good set of on-page SEO tools such as keyword research, a content editor, an page optimization tool, and a SERP analyzer tool as well.

You can create a new article outline and start writing in minutes with SurferSEO software. SurferSEO integrates well with Google Docs. You can track keyword density to avoid keyword stuffing.

There are three tiers for SurferSEO.

• The basic plan, for small businesses

• Pro plan for multiple websites

• Business plan for larger organizations

My SurferSEO Review

What Does It Do Right -

What Does It Do Wrong -

Let me start with a basic overview of what you need for basic SEO results. This is also my method for how I rank content in SERPs. The basics of SEO are not really complicated but many Youtube videos and teachers of SEO want to make it all sound very complicated and confusing. I am sure their systems work for them but the basics of SEO that will get you pretty much 60% there are:

• Keyword in title

• Keywords in the Title tag and Page description

• Keywords sprinkled 3-5 times per 300 words throughout your piece

  That’s it. You are now most of the way there to get your content to rank for your given keyword. There are a few other things such as internal links and backlinks that help. And dwell time is a concept whose skill comes with creating quality content. Google has said in the past and now that it is looking for quality content first and foremost. One way to measure that is with how long a reader stays on the page.

There are two parts to SurferSEO I use The Most

• Content Editor

• Keyword Research Tool

The Keyword Research tool is exactly what it sounds like. A keyword tool for deciding which keywords would be of value to use in a blog post or content pillar. Entering a keyword into this tool returns a series of related keywords to your topic keyword. It is not necessary to write content around each and every related keyword.

The image below is from the keyword “AI prompt engineer” keyword. Each topic card is designed to be turned into a blog post for your blog or for your own website. Clicking the purple button and it SurferSEO will produce a bare starting version of your potential blog post.

What I really want to cover though is does SurferSEO really work when it comes to using their ranking factors for a page. Does following their guidelines really give you an edge in SERP and does it help keep you there.

SurferSEO rankings

The two images above are from a SurferSEO audit I did on a website that already ranks number one for its target keyword. This is Tom Gil’s website RealEstate Copywriter. He ranks number one for RealEstate copywriter and has for some time.

Using the Audit tool with SurferSEO it looks as if he has some work to do. According to the first image, his score may be 52 - according to SurferSEO - which is lower than those ranking in positions four and five.

The second image shows his word count rankings and again even though he ranks number one it is shown that he needs to work on this page. This shows that it is too short to be of much value. But that image also shows that SurferSEO is looking for how many bolded words are used on the page. This is misleading.

How you use bolded text is contextual and stating that more is better is not always the case. For the most part, the leading SEO experts I follow such as Jacob McMillen, and Matt Diggity don’t concern themselves with how often they have bolded text.

Using <bold> or <strong> tags on your keywords may add a little to your over other ranking factors but they are not a leading indicator of quality content. This is a cosmetic factor on the page, not a factor that would raise you in SERP necessarily.

Again here SurferSEO is using broad ideas about ranking factors and using them to give your page a score. The point of a blog post is to give advice and give value to the reader. The best measurement of that may be dwell time or time on the page not the number of paragraphs or how many words in total you have on your page.

The length of your content is not the sole ranking factor. Google has said that the point of a post is to satisfy search intent. Again using the length or number of bolded words or sections in a score is misleading. Also, Semrush has studied the use of bolding keywords and has found no substantial difference in organic search results.

Latent semantic indexing Keywords

This is not something that Google uses. Others may call this an old-school assessment but Google has said it does not use that technology for ranking. Google considers it old technology. There are however words that are related to your main keyword and those should be included in your piece but spending a lot of time worrying if you have LSI covered or not is misleading.

Google is not reading your post. Using related and contextual keywords will help improve readers and Google to understand your blog post. The point in ranking is to make your content useful for readers and that will lead to a higher ranking of your content. You don’t need to be scientific about it.

In the final analysis, SurferSEO can help you to rank your content but the scoring system seems dated and not very useful. The green light you receive, once you have satisfied their content scoring system, misrepresents things Google has said about ranking factors for blog writing.

SurferSEO does not get its data from Google when it comes to analyzing your page. They don’t say where their data comes from, but it could be a system of web scraping, and algorithm work as SEMRush has employed. SERanking on the other hand gathers data from Google directly.

Most reviews you will find on YouTube will not do much more than just explain what the SurferSEO does. It’ll list the features and how to use each feature. This is one such video. Most videos will be the same thing. They never get into whether SurferSEO actually works. Though most of these vids are for affiliate links which means they are biased. They want you to use the product they are talking about.