What is Surfer SEO
Surfer SEO is an SEO tool used for helping websites and pages improve their rankings, irrespective of what Google or other search engines do. This review will delve into the techniques and strategies of Surfer SEO which offers you suggestions on how to rank higher.
SEO Marketers are always searching for new tools or strategies that can give them a boost in their rankings on search engines. On the other hand, search engines are continuously fine-tuning their algorithms to provide relevant, useful, reliable, and authoritative search results for their users.
Surfer SEO aims to analyze and interpret the search engine results and to use these results to enhance website rankings.
Some people assume that on-page SEO aims to make the website suited to the search engine algorithms and that the ideal website is the one that ranks for Google. At least, this is the idea you get when you see people blindly follow the Google Webmaster Guide, without knowing what Google wants to offer to its users.
Though, there is a contrasting view on this. This perspective states that websites are locked in a competition to climb up in the rankings, based on the guidelines. And that the algorithms follow the guidelines. It is important to consider that guidelines are published whereas the algorithms are never published.
To put it in another way, there is a ranking, and there are pages which rank. By using on-page SEO optimization to compete against those pages, it is imperative to know what your competitors are doing so to outrank them. With Surfer SEO, you will be provided with this information in a practicable form.
Once you’re aware of what your competitors are doing, you can overtake them on the search engine rankings. Study your competitors – what types of content they produce, where they share their content, and learn about the ranking factors. Some years back, this strategy included posting backlinks wherever the competitors posted them. After some changes in the algorithm, it became a contest to post the finest and most authoritative articles, aiming to become the topic or keyword authority.
Even though the above guidelines haven’t changed, what has changed is that in earlier times some ranking factors were not considered by SEO experts, but are now considered. However, the million-dollar question remains – what does a website need out of SEO tools to rank?
What can Sufer SEO Tool contribute?
Surfer SEO can help you greatly in understanding search engine results pages (SERP). It surveys the top 48 of the SERP and analyzes these pages.
It provides you with all the important information including ranking factors about the top search results. The other important things the data will uncover include the length of the article, which keywords are used, how many images are used, the frequency of header tags, the title length, meta-description length, the frequency of keywords in the article, etc. All this data will be available to you so you can compare your site to your competitors.
These SEO reports compare an entire list of items and show you these ranking factors as a to-do list. For instance, if the top search results websites have an average word count of 2,500 whereas your website’s average word count is only 500, you would need to increase the length of your articles. Secondly, if your competitor’s video posts average more than 10 minutes, and your videos are only 2 minutes, then you would know what is to be done with your video content. By using Surfer SEO, you have to trust the results and follow these suggestions. After looking at the reports, you can decide on the things you need to work on to beat your competitors.
In most instances, Surfer SEO suggests to you what your site needs to do. It creates a plan for your website to rank on the first page of search engine results. So, before you intend to write an article or long-form content, do check the statistics of your competitors. Moreover, you can enhance your existing articles by comparing them with your competitors. Whenever you’re working on something new or planning to improve the existing content, you can use the keyword and competition comparison.
Surfer SEO Pricing
Surfer SEO has four pricing plans: Free, Copywriter, Freelancer, and Agency.
Surfer SEO Free
This free plan allows you to use 3 keywords analyzer queries per day. These queries analyze more than a hundred factors, with mobile scraping and a shareable audit. Due to its limited functionality, it does not demonstrate enough power.
Copywriter
This plan provides a maximum of 5 keyword analyzer queries per day. Also, it offers a content editor that allows up to 5 writings every month. It is much more powerful as it uses more than 250 factors, with mobile scraping and a shareable audit. It provides you with a personal walkthrough on demand. This plan is priced at $19 per month.
Freelancer
The Freelancer plan is sufficient for a single website run by an SEO/Digital marketer. It will offer you 15 keyword analyzer queries per day, and a content editor with a maximum of 15 writings per month. Also, it will include a shareable audit, mobile scraping, uses prominent keywords, and a personal walkthrough on demand. There are more features included in this offer such as Google bot screenshot, page speed metrics, on-page link analysis, estimated traffic, keywords analysis, and backlink analysis.
Agency
This is a full-service plan that includes everything the Freelancer program offers; however, it offers 50 keyword analyzer queries per day, content editor with more than 50 writings per month, and a maximum of 100 per day Domain Analyzer reports on new domains.
Surfer SEO Features
Actionable Results:
Surfer SEO creates an on-page data-driven SEO strategy. So it saves you precious time and effort; you need no trial-and-error. This data-driven strategy shows you exactly what needs to be done to optimize your SEO. There is no room for error in this strategy. You can fully rely on it.
As the Surfer SEO will show you the statistics for top-ranked websites on SERP, this information can be used to enhance and optimize your content. After acting upon the recommendations of Surfer SEO, you will see the expected results. An SEO campaign takes time for the results to show, but with Surfer SEO, you can see the direction towards attaining top positions on search engine rankings.
Simple Design and Workflow
Surfer SEO uses a lot of data and numbers. There is a ton of information to understand which can be a little puzzling to the user. But to make it easy for the users, the design of the website is user-friendly. It is simple to understand so you can get the required information without any hassle. This makes the whole process much easier for users.
Clean Interface
An analysis tool can be messy and difficult to understand. But this is not the case with Surfer SEO. The interface is presentable, clean, and great emphasis has been placed on making it understandable. You won’t find any useless and unimportant date on the site. A clutter-free, simple, and clean interface makes it much easier to understand data.
Data-Driven SEO Strategy
The old way of SEO strategy is trial and error. Using this method, SEO strategists test different things to find out what the algorithm is.
But, the new SEO strategy is a data-driven one. It works by collecting all the required data regarding search engine results and then formulates a strategy by giving you recommendations for your website. This assumes that whatever the top ranking sites are doing can be replicated by your website to attain a higher ranking. By this reasoning, a lot of website parameters are analyzed so to find a metric that can be followed to rank higher.
By using this data-driven strategy, you don’t require any other SEO strategy other than which can be used on the website. This strategy doesn’t consider the age of those websites which rank high on search engine results. And it also doesn’t involve requiring a lot of backlinks. What it depends on are different parameters that can be found in the top-ranking sites. So, it assumes that replicating the characteristics of those websites should lead to similar results.
There could be as many as a hundred websites analyzed for hundreds of different parameters; it all depends on which SEO software you’re using. Surfer SEO uses less than 50 of the high-ranking sites, surveying them for 100-500 different ranking factors or parameters. After analyzing, Surfer SEO will offer you suggestions for enhancing your website’s SEO.
By using this method, Google can change algorithms overnight which lead to change in SERP. Change in search engine results is expected because of the competition. Websites are frequently changing to outrank their competitors and this reflects on the ranking which usually keeps fluctuating.
TFIDF: The Core of Data-Driven Algorithms
One of the key statistics in data-driven algorithms is “term frequency times the inverse document frequency”. It measures the significance of a keyword across all documents in a collection.
Term Frequency means ‘the number of times a word is used in a document’. Higher frequency means ‘more significance’. Document frequency refers to ‘the number of documents in a group, which contains the term’. It doesn’t matter if the term is used many several times in a document; the document which contains the term is counted. The term inverse document frequency means “if a term is used too frequently, then its significance decreases.
TFDIF is then calculated by counting the frequency of a term in a document and divided by the number of documents which contain that term.
With this metric, medical, academic, scientific, and research papers would have a higher effect on the ranking of a post.
More importantly, Google uses this statistic in its algorithms, and the data-driven SEO tools consider it as a ranking factor. Also, SEO/Digital Marketers choose their keywords by using TFDIF.
With Surfer SEO, content optimization starts with targeting keywords with a high TFDIF value. However, this is not an absolute value; you can use the relative value instead. A keyword is selected according to the searches with high term frequency, but with a small number of website (document frequency). This leads to a smaller number of searches, from several hundred to thousands, but as there are only a few numbers of sites which contain this keyword, there are more chances of getting traffic.
On-page SEO is about optimizing individual web pages and posts to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic on search engines. Surfer SEO uses these metrics to give you an idea of the competition for a specific keyword. Websites are competing with other websites in providing the best compliance to the search algorithms.
To appear on the first page of SERP, your website doesn’t need to beat all the websites in the world instead it only needs to outrank against a small subset of websites, with the same high TDIF keyword.
Structured Data Analysis
This analysis takes an in-depth look at your schema markups for each of the top SERP. Each of the URLs on the SERP is analyzed and compared with your website. This allows you to fine-tune and adjust your website, according to the high-ranked competitors. This is a huge advantage for many reasons, mainly because website admins and developers infrequently analyze their own schema diagrams. The other key benefit is that it educates the website owner and admins about the use and relevance of schemas to search rankings.
True Density in Audit
The Surfer SEO Website replaced the “Missing Common Words & Phrases” section with “True Density”. True Density analyzes the frequency of keywords, their page, and website density with emphasis on whether it is used too much or not enough in the web pages.
The analysis of keywords in this way provides you with a list of significant words or phrases in regards to website visitors. It tells you what keywords the users are searching on search engines. This helps you adjust your website according to user expectations.
Content Editor
There is a big divide between copywriters and SEO experts/managers. This is where the Content Editor comes into play as it helps to bridge this gap. Content Editor offers users a great advantage over other SEO tools. It is not merely an editor; it is much more than that. It tallies keywords for a website or web page. So it gives you a target to aim at. The keyword goals are presented as a list of keywords and phrases. These keywords and phrases are used on websites including those are that are ranked on page one on search engines.
Some other suggested related keywords can be used to optimize your rankings. This feature is more aggressive than it might seem. It makes the job much easier for the copywriter or SEO expert because all he has to do is authoritatively write the article. In short, this is a powerful and effective SEO tool.
Surfer SEO Pros and Cons
Pros:
- A comprehensive and easy-to-understand workflow. You won’t have any difficulty in comprehending the tools.
- 500-plus ranking factors used in comparing a given website with other top-ranked websites on SERP.
- Semantic Analysis: It displays a comparison of keywords used between the top-ranked websites.
- Popular words and phrases and a Content Editor: This provides keywords and phrases commonly used in other websites. This gives you an idea as to what topics to write on. And while you’re writing the article on the Content Editor, it will provide you with a list of suggested keywords and their frequency.
- Multiple views: It has a SERP view, Chart view, and a Table view.
- Audit: This tool uses predefined ranking factors to compare the top 5 sites on the SERP, and compared with any other website. So you can compare your site with the top 5 sites, and the auditing tool will tell you how to revise your content.
- It analyzes the information about the top-ranked websites, and then gives you recommendations to improve your website or page.
Cons:
- Even the full-service plan has a limit of 50 queries per day. This may not be enough for a big agency.
- A limited number of ranking factors are considered. There are only 80+ ranking factors in the report.
- There is an issue of transparency as the metrics of other websites is not shown, instead only their average is displayed.
Conclusion:
Surfer SEO is an authoritative tool for data-driven SEO analysis. It consists of a powerful set of tools with ease of use. Overall, it will be safe to say that it is comparatively the best SEO tool.
