Surfer SEO Review: Our Best On-Page Optimization Tool in 2021

If you’re looking at getting started with Surfer SEO tool, This is a practical guide for you. Using the SAAS tool would help save time manually auditing webpages. 

Whether you’re helping your clients improve their rankings, or trying to help your own website take off, undeniably, on-page SEO is one of the core elements to a successful optimization effort.

And while the reasoning behind optimizing your content is clear as day, the “how” factor is, unfortunately, a little muddled.

Sure, you can follow some checklists and best practice recommendations to put your best foot forward. And you’ll likely even see some marginal results from your efforts.

But the next step up would be to do your own research and follow the data you get. This means that you’ll have to:

• Analyze every single keyword
• Go through every top-ranking competitor
• Analyze their content for keyword ratios
• Check their TF/IDF ratios
• And so forth…

It shouldn’t be hard to see the fact that this approach will eat up hours of your time. And I’m not talking about 1-2 hours either. More like 10-20, if not even longer.

Sounds exhausting, right?

What Is Surfer SEO?

Most of us don’t have that sort of time available. And even if we did, the last thing we’d want to spend it on is dissecting web content word by word.

This is where Surfer SEO comes in!

Thanks to the fact that we live in a high-tech world, Surfer SEO allows you to pull all of the most important metrics (and more, they cover over 500 different signals) and compare the top-ranking content for each and every keyword with your own.

Why is this helpful? You get real-time improvement opportunities as you write!

Forget about countless revisions and weeks, if not months, spent testing and waiting for things to rank. With Surfer SEO, you know whether or not you’re on the mark when it comes to your content before you even make it live on your website.

In short, it eliminates any guesswork out of on-page SEO optimization. And it has three user-friendly and powerful tools to help you on your way:

• SERP Analyzer
• Keyword Researcher
• Content Editor

These tools can help you get relevant and accurate insights into the keywords, content, and backlink gap of the top-ranking competitors for the searches you’re looking to target.

And while there is no shortage of on-page SEO tools available to consultants, firms, and business owners alike, Surfer SEO stands high and mighty above them all.

What Makes Surfer SEO So Awesome?

The tool takes over 500 different signals into account to give you precise recommendations, which is already enough of a wow-factor for most people.

But outside of the signals, there are three key things that put Surfer SEO a cut above any other on-page optimization tool that I’ve used and reviewed in the past.

User Friendliness

If you’re an SEO, you’ve probably heard of tools like Cora in the past. They’re effective, deliver lots of value, and give you lots of data. But that’s also where it falls short!

Many of the best on-page tools out there just bombard you with data, dumping all of it on you to decipher, organize, and extract insights from on your own. And if you’re anything less than excited about digging through numbers and sorting data for several hours every time you go looking to refresh and optimize your content, you’re in for a long day.

On the other hand, Surfer SEO not only derives all of the insights, but they also help you make sense of everything with a nice and simple user-friendly interface. Whether you’re looking to optimize your content as you write, or find improvement opportunities for existing pages, it’s all there and easy to do.

So when it comes to the user experience, Surfer SEO managed to make on-page optimization intuitive!

Meaningful Structural Analysis

There’s not a whole lot that’s set in stone when it comes to on-page factors that matter. Unfortunately, most people chalk it all up to the keyword frequency and call it a day.

And when you consider the wealth of data you can pull from your competitors, it’s not easy to figure out what actually matters and what doesn’t, which leads most people to just pull a hail mary and stick with the basics.

In Surfer SEO, when you get recommendations, one of the first things you’ll see is the “correlation meter.” This meter lets you know how strong the correlation between the suggestion and strong rankings is. And in turn, it’s a good indicator of how important any given suggestion would be to implement.

You also get insights into how the top rankers are structuring their pages, and what you’d need to implement on your own page to fall into the best averages.

True LSI Keywords

Latent Semantic Index (LSI) keywords are a bit of a hit-or-miss topic in the SEO industry. And it’s safe to say that most people and tools alike don’t understand what they really are.

While the common misconception is that LSI keywords are related searches scraped from the results for your target keyword, that’s actually entirely wrong and doesn’t really provide much value when it comes to ranking.

In reality, LSI keywords are the contextual keywords that you’ll find seeded throughout the content pieces ranking at the top of the search results for any given term.

And thankfully, Surfer SEO understands this well. The tool provides accurate LSI keywords that are the phrases and terms that are contextually related to your core keyword.

At first glance, you might think that they’re using TF/IDF analysis (which is what most engines use), but in one of their blogs, the Surfer team has gone into a good bit of detail about how and why they opted for prominent keywords instead.

And all you have to do when optimizing your content is making a list of the LSI keywords your top competitors are using, and make sure that they’re included in your content. Easy, right?

What Are The Downsides?

So far,

I’ve been raving about Surfer SEO.

But, just like any other piece of software out there, there’s always something that can be improved and upgraded.

When it comes to Surfer’s shortcomings, there’s really only one thing that stands out.

Their keyword research tool gives you a lot of data. And I mean so much data that it won’t comfortably fit on one screen.

If you’re interested in accessing any date beyond the first five pages of search results, you’ll need to do a relatively confusing manoeuvre. You have to scroll down and then scroll to the right, off-screen, to see the results.

While there are a few kinks to iron out with their interface and how they display some of the results, it’s still leaps and bounds ahead of many other popular tools.

And while it’s not quite on-par user experience wise with content-focused tools like Clearscope, it offers everything you need at an incredibly reasonable price.

My Final Verdict On Surfer SEO

Having covered the most essential points on how Surfer is helping SEO’s crush search, it’s time for a final verdict.

Surfer SEO is one of the best on-page optimization tools available in 2020!

It gives you the ability to optimize your content at a level of depth and accuracy that no other tool comes close to. At least not in their price range.

Compared to tools like Clearscope, you can get started at nearly a tenth of the cost you’d otherwise have to budget.

And if we take into account the fact that Surfer is still in its infancy stages, it’s easy to see that there’s a lot of amazing things coming that will make a sizable impact on the global SEO community

Do you have a feature you enjoy using with the Surfer SEO tool? I would love to hear your input in the comment below.