Surfer SEO Review: Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links in which I receive commissions. The reviews and opinions expressed in this article are my own.

On-page SEO is extremely important and it refers to the enhancements that you can make to your webpage so it ranks better on the search engines. 

These enhancements can be anything from content to design, to other on-site items that might cause problems with SEO. 

Backlinking and social shares is something on the other side of the spectrum of on-site SEO that takes care only of the things within the site. 

The great thing about on-site SEO is that you don’t need much investment to see real improvements. 

You can have a small budget and you can play your cards right to the point where your website will rank in the first page on search engines. 

Of course, it is a long process and only on-site SEO won’t get you there, but it is a part of the formula for sure. 

On-page SEO can be done by yourself only by improving the website and putting out high-quality content and media. 

Another way to go about it is to use tools that will show you what you need to improve very quickly and present results fast. 

In this post, you will know about Surfer SEO, a tool that makes on-site optimization very easy for everybody that aspires to get better results. 

What is Surfer SEO?

Surfer SEO is a cloud-based tool that specializes in on-page optimization by analyzing and comparing your pages with those that are ranking in the SERPs. 

There is no guessing what Google prefers in order to make your pages rank higher. 

Surfer SEO literally does a data-driven analysis and tells you exactly what you’re missing or having too much of that the highest-ranked pages do or don’t. 

The analysis is thorough and includes different types of factors like keywords, keyword density, phrasing, meta tags and descriptions, images, HTML codes, and more. 

Having that information will let you know and execute whatever it is that you need to in order to outrank the higher ranking pages.

It has five main features:

1. SERP Analyzer
2. Content Editor
3. Keyword Research
4. SEO Audit
5. Keyword Surfer

Read also: How to conduct a technical SEO audit 

Best features of Surfer 

Let’s see what these five main features do for you. 

SERP Analyzer 

This can be considered as Surfer SEO’s top functionality that is extremely helpful with your content optimization. 

The SERP Analyzer is a tool for analyzing (obviously) the highest-ranking pages for a certain term that you specify. 

The tool then identifies which factors grant these pages their high ranking and then they offer the advice to you.

It analyzes over 500 factors to get you reliable information and some of those factors are: 

• Text length
• Number of headings
• NLP entities coverage
• Page speed
• Keyword density
• NLP Sentiment
• Referring URLs
• Referring domains

The analyzer will discover the optimal keyword density, compare your page to the competition, and find link building opportunities. 

Content Editor

Via the content editor functionality you can create content that is on-page SEO optimized and you can also fix all the content that you put out in the past.

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Some distinct advantages of the Surfer Content Editor are that it uses the data from the SERP Analyzer for real-time results. It also lets you do the optimization as you write. 

It is difficult to communicate your preferred guidelines with your content creators sometimes and you need to spend extra time fixing it all up. 

In those kinds of instances this editor helps out a lot by generating guidelines that can be sent to the content creators directly. 

Keyword Research 

The Keyword research has the capacity to search for phrases that have the same search results in Google. 

The logic that it follows is that if another high-ranking page succeeded to rank high because of their keywords, you can as well with the same ones.

You can see similar search results with volume and relevancy levels based on SERPs. 

Although it’s  not the best keyword tool out there, it doesn’t hurt to have this feature.

If you want to learn about a great keyword research tool, read my review of Ubersuggest here 

SEO Audit 

This part of Surfer SEO is one of the best functionalities in my opinion. 

SEO Audit automates a lot of efforts and work that you would have needed to put into manually via the Audit tool. 

It gives you step-by-step instructions on how to achieve higher rankings according to the organic competition that you have. 

It literally tells you specific tasks like how much content you should add or take out of some piece so it becomes the best version it can be. 

It really gets into details and delivers the results extremely fast so you can act on them immediately. 

You would also like to check my best SEO guide here

Keyword Surfer

The Keyword Surfer is an extension for Google Chrome that you can use to reveal search data and perform keyword research directly in Google Search. 

You can find out the monthly search volume for any query in real-time so you will know approximately what to expect. 

Pricing

Surfer has a few options to offer when it comes to pricing. You can either pay the plans monthly or annually with 20% savings. 

The basic and the most affordable plan starts at $49 per month and it has the following features: 

1. SERP Analyzer (15 queries per day)
2. Content Editor (25 queries per month)
3. Backlinks & Visibility (25 queries per day)
4. Keyword Research (Unlimited)
5. NLP Analysis (10 queries per month)

The second and most popular plan that Surfer offers is the Pro plan at a price of $99 per month. 

With this, you get a higher threshold for queries in the following way: 

1. SERP Analyzer (50 queries per day)
2. Content Editor (100 queries per month)
3. Backlinks & Visibility (100 queries per day)
4. Keyword Research (Unlimited)
5. NLP Analysis (50 queries per month)

The annual version of this plan will cost you $990. 

The last and most expensive plan is the Business plan with a price of $199 per month. 

The queries per day are even higher with this plan in the following way: 

1. SERP Analyzer (100 queries per day)
2. Content Editor (300 queries per month)
3. Backlinks & Visibility  (300 queries per day)
4. Keyword Research  (Unlimited)
5. NLP Analysis (150 queries per month)

The annual price for the business plan is $1990. 

If you subscribe to Surfer and think that it doesn’t meet your expectations, you can get a 30-day money-back guarantee.

The best thing about this is that it won’t automatically renew as many businesses push their products. 

If you want a better side-to-side comparison of all the plans and their functionalities, you should check out the Surfer webpage where you can find exactly that. 

Advantages and disadvantages 

I will try to be as objective as I can in this section as I am putting the pros and cons together here based on my experience with Surfer. 

Advantages 

These are some of the things for which I am always happy to use Surfer: 

1. It is easy to use: no matter how helpful a certain tool is when they burden it with a complex interface that is hard to navigate, it can get quite challenging to use. Surfer has a user-friendly interface that lets you focus on the work and not on spending time searching for the right button to click on. What’s more, the results are presented in a visually appealing manner so it’s easier for people to see what the results mean. 
2. Real LSI Keywords: most of the available tools on the market that offer LSI keywords basically only show you related searches that are taken from Google. Surfer gives a list of real LSI keywords which are true contextual keywords or phrases in relation to the primary keyword.
3. Assistance with content structure: on-page SEO is not connected only to keywords and frequency but what’s also quite important is the structure of a page. You have to have a page with the right elements like titles, meta tags, meta descriptions, Hx tags, proper media, etc. Surfer SEO analyzes this extremely well. All your errors are seen in one place without the need of scraping this data from several different tools. 
4. SEO Audit on the go: optimization is a game of trying and failing, then trying again. Unless, you have a proper tool by your side. Surfer SEO has an incredible auditing tool that makeS comparisons of your page to the pages of your competitors in a minute. Auditing your pages will let you know what are the weaknesses and strengths of the page by giving you “WarningS”
5. Semantic analysis: makes and shows a comparison of the keywords that are used among the top websites
6. It has multiple views: you can look through a SERP view, table view, and chart view. 
7. Ranking factors used: Surfer SEO uses more than 500 ranking factors when it’s comparing the websites with their competitors that rank high on SERPs. 

Disadvantages

Even though I mostly like Surfer and think it’s an extremely powerful tool that can make a big difference, there are some things that can be improved:

1. Number of queries: the number of queries available depends on the plan that you will choose. However, the biggest number of queries available in their plans is 50 per day through the business plan. Although that might be way too much for a small website owner, a big agency might not be pleased with that limitation. 
2. Some suggestions can compromise the readability: editing a few words here and there is okay, but sometimes there are too many suggestions that impact the readability of the content
3. The keyword tool: it is not the best and I would call it one of the most undeveloped parts of Surfer. There are not clear enough metrics and if re-checked by Ahrefs or other tools the results differ a lot. It can be fine for border terms or when you don’t care about metrics, otherwise be careful.

Conclusion 

Some of the tools that Surfer SEO offers can be a real game changer for you and bring your content to the top of the search results. 

Surfer has made a huge following in a very short period of time and with a reason, the tool works!

Anybody can work with this tool because it is very easy to use and has a clear interface.

The prices are also affordable when you take into consideration what results you can achieve with the right combination of Surfer’s tools. 

In the end, if you are in doubt about it you can always try the $1 trial for seven days and draw your own conclusion. 

If you found this article helpful, check out these other reviews on my blog: 

• Review of Ezoic: How to use for beginners
• How to generate leads with OptinMonster
• Features, pricing and pros & cons of using BuzzSumo 

If you are curious about some other SEO tools and want me to review them, please let me know in the comments below!