Surfer SEO vs. Topic

Surfer is well suited for:

• Creating (and resisting) articles and web pages to increase their SEO relevancy for a keyword.
• To identify NLP terms and the frequency of terms to be added to the page
• To find internal linking opportunities
• To plan pillar pages/topic clusters

Surfer is not a tool for

• Technical SEO
• Crawl Audits
• Serp / Keyword Tracking
• Project Management

Incentivized

Great at providing content briefs as well as for seeing the types of topics that rank well competitively. It's also good with finding content that needs to be refreshed which is a super easy way to drive near term SEO results.

• Analysis for on-page ranking factors
• Competition analytics
• NLP Analysis for webpage content
• Content SEO scoring
• Content editor with details about what to rank for
• Plugin that helps with search data on Google

Incentivized

• Content Brief
• Competitive SERP ranking analysis
• Grouping content topics together to see related keywords/ content clusters easily
• Analyzing Google Search Console data for content refresh opportunities

• Can improve their algorithm to serve better for technical articles

• Using the GSC data to find new, adjacent content opportunities.
• They are using GPT-3 for title generation and would love to see it used to provide more content suggestions beyond the titles/descriptions
• Sometimes it doesn't surface 'questions' that people are asking related to lower volume terms but not sure of a way to solve that

Because, I've been using this tool since many years and I haven't looked for any other tool when it comes to content optimization

Semrush's content and page optimisation tool is quite poor; it's not in the same bracket as Surfer. Frase is a good alternative from a cost perspective (if not paying the AI writing functions), it's cheaper, and Frase's keyword/topic heatmaps are quite unique. Sufer has a better UI and a shorter learning curve. It has an advantage in that it offers internal linking recommendations, which Frase lacks. Surfer also has limited competitor analysis (backlinks and page speed), which Frase does not. Both tools allow you to choose the number of competitors on the SERPS

Incentivized

Topic was way less costly than MarketMuse with similar functionality. It was agnostic to CMS (WordLift is designed for Wordpress only). So it was priced well with all the functionality we needed.

• SuferSEO has helped us rank in the top 10 for results that are over 1M in search volume
• SurferSEO gives our team the ability to rank quicker than without the tool
• SurferSEO helps us close prospects by showing them the depth of our analysis and knowledge.
• SurferSEO makes our agency look and feel like a professional that knows what they are doing

Incentivized

• It has greatly reduced the number of hours our SEO team has to review content
• Has sped up our content briefs by hours per brief
• Great for helping us to see what content is performing well / needs help via the Google Search Console integration