Surfer SEO Review 2026: Pros And Cons You Need To Know
Welcome to our Surfer SEO review.
There are lots of content writing and on-page optimization platforms out there, but Surfer SEO is considered to be one of the best.
But how good is it?
In this in-depth review, we’ll be revealing everything there is to know about Surfer and giving you a first-hand look at all of its features.
By the end of the post, you’ll have all the information you need to come to your own conclusions about whether it’s a good fit for your business.
What is Surfer SEO?
Surfer SEO is a cloud-based platform that helps you to plan, write, and optimize SEO content (like blog posts and website pages). And in doing so, helps to improve your organic visibility in the SERPs so you can drive more organic traffic to your site.
The basic gist is that you use Surfer to discover keywords, plan your content strategy, and generate outlines/briefs for individual posts.
Then, you write your content following those outlines. And as you write, Surfer analyzes your written content against hundreds of on-page SEO ranking factors by comparing it to the first-page search results for your target keyword.
It scores your content in real-time, and lets you know what you need to change and what terms you need to add to improve your chances of ranking.
The idea behind this is that the first page results must be doing something right if they’re already ranking. So you stand a better chance of ranking alongside them if you structure your content in a similar way and cover the same topics/keywords.
Of course, there’s a bit more to it than that. And there are a few more things Surfer can do besides the above, but we’ll cover all of that when we get into the actual features.
What features does Surfer SEO offer?
Surfer SEO comes with a ton of powerful features that, when combined, can help with every aspect of the content creation process. The main ones to know about are:
- Keyword Research
- Content Editor
- Audit
- Domain Planner
- SERP Analyzer
- Keyword Surfer
Next, we’ll take a closer look at each of these features and how they work in practice.
Keyword Research
Once you’ve signed up for Surfer, you’ll be brought to your dashboard area:
From the left-hand sidebar, you can access all the tools you need.
Surfer’s Keyword Research tool can help you to plan your content strategy and discover hundreds of new topic ideas in minutes.
To get started, just enter a seed keyword (a broad topic related to your niche), choose the geographical area you want to pull results from, and click Create Keyword Research.
Once Surfer is finished doing its thing, you can click the results to open up the report, which looks like this:
What’s super cool is that, as you can see, Surfer doesn’t just generate a list of related keywords alongside their search volume, like most other keyword research tools out there.
Instead, it groups similar keywords together into Topic Clusters that are related to the main topic.
For example, we searched for topics related to the seed keyword ‘best SEO tools’. And Surfer came back with topic cluster suggestions like these:
- Link building tools
- Content marketing tools
- Best WordPress SEO plugin
- Local SEO
- SEO extensions for Chrome
Each one of these clusters is like a bucket that contains around a dozen individual closely-related keywords.
You can take a peek inside the bucket by hovering over the cluster and clicking Open Detailed Review.
Inside, you’ll be able to see all the individual related keywords alongside their monthly search volume and keyword difficulty.
And at the top, you’ll see the combined monthly search volume and total traffic you can expect if you target the whole cluster.
Taking this sort of cluster-based approach toward keyword research is much better from an SEO perspective. Because Google’s algorithm is a lot smarter these days.
Search engines like Google now understand the intent behind search queries and serve up results based on how well they cover the topic the searcher is interested in, not just how well they’re optimized around a very specific search query.
So it no longer makes sense to target individual long-string keywords. Instead, it makes much more sense to target broader topics that cover lots of closely-related keywords in the same post.
Once you’ve found a topic cluster you want to target in your content strategy, you can click the purple icon next to it to import it to the Content Editor, which brings us neatly onto the next feature…
Content Editor
The Content Editor is very much the ‘core’ of Surfer SEO. You can use it to outline, write, and optimize all your website posts and pages.
To get started, click Content Editor from the left-hand sidebar.
Then, add the keyword(s) you want to target in the post and click Create Content Editor. Alternatively, you can import content from a URL, or add topic clusters from the keyword research tool, as we discussed above.
Surfer will then generate a detailed content outline and brief for the target keyword, complete with SEO guidelines to help you write it.
The Content Editor itself looks like this:
There’s a main window where you write your content and a sidebar where you can view optimization recommendations.
The main editor window works just like any other text editor. You type sentences onto the page and change the formatting (H-tags, alignment, etc.) using the toolbar at the top.
As you write, the Content Score widget in the sidebar will update based on how well-optimized your written content currently is for the target keyword. The higher the score, the better the chance you’ll have of ranking.
It also tells you the average Content Score of the articles that are already ranking for the search term on page one of Google, so you know what to aim for.
Below the score widget, you’ll see some SEO guidelines.
First off, there are structural guidelines. These tell you the word count and number of paragraphs to aim for, and how main headings and images to include.
Then below that, you’ll see some suggested terms to include in the content.
These term suggestions are based on NLP (natural language processing) and SERP analysis.
Basically, Surfer analyzes the search results for your target keyword and looks at what kind of words and phrases the top-ranking articles use in their content, and how frequently they appear, and then uses this data to recommend terms that you should include too.
Adding more suggested terms should move the needle on the Content Score tab and improve your ranking potential.
There are also a couple of other tabs in the sidebar worth mentioning.
The Brief tab is useful if you’re working as part of a team or outsourcing to content writers. You can add notes about the content for your writer (like deadlines or benchmarks) and they’ll show up here. Plus, it also contains a list of competitor articles that the writer can use for research.
And the Outline tab is even more useful. It contains AI-generated titles, headings, and question sections that you can add to your post in one click and then edit manually.
This is a fantastic time-saver, but don’t expect miracles. AI-generated content can’t fully replace content written by a real person, but it can speed up your workflow and help you to get some ideas on the page, which you can then heavily edit and expand on.
Now that you’re familiar with what everything does, there’s one more important part of the interface that you need to be aware of – the customize button.
Before you start writing anything, you’ll want to customize the content that Surfer SEO is optimizing against. Initially, the tool will guess which content it makes sense to optimize against.
It won’t always get it right but it does a damn good job all things considering.
This is important because it wouldn’t make sense to optimize this Surfer SEO review against a review page on a site like TrustRadius or G2. Just like it wouldn’t make sense to optimize a regular blog post against an ecommerce product page. They’re different types of content with different search intent.
If Google wants to rank an ecommerce product page, it’ll rank an ecommerce product page. It’ll only start ranking a blog post instead, if it determines that the blog post better solves the search query. Search intent matters.
Here’s a quick example:
Surfer was smart enough to recognize most of the articles we didn’t want to optimize against. We de-selected a few more for good measure.
But what if there are certain terms/phrases you don’t want to appear in Surfer’s recommendations when you optimize your post? Scroll down to the Terms section of the customize menu. Then, you can deselect any terms you don’t want.
Once you’ve finished writing and optimizing your content in the editor, you can copy-paste it over to your CMS, or export it to WordPress via a plugin. And then mark it as Done so that Surfer can start tracking it (more on this later).
Plagiarism Checker
Before we move on from the Content Editor, one more feature to mention is the Plagiarism Checker.
This is a relatively new tool that can check your content to make sure it’s 100% original before you publish. And that matters, because unoriginal/plagiarised content hurts your site’s SEO.
To use it, click the three dots at the top of the Content Editor, and then click Run Plagiarism Checker.
It can take a while for Surfer to scan your content. But once it’s done, it’ll let you kn