Surfer AI Content Review 2023
Surfer SEO has released a new AI content writing tool to create fully optimized SEO content with just a few clicks. This is just one new SEO tool they are offering alongside their other SEO tools.
This SEO tool harnesses the power of artificial intelligence while using Surfer SEO tools to analyze vast amounts of data, including competitor insights, organic traffic, keyword trends, monthly search volume, and search engine ranking factors.
By leveraging this information, Surfer AI empowers content creators to craft compelling articles with the potential to rank highly in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Combining the power of artificial intelligence with user-friendly functionality, Surfer AI provides a comprehensive solution for generating fully SEO-optimized content.
Its ability to enhance content quality, boost search rankings, and save time make Surfer an AI-powered tool worth exploring, as it may be revolutionary in the ever-evolving world of digital marketing.
Searchbloom’s team of content writers and editors had the opportunity to test and experiment with Surfer AI thoroughly, and we’re excited to share the features and benefits of this new SEO tool, as well as its A.I. writing functionality, all from an SEO perspective in our in-depth Surfer AI content review.
What is Surfer A.I.?
Surfer AI is a cutting-edge artificial intelligence tool that Surfer SEO made to help its users produce written content with a high level of search engine optimization.
Unlike other AI writing tools, Surfer AI focuses on creating content that is optimized to raise high search engine rankings. The tool itself is user-friendly, as Surfer developed their proprietary AI system for effective generation and a simplified user experience.
With Surfer AI, you can rely on the SEO tool to handle the keyword research, writing, and optimization processes involved in creating written content.
By leveraging the power of the highest tier natural language processing of the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) model, Surfer AI produces text of superior quality with few errors or repetitions.
Surfer AI’s true strength lies in its ability to optimize content for search engines. By utilizing advanced algorithms, it acts as a SERP analyzer tool for pages related to your target keyword and extracts valuable insights.
These insights include optimal keyword density, suggested headings, and even recommended phrases to incorporate within your content. Additionally, the tool provides real-time suggestions for improving readability, enhancing overall user experiences, and increasing the likelihood of engaging and retaining visitors.
The primary objective of Surfer AI is to produce content that not only includes relevant keywords but also satisfies the search intent of users. Rather than generating generic and keyword-stuffed content solely for increasing search engine visibility and organic traffic, Surfer AI aims to create valuable content that aligns search volume and organic traffic with user needs and preferences.
Features
Surfer AI harnesses the power of Surfer SEO technology to offer a comprehensive suite of features for generating optimized written content.
Keyword Insertion
One of Surfer AI’s most notable content optimization capabilities is its ability to find and seamlessly insert relevant keywords throughout the article.
By analyzing search engine data, keyword research, and user intent, Surfer AI identifies the most appropriate keywords to include in the content, ensuring that it aligns with the targeted topic and ranks well in search engine results. This content optimization also helps to improve the article’s visibility and reach.
Optimized Headings
In addition to the keyword suggestions and optimization suggestions, Surfer AI assists in creating optimized headings for the article. Headings play a crucial role in structuring the content and enhancing its readability.
Surfer AI leverages its understanding of search engine algorithms to generate headings that are not only catchy and attention-grabbing but also optimized for SEO. This helps to improve the article’s overall ranking potential and user engagement.
Image Suggestions
Surfer AI goes beyond just generating text by providing image suggestions too. Images also play a vital role in enhancing the visual appeal of an article and improving its user experience.
Surfer AI’s image suggestions feature analyzes the content and suggests relevant images that can be included to complement the written text. By selecting appropriate and engaging visuals, the articles created by Surfer AI become more engaging and visually appealing.
Article Summary
One notable feature of Surfer AI articles is the inclusion of a summary in the introduction. This summary serves as a concise overview of the main points and topics covered in the article. It not only helps the content creator have a clear understanding of what will be discussed but also provides readers with a quick glance at the article’s key takeaways. This feature also enhances the user experience by enabling readers to quickly assess the article’s relevance and decide if it meets their informational needs.
By combining Surfer SEO technology with advanced AI capabilities, Surfer AI offers a robust solution for content optimization and creation. It streamlines the process of generating optimized articles and website pages by providing keyword suggestions for insertion, optimized headings, image suggestions, and a summary. These features empower content creators to produce high-quality, SEO-friendly content that resonates with both search engines and readers.
How to Use
One of the most remarkable aspects of Surfer AI is its intuitive interface, which makes it accessible to users of all skill levels. Whether you’re an experienced SEO specialist or a novice content writer, the SEO tool provides an effortless and user-friendly experience.
Upon entering your desired topic or keyword, Surfer AI instantly generates an outline for your content, highlighting the most important subtopics and suggesting word counts for each section. This feature ensures that your content is comprehensive and well-structured, enhancing its overall readability and SEO value.
Surfer AI also enables users to save valuable time and resources by automating the content optimization process. Instead of content editors spending hours manually researching keywords, analyzing competitors, and optimizing content in the content editor, Surfer AI streamlines these tasks into a few simple clicks. This allows content creators to focus on the creative aspects of their work while maintaining confidence in the SEO value of their content.
Using the Surfer AI content creator is easy: simply go to the Surfer SEO Content Editor on the Surfer dashboard and click on the “Write with AI” button.
Once there, choose and enter between one to five primary keywords you want to rank for.
You can use the Surfer SEO keyword research tool if you’re not sure which keyword to pick. This SEO tool can help you find valuable keyword research information, such as keyword difficulty and search volume.
We tried this with four different articles using various keywords, such as: “conversion rate optimization service”, “how much to spend on a mattress”, ”how much should a mattress cost”, “condos for sale in florida”, “buying a condo in florida”, “buying a vacation home in florida”, “buying a second home in florida”, and “best hunting binoculars”.
Then, choose your country and device settings and hit the “Create for one AI credit” button.
After you hit the Create button, you can select your tone of voice and turn on anti-AI detection.
Click on the dropdown to select from a bunch of voices for your content. This will tell Surfer AI how to approach your blog post’s on-page SEO and can help ensure the content generated matches your brand’s personality.
You also have the option of leaving it on auto, which is recommended since it will then tell Surfer AI to mimic the top-ranking pages in voice and tonality.
It is also recommended to keep the AI content detection setting off because Google embraces AI content as much as it does human-made content, as long as the articles provide value.
Plus, since the questionable algorithms used by content detector tools are often wrong, there’s no real benefit to hiding AI-generated content.
However, keeping the anti-AI detection setting on can sometimes force Surfer AI to use unnatural language and negatively affect your keyword optimization.
After all that, the AI then pulls up a list of sites ranking for this term and suggests which ones to pull from. You can choose to use those sites or search the top-ranking pages and find your competitor’s sites.
Once you choose the competitor sites for the AI to crawl, it creates an outline with potential headers. You can edit this outline, create new headers, and delete ones you don’t like.
However, the system sometimes takes a minute to load your requests and multiple clicks to register, so be patient and know it is an option if you want to edit. (Note: Our staff had trouble editing in the first round and thought the feature hadn’t been rolled out yet but were able to figure it out by the next test.)
After you review the outline, the tool writes the article. This can take quite a bit of time, so you can either move on to a different task, check your emails, make a cup of coffee, or simply enjoy the fun loading screens Surfer AI has.
As you wait for the article to generate, the tool creates funny one-liners based on your given keyword. The screen above is one that came up when we were writing our “hunting binoculars” piece, saying the tool is “exploring the wilderness” as it was generating.
Once the tool finishes writing, there will be a full-length article complete with suggestions for image placement and the type of image to use.
It is worth noting that the AI is missing backlinks and internal links, or even link suggestions, which, if added one day, could help the tool become even more effective.
Case Studies
Our team created four case studies using the AI tool. We will discuss each case in detail as well as rate the tool on key factors such as the Surfer SEO content score, organization of the piece, relevance, and how much editing it requires to be publishable.
Case Study 1: Conversion Rate Optimization Service
Our team started our case studies by asking Surfer AI to create a conversion rate optimization service page. We liked most of what it did, but it was lacking in a few areas that we found important.
What is the Surfer SEO Score of the Piece?
The Surfer SEO content score, located in the content editor for the piece, was below the average Surfer SEO score for the given keyword and wasn’t even in the green section of the score meter — all of which indicates that the piece would rank poorly compared to its competitors.
This was disappointing because, at Searchbloom, we always want our content to be above the average content score, in the green, and even higher than the top score when possible.
How is the Piece Organized?
The piece did not have enough headings or paragraphs to match the Surfer SEO recommendations, as seen in the sections below the content score, which lowered the score.
We would have liked it more if the tool had generated a few more headings and paragraphs, which it likely could have done since there were 300 more words available in the recommended word count.
The piece had a lot of H2s but not many H3s or H4s. More of these subheadings would help break up big blocks of text and raise the Surfer SEO score. The H2s also felt lacking in creativity — their titles were very generic and, at times, somewhat boring.
The AI’s image placements and suggestions for what the image could be were good, but our team would have preferred if the images could have been more easy to upload from Pixabay and similar sites. The images Pixaby suggested were also only based on the particular keyword put into the AI tool.
The short summary at the beginning of the piece was really great, but it would have fit better for a blog and not a service page.
Is the Piece Relevant?
This piece was factual and well-researched. It answered some good FAQs about conversion rate optimization. The writing was able to give information on the primary keyword and provided a great starting point for a service page on CRO.
However, the page was also generic, and the CTAs in the piece needed a lot of work to fit with any specific place offering CRO. We used this as the basis for a page on our site, and in order to make the page focused on Searchbloom and exactly what we offer for CRO, it required a fair amount of editing.
How Much Editing Does the Piece Require?
While the overall piece was factual and well-researched, there were some issues with the writing that required editing.
The piece, especially in the intro, had a lot of rhetorical questions and directly addressed the reader with phrases such as “keep reading”, “we will address this in this guide”, etc.
We feel there are better ways to get across the ideas conveyed with these techniques, so we had to edit out all of these phrases and sentences.
The writing in the piece was also awkward at times. One example is this phrase, “Every business is unique, and so should be their approach”. While there was nothing grammatically incorrect about it, the phrase feels off when you read it. A few instances of phrases like this had to be edited.
The last thing we had to edit was the repetition within the piece. The same ideas were often repeated two or three times with only slight differences in word choice.
Case Study 2: How Much to Spend on a Mattress/How Much Should a Mattress Cost
For our second case study, we were writing a blog on mattress prices for a partner. This piece needed specifics about our partner’s products and offerings as well as CTAs for their products.
The content the AI had generated had some good ideas but, overall, required a lot of editing.
What is the Surfer SEO Score of the Piece?
The Surfer SEO score on this piece was great — not only was the score in the green, but it was four points above the top score. Surfer AI did a great job at generating the right word count and using keywords effectively throughout the piece.
How is the Piece Organized?
Based on in-house research and budget considerations for this piece, the blog was longer than we had scoped for this type of piece, but we were happy to see AI generate so much quality content so quickly.
The piece had headers that were great for a more generic blog on mattress prices, but our partner sells luxury mattresses, so there weren’t many spaces in the text to place information about their own luxury mattress prices.
Another issue was that there were no CTAs in the entire piece — we were expecting at least one vague and generic CTA at the end of the piece, but it simply wasn’t generated.
Is the Piece Relevant?
The piece did have some good information on mattress prices, but overall it felt more vague than what we were wanting from this piece.
For a partner blog, we typically want a few sections that are tailored more to the partner and their products and services.
How Much Editing Does the Piece Require?
Similar to our first case study, there were a lot of rhetorical questions and direct references to the reader and writer. We again wanted to cut these out and rephrase them to sound more natural.
Some of the writing in this piece was a bit clunky and awkward, but overall it was better than the first case study.
Case Study 3: Condos for Sale in Florida/Buying a Condo in Florida/Buying a Vacation Home in Florida/Buying a Second Home in Florida
Our third case study focused on a landing page for buying a condo in Florida. The content was meant to lead to a landing page for a partner that sells Florida condos.
We already had some in-house scoping on this piece for word count and suggested H2s. This was where we struggled to edit the Surfer AI-generated outline. Overall, there was a lot of good information here, but it did need some editing on our part.
What is the Surfer SEO Score of the Piece?
The Surfer SEO score on this piece was incredible — a 90 is hard to ever achieve on Surfer SEO’s content editor, and the fact that it was nearly 30 points higher than the top score was truly impressive. The Surfer AI generated a really well-optimized piece in this case.
How is the Piece Organized?
The piece was well-organized. It followed the suggested topics from our in-house scoping really well, but we were disappointed at how difficult it was to add the headings we wanted for the piece. The only other issue we found was that there should have been more FAQs, as there weren’t many.
In addition, the piece was around 1,000 words shorter than what we were aiming for based on our in-house research.
Is the Piece Relevant?
The piece had some good information but discussed a lot of information about our partner’s competitors and was therefore not relevant to our purpose for this piece.
On the other hand, the keyword usage and overall information were great and needed very few edits aside from adding information about our partner.
How Much Editing Does the Piece Require?
Due to the specific needs that we had for this piece, it required a lot of editing.
First, we didn’t want a summary that was generated after the introduction of every Surfer AI piece on this page, and we were pleased to find out that it was able to easily take it out without messing with the Surfer SEO score at all, as it could have been full of necessary keywords and tank the score. Fortunately, it wasn’t, so we got to keep our 90 points.
We found there were some pieces of information that were good but didn’t fit under their headings, such as information about condo costs in a heading on beachfront condos, especially since there was a separate heading on costs to consider elsewhere in the piece.
This was just one instance of unnecessary repetition that we had to cut. There were also a few paragraphs near each other that seemed to be giving the same information in different ways, which we deemed unnecessary as well.
Finally, the last issue we had, in this case, was that we had no way of telling the AI which partner we wanted it to generate content for, as we had to add our own CTAs and change some information to fit what our partner specifically offered.
Case Study 4: Best Hunting Binoculars
Our fourth and final case study was a blog on the best hunting binoculars for a partner that sells hunting gear.
This piece of content worked best for Surfer AI because it didn’t need to be tailored to a specific site as much and was meant to be solely an informational blog rather than a landing or service page.
What is the Surfer SEO Score of the Piece?
The AI did a good job creating content with a high Surfer SEO score. We liked that it was in the green, but we would have preferred for the piece to be closer to or above the top score.
How is the Piece Organized?
The piece had a good number of headings, and the headings were well-titled and interesting, doing a good job of setting up the piece.
We were also happy to use the suggested image placements. However, we didn’t use the suggested image types and instead chose images we felt fit the piece better.
The AI created a good amount of words that left room for us to edit and add more but was also well within the range suggested by the keyword SERPs.
Is the Piece Relevant?
Since we wanted a general blog to help our partner’s site rank for binoculars and offer suggestions for hunting binoculars without CTAs to buy from the partner, the piece generated was incredibly relevant and well-researched.
How Much Editing Does the Piece Require?
This piece required the least amount of editing compared to our three previous case studies.
While the piece still had some direct references to readers and writers that we had to remove, they were not as apparent in this piece as others.
The only edits it needed were a few adjustments to sentence structure and flow, especially when it came to repetitive ideas and unnatural-sounding language like “without further ado let’s…” or “this section will…”.
Pros and Cons
There are many pros and cons to consider before implementing the Surfer AI tool into a business’s marketing strategy. From our review, here are a few of each we’d like to share:
Pros
Time and Effort Saving
Surfer AI automates various aspects of the content creation process, such as keyword research, keyword insertion, headings, content optimization, and generating a full article. This saves content creators a significant amount of time and effort, allowing them to focus on other important tasks.
SEO Optimization
Surfer AI incorporates Surfer SEO technology to ensure that the generated content is optimized for search engines. It helps you generate articles that rank higher in the search results by identifying relevant keywords, creating SEO-friendly headings, and providing image suggestions, thereby improving the content’s ranking potential and visibility in search results.
User-Friendly Interface
Surfer AI is an AI writing tool that is designed to be user-friendly, making it accessible even to individuals without extensive knowledge of its SEO tools. It also simplifies the writing process and guides users through each step, ensuring a smooth and intuitive experience every time.
Ready-to-Rank Content
The articles generated by Surfer AI are tailored to satisfy search intent and provide valuable information to readers. Unlike generic and keyword-stuffed content, Surfer AI is made to deliver high-quality, reader-centric articles that have a better chance of ranking well in search engine results.
Cons
Dependency on AI
While Surfer AI can greatly assist in content creation, it is still reliant on AI technology. There may be instances where the generated content does not fully meet the expectations or specific requirements of the user. Human input and editing may still be necessary to refine and enhance the final output.
Limitations in Creativity
AI tools like Surfer AI excel at generating data-driven and optimized content. However, they may lack the creative flair and originality that a human writer brings. This can result in content that feels formulaic or lacks a unique voice.
Cost Considerations
The pricing structure of Surfer AI, which involves the purchase of AI credits, may not be suitable for all budgets. The cost of generating articles with Surfer AI can add up, particularly for users who require a large volume of content or have limited financial resources.
Limited Customization
Surfer AI operates within predefined parameters and algorithms, which means it may not fully accommodate every user’s particular preferences or writing style. Some users may find the tool’s options for customization or personalization lackluster.
It’s important to note that all the AI tools’ pros and cons listed above are based on general observations and considerations. The actual experience and assessment of Surfer AI may vary depending on individual needs and expectations. It is advisable to thoroughly evaluate the tool and its features to determine if it aligns with your needs and requirements before making a decision.
Price
According to the information available on the Surfer SEO website, the pricing structure for Surfer AI articles involves the use of AI credits. Each AI credit is priced at $29, and the number of credits required for generating an article depends on its length. The website states that a 500-word article typically requires 1 credit, a 1000-word article requires 2 credits, and so on.
By offering AI credits as a unit of measurement, Surfer SEO provides a flexible and scalable pricing model for users. This allows individuals, small businesses, and larger enterprises to choose the number of credits they need based on their specific content requirements. Whether a user needs a single article or multiple articles, they can purchase the appropriate number of AI credits accordingly.
Using Surfer AI also requires a subscription to a Surfer SEO account, and the price may vary depending on the Surfer SEO tier that fits your needs and budget.
Is It Worth It?
If you want top-of-funnel informational blog content, Surfer AI would be worth it. For overall content creation needs, the tool is not our favorite. The responses are too generic and require a great deal of editing to produce anything other than an informational blog post. Surfer AI articles are also more expensive than other tools and are not as customizable.
If you want help making digital content marketing work for you and don’t want to worry about messing with all the new AI writing tools yourself, Searchbloom can help. Get a free search marketing plan from us today.
Frequently Asked Questions
How Many Words Does a Surfer AI Article Have?
The number of words a Surfer AI article will have is based on the SERPs of the keyword(s) used to create it. Surfer analyzes the word counts of the ranking pages for your keyword and writes a full article that matches the average word count numbers of the content that ranks in the SERPs. Unlike other generative AI sources like ChatGPT, Surfer AI is not restricted by word counts.
Surfer AI will write a full article with related keywords using anywhere from 500 words to 4,000 words, depending on what ranks for your desired keyword(s).
Can I Use a Brand Voice in Surfer AI?
Surfer AI allows you to choose a tone of voice when you create an article, but it is a narrow selection and cannot be tailored to any one specific brand voice.
