I just want to state right off of the bat that I'm not only a Surfer SEO user but I wrote this article using Surfer. Quite often I'll use the brand name Surfer when talking about the Surfer SEO tool.

Here are my tl;dr takeaways about this long form review article.

  1. Surfer gamifies your content
  2. Surfer educates you about keywords and SEO
  3. Surfer teaches you content writing best practices

Gamify your content with Surfer

Surfer makes content writing addictive!

I enjoy writing content with Surfer whereas doing this in Google docs is just boring and less inspiring. Since I started using Surfer more seriously, my writing content output has increased substantially.

Now when I check my rankings in the SERPs, I know Surfer was a big help behind it.

Content writing strategy to rank higher in SERPs

Taking a quick look at my casino affiliate programs page, I started writing this last fall after getting a 1 on 1 chat with Victor Karpenko. If you don't know him, he's the founder of Seoprofy and one of the sharpest SEOs I know.

His advice and strategy he gave me were simple:

  1. Map out keyword research using Ahrefs
  2. Prioritize your content based on the research
  3. Start writing content to beat your competition using Surfer
  4. Build links and content linking back to your core article

Looking at this strategy, I applied it and started writing close to 4000 words for the topic 'casino affiliate programs'. Within 6 months of publishing the article, I shot up in to the top 10 which was no easy feat as I was competing against some well written articles with higher authority.

As you can see from the article comparing Sept of last year to April 2024 and you can see that the StatsDrone page for casino affiliate programs didn't show up in any results and is now classified as a new result. Not only is it a new result, it is ranking fairly high and beat out some long standing established websites. 

I'm applying this for other competitive niches so watch out for everyone ranking for SEO affiliate programs!

Surfer educates you on content writing and SEO

Is Surfer going to make you an SEO expert overnight? Absolutely not.

However I can tell you that Surfer just accidentally forces you to adopt best practices when it comes to writing content.

A quick example is word count. For example in writing this article, Surfer is recommending that I product 3,272 to 3,763 words of content with 20-38 headings, at least 138 paragraphs and 28-60 images.

Now that might seem like a lot but Surfer is explicitly telling me that if I want to have a chance to rank well for the title of this article 'surfer seo tool review' then I gotta put some effort into it. Surfer also encourages you to add more paragraphs and

One small issue I have with Surfer is that the gamification of the keywords makes me want to inject keywords in a somewhat unnatural way. The way I try to solve this is by having intent to use those keywords but rethink about how to say that in a natural way so it doesn't look like keyword stuffing.