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Google has a funny way of making websites vie for the top spots on organic SERP listings. Every so often, Google releases core updates, citing the latest criteria for ranking on Google Search. Some of the most important ranking factors pertain to content SEO. A few of them, as listed by Backlinko, are:
Keyword Density
Latent Semantic Indexing Keywords in Content (LSI)
LSI Keywords in Title and Description Tags:
Page Covers Topic In-Depth
Content Length
TF-IDF : How often does a certain word appear in a document
Duplicate Content
Content Recency
This list is just the tip of the iceberg. Creating content (e.g. a service page or blog) to help your webpages clinch the top spots on Google needs to be thorough and aligned with the ranking factors. It can be hard and time consuming to optimise content manually for a given search term, falling back on your own rudimentary research. Now imagine a software tool which does that for you! That’s Surfer SEO Tool for you. In this blog, we are going to zoom in on some of its key attributes. We are also going to reveal how the Content Editor tool waves its SEO magic wand on content to make it Google’s darling.
What is Surfer SEO Tool?
Surfer’s SEO Tool is an on page optimization software that scrapes the top results in the SERP for a search term, analyzes it and then creates an SEO roadmap for you to follow while creating your content.
It will tell you the desirable content length, meta tags, titles, number of times a keyword should or shouldn’t be included and top questions (based on trending entities and topics) to add in FAQs. Surfer’s analysis is based on 500 ranking factors.
Surfer SEO provides on point data driven insights that tells you what’s lacking in your content, as opposed to guessing what Google favours while ranking.
Key Surfer SEO Tool Features
Usability
Surfer SEO has a user friendly interface. It provides a non-intimidating, non-developer friendly user experience. Unlike other content SEO tools, Surfer’s friendly user console is free of drama and non-essential elements. The absence of unnecessary multiple tools and the efficacy of the three key features makes it an ideal software for content optimisation.
Affordability
Surfer SEO tool’s most basic plan starts at $29 per month, which is pretty economical. The data driven insights that this tool offers is suitable for businesses of all sizes. The basic plan itself offers a lot of features. There’s a monthly limit of 25 queries and 10 NLPs for the Content Editor tool. For the SERP Analyser, the daily limit is 10 queries and 10 NLPs for the month. This tool is handy for people ranging from someone who’s just starting out to already established businesses or enterprises looking to up their content SEO game.
Tool Features
The amazing thing about Surfer SEO is that it is summed up by three key tools:
- SERP Analyzer
- Content Editor
- Keyword Research Tool
Apart from the above three, there’s also a free SEO extension called Keyword Surfer for Google Chrome. There’s also an SEO Audit 7 day trial feature for $1, which informs you about a list of quick wins and SEO opportunities.
SERP Analyser compiles correlational data between positions in SERP and ranking factors, all based on 50 pages and 500+ ranking factors. It compares common patterns in top ranking pages, just so that you can save those tedious hours of manual research. The tool analyses ranking factors like:
- Text length
- Number of headings
- NLP entities coverage
- Page speed
- Keyword density
- NLP Sentiment
- Referring URLs
- Referring domains
- Meta tags structure
You can compare keyword or phrase density, compare the top pages, based on a keyword and also get data for link building with this beauty. The query can be analysed by country, as seen below:
The Keyword Research Tool, as the name suggests, lets you research new keyword ideas, topic related questions, topical segments. It provides a time efficient way to extend or create content on your website based on keywords you want to rank for. The Keyword Research tool puts reverse engineering to good use to find and group keywords with similar search results. Think phrases with the same search results, and you have it. If those similar pages rank for another keyword, you have the data at your disposal, to use and rank for that keyword too.
The Keyword Research tool in Surfer SEO groups keywords in regular search terms and questions. The tool also lets you see SERP similarity and search volume for each keyword. At the end of the day, you get a heap of ranking keywords that bring in more traffic.
The Content Editor, our favourite, is the most interesting of the three. This tool suggests the top URLs, content length, keywords, headings, paragraphs, bold words, and images to use, all based on data driven insights from the top ranking pages. You get to see what’s making your competitor’s pages rank for a keyword, including those in your content, all through this wonderful tool. Hours of your precious life saved.
Optimisations based on the tool suggestions can be weaved in the content within the tool itself. Optimising that old blog or writing an optimised service page around a keyword has never been easier!
If you are not happy with the keywords you included, or want to include an additional question for the FAQ, you can still customise all of that by hitting the customise button to add the extra bit you want.
The magic of Content Editor Tool
There’s no better way to rank for a keyword than to write content around it. Is there a right way to create content for SEO, though? For sure, there is. Three questions:
- How do we optimise our content for Google
- How do we structure our content
- How do we know what our competitors are doing?
All of the above questions are answered by Surfer SEO’s Content Editor Tool. It simply automates the process of scraping the top ranking web pages for your keyword and then informs you how to create your winning content.
For starters, it will fish out the top ranking URLs for your query, along with their content score, domain score and word count. You select the ones most relevant to you.
Second off, it will suggest the content structure. Suggestions are offered based on the average word count, headings, paragraphs, bold words and images that the SERP winners are using.
Now the icing on the cake. This tool suggests all the relevant terms to include (the primary + secondary keywords) along with some topics/FAQ questions, for expanding your content.
After you select and customise the suggestions, get set to create your winning content, optimised and ready to be Google’s favourite. The results might not be immediate but they will steadily arrive.
Conclusion
Long gone are the days, when SEO analysts and content writers used to spend hours on manual competitor research for optimal content. Content building automation software, delivering correlational data driven insights, is the hipper content SEO way. At Metric Labs, we love using Surfer SEO, especially the content editor, to put up Google preferred optimised content. Our love for all things aiding marketing automation, has made Surfer SEO our favourite on page optimisation tool. What’s yours?
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