So Surfer SEO released their AI last week, and it’s received a ton of appraisal, but I wanted to put it through my own testing to see the results.
But is it worth paying 29 times more per article than other AI Copywriting tools?
It’s running on GPT-4, the newest AI model from OpenAI, so I expect great things, especially with their price point.
Let’s get into it.
I signed up for the light plan at $29 per month, getting keyword research and 3 content edits per month. It’s super limited, and SurferSEO works from the principle that everything costs extra.
Unless you’re on the max plan at $299 monthly, you only pay for grow flow and Surfer AI.
If I want an SEO audit, it’s $49 extra per month. SERP Analyzer, $29 extra per month and Grow Flow, $9 per site per month.
So yes, as they say, SurferSEO isn’t for everyone, but I wanted to test their AI, which has been so hyped.
I started with the long tail keyword: How to export from Figma to Webflow
Getting from keyword to outline took 4 minutes. While this is not fast, I believe they can improve this, as the alternative tools do the same steps but much faster.
What SurferSEO does in these 4 minutes is scrape Google for the ranking websites and then give each website a content score based on its own NLP parameters.
Based on the content score Surfer SEO then chooses the websites it wants to compare itself against and get inspired by. This is a neat way.
My outline would be:
Short intro
Key takeaways
Export Your Figma Project To Webflow Using A Plugin
- Guide to use the plugin
Export Your Figma Project To Webflow Manually
- Define your global styles
- Export Figma Assets
- Div-framing your Webflow website
- Styling your content
- Define interactions
- Test desktop and mobile
Wrap up
SurferSEO’s outline:
Understanding Figma and Webflow
- Figma Overview
- Webflow Overview
Preparing Your Figma Design for Webflow
- Layout Structure
- Components and Symbols
- Color Management
Setting Up Your Webflow Project
- New Project Creation
- Style Guide Implementation
- Customizing Colors
Exporting Assets from Figma
- Designating Assets for Export
- Export Commands
- Uploading to Webflow
Building Your Webflow Site
- Replacing Frames with Divs
- Styling Content
- Creating Interactions
Testing and Refining Your Webflow Site
- Publishing Your Site
- Cross-Platform Testing
- Tweaking and Finalizing
I’m not changing anything, I’m going with the flow of Surfer SEO AI creates articles in one click. I could maybe have changed the outline and got a better result, but I wanted to let Surfer SEO do the work as it think it should be done.
Surfer SEO AI uses the newest version GPT 4 in 32k, which means it supports 32,000 token context-length.
GPT-4 is much more expensive than GPT 3.5, up to 5x the price, so that’s some of the reason to why the price tag is at $29 per article, but is the output worth it?
It took 8 minutes to get the article generated, so overall it’s not a fast article generator, but GPT-4 is a lot slower than GPT-3, so that’s part of the answer. However, I generated the same article using KoalaWriter in less than 2 minutes.
I’ll share a link to the article from Surfer SEO AI in the description. So you can check it out.
For the intro, I’m in-between, it has some great elements, but I would change it to contain more of the content in the article, right now it’s a little too generic.
- Short summary
- Content score, it’s optimising the content to use the right NLP keywords.
- The overall quality of the content
- Suggesting images, but it’s just after each H2, so there is no logic behind it seems. And for an article like this, images are crucial, maybe even a video.
- It hits word count perfectly.
- It generates an FAQ section, which is decent. It’s not perfect. And the 2 questions in this case are already answered in the article, so I wouldn’t keep the FAQ section.
- And 12 minutes to generate a 3000 word article, Expect 4 minutes per 1000 words.
- It took around 8 minutes to generate a 2000 word article.
- No outgoing links.
- No internal links.
- No tables.
- Missing experience (I did XYZ).
Now the thing about AI Copywriting tools is that they often work for different use cases. Surfer SEO is great for info articles but terrible at comparison articles and best x for y—for example, the best noise-cancelling headsets for freelance copywriters.
But with the article done, you can easily export it to WordPress if that’s part of your plan. It’s not for my sake.
But now, is SurferSEO AI worth $29 per article? No, it’s not.
Surfer SEO is comparing their AI to human writers to justify their price point, but I’m comparing it to their alternatives, Frase and KoalaWriter.
Now Frase doesn’t run on GPT 4, so it’s not a 100% fair comparison, but they do a decent job at generating the content, and I can generate articles down to below $1.
However, I would readily use KoalaWriter for most of my articles if I used AI. With KoalaWriter, I also get outbound links to sources and formatted tables.
They run on GPT 4, and I generated an article of 2000 words for a little less than $5. But the thing about KoalaWriter is that you don’t get the NLP editor you get with Surfer and Frase.
By the way, I’m working on a comparison video between these 3 tools where I’ll go in dept, so remember to subscribe so that you won’t miss that video.
So, in the end, Surfer SEO is for people and companies with a large budget who create many info articles and want to speed up their content creation flow.
I haven’t been able to generate an article I could easily copy, paste and publish. All the articles are missing internal links, my own experience and sometimes, they’re a bit off.
But, if you want to step up your SEO game, you’ll need to run competitor research. Watch my video on how to do so, and it’s super easy and very lucrative for your SEO strategy.
