Lucjan Suski is the co-founder and CEO of Surfer, an all-in-one platform for keyword research, content creation, optimization and SEO (Web optimization) growth management.
When did you initially get inquisitive about SEO?
Web optimization has at all times fascinated me from the attitude of a product person. A lot of the tools that were inbuilt this space had inferior UX in comparison with what I used to be used to working as a Product Engineer for several product startups across different fields. I also knew that SEOs use their tools heavily, and usage is directly connected to revenue, that’s why I began to dig deeper.
Could you share the genesis story behind the launch of Surfer?
Back in 2016, after a few years working as a Product Engineer, I began to entertain the thought of a startup as a technical co-founder. During that point, my brother Michal was hired as an Web optimization Specialist in KS, a marketing agency founded by our friend Slawek Czajkowski. Michal quickly climbed the ladder and have become Head of Web optimization, and I began to select his brain in regards to the problems he faced each day at work and ways to enhance the performance of Web optimization teams. Some were obvious. For instance, a not-very-innovative thing like a rank tracker crossed our minds, but we quickly settled on something really extraordinary – an on-page optimization tool that mechanically analyzed a whole lot of rating aspects to see what really makes a difference relating to rating. Inside a couple of weeks, I put together a prototype that was immediately adopted by the agency, and the remainder is history.
How does Surfer help with keyword research and becoming a topical leader in a distinct segment?
Well, the way in which Google works now could be that you might write the very best piece of content on the planet on a subject, say “find out how to shed weight”, but your probabilities of rating well would still be slim to none.
What they wish to see is a sustained, continuous effort to publish content in a certain area of interest. So, should you’re covering weight reduction, be prepared to put in writing about all things weight reduction – nutrition, exercise, health, and so forth.
Consider your website as a book on a subject. Like a book, it’s essential to cover topics with examples and sources in several chapters while demonstrating why you might be a reputable source on the area of interest.
This idea has been widely adopted and is often called topical authority in Web optimization circles.
But just writing about different subtopics in a distinct segment isn’t effective. You should also determine which articles to put in writing, find out how to link them, and even which to prioritize.
That is where keyword research tools are available. Unfortunately, most keyword research tools act as keyword database tools – they provide you with a ton of keyword information, but you might be left to act upon them, to interrupt down the knowledge into steps you could actually implement in a content strategy.
That’s where Surfer differs. We do not just hand out a bunch of keywords to you. As a substitute, Surfer takes a scientific approach to keyword research.
We break down which pages to put in writing about and in what order based on which cluster they belong to. Clustering related articles together helps website owners know which pages to link to, and after all, we also provide keyword metrics like search volume.
Keyword difficulty is a person metric. For instance, Forbes and I must have different metrics for a subject because we’re not the identical. Unfortunately though, most Web optimization tools ignore this.
We don’t, so our keywords are personalized on your domain depending on the keywords you’re already rating for and what your organic presence looks like.
Are you able to discuss Surfer’s content generation, and the way it differs from competitive Generative AI tools resembling Jasper?
Our focus is on creating content that ranks well in serps. That is where we’re different from other AI tools.
Most AI tools depend on creating well-written content based on their training data and prompts. Surfer’s purpose is to create articles that may make it easier to attract organic traffic by rating on your goal keywords.
With a purpose to do that, we employ a series of proprietary algorithms to investigate the top-ranking articles to find out how they got there.
We research their content, determine what heading structures they use, NLP keywords and phrases, and at what frequencies, amongst other things.
So if the search results show articles on “image website positioning best practices” while you seek for “image website positioning”, Surfer will write an article on “image website positioning best practices” as an alternative of say, “image website positioning tools”
We also allow users several customization features, from selecting a tone of voice, article type and to edit headers and talking points they wish to be included throughout the articles before the content is generated.
Could you discuss how Surfer integrates with Jasper, and the advantages of this integration for the top user?
Jasper’s Web optimization mode lets you use Surfer directly inside Jasper to optimize Jasper-generated content for serps. As I discussed before, our focus is on content that helps users rank in serps and draw organic traffic.
Surfer offers data-driven evaluation and optimization for on-page Web optimization to enhance your content written inside Jasper.
The combination is sort of straightforward when you log in to Jasper and doesn’t require any great setup on the user’s part.
The principal profit for the user is enhanced content optimization for Web optimization. The combination ensures that the content not only reads well but can also be optimized for serps right from the drafting phase. This may save time and resources by reducing the necessity for extensive revisions and Web optimization adjustments after the content is created.
Since users are guided by Web optimization insights from Surfer while writing, this permits for a more streamlined workflow.
Most writers aren’t SEOs and don’t wish to spend a number of time optimizing their content. The combination allows non-Web optimization familiar writers to give attention to what they do best while aligning with Web optimization best practices.
Especially for agencies and in-house content teams, this integration allows for scaling content production. Teams can produce more content in less time, while maintaining high standards.
After an article is published there’s an choice to proceed to audit the articles, for post-publishing optimization. Are you able to discuss what that is, and the way it really works?
Well, Web optimization is a long-term and continual process. Unlike social media or videos, you may’t publish content once and ignore it.
But after all, Web optimization also continues to herald visitors long after you might have written an article, unlike those platforms.
The rationale is that user behavior changes, as do trends and preferences. And so people search for various things and wish to perform tasks that weren’t previously done. On the earth of search, that implies that publishers must adapt to those changes to remain relevant.
Besides users, search engine algorithms are also continually evolving. In actual fact, in 2016, Google announced that it ran 130,336 search quality tests.
It is a mind-boggling number that’s inconceivable for users to maintain up with.
That is where auditing or post-publishing optimization is available in. Surfer allows users to maintain up with these changes by continually updating for ends in the search engine pages.
So while one yr, we might even see ecommerce web sites within the search results, we might even see guides the subsequent yr for a similar search term. Surfer ensures you could adapt your existing content according to these changes.
Often, it takes weeks, if not months, for Google to search out a rating on your keyword. But as an alternative of accepting what Google decides for you, it’s prudent to repeatedly optimize your articles for incremental gains that may make it easier to rank higher in search results.
Surfer’s audit tools take a look at other pages which can be rating and can make recommendations for missing keywords and their density in your content, besides other details.
Our approach is to spotlight the low hanging opportunities you could take to maximise your search performance.
I’m a private believer that human writers should augment themselves with AI, versus replacing human writers with AI. How would Surfer fit on this world view?
Surfer will help here in two ways. First, although you should write the most dear and unique content by hand, you continue to have to support it with articles which can be less exciting. For those, you must consider hiring high-quality AI writing tools resembling Surfer or Content at Scale. On top of that, we aim to enhance human content writing with a toolset that automates all of the research that individuals currently do manually, in order that they can give attention to providing a novel standpoint. That is something that we have now in our roadmap for the longer term.
Between 2019 and 2023 Surfer has grown its revenue by 15x, what do you attribute this success to?
I feel it’s all about specializing in things that may really make a difference. When you find yourself a small startup without many purchasers, you may’t spend time on things like conversion rate optimization, which has the potential to spice up your growth by perhaps 20%. At that stage, you would like 10x and even 100x improvements. Those improvements are mainly coming from specializing in product innovation. We were at all times considering, “how can we blow the minds of our customers”, and such a mindset was quite easy to realize provided that over half of the co-founding team consisted of Web optimization experts. We had a really quick feedback loop back within the day between myself and Slawek, Michal and Tomek, that led to delivering mind-blowing features fast.
What’s your vision for the longer term of Web optimization and Surfer?
With the evolution of AI, Web optimization will proceed to evolve. Search engines like google and yahoo will proceed to adopt the technology, but I don’t think we’ll see a rapid disruption event where search will change overnight. Do not forget that we’re talking a few couple of billion users which can be used to the search working the way in which it really works today. ChatGPT got massive traction and was adopted by 100 million users, but most of them aren’t resigning from searching in the standard way, they moderately augment it.
At Surfer, we’ll keep evolving our AI capabilities to assist people understand what makes good content and, in effect, rank higher. Irrespective of what AI or non-AI way you favor to put in writing your content, Surfer AI can be there to assist make it higher suited to Web optimization.
