Michal Suski Surfer SEO Cofounder Interview How Surfer SEO Works ?

Surfer SEO was born because a small agency couldn’t hire enough experienced SEOs. 🏄

At the Chiang Mai SEO Conference, everyone was talking about Surfer SEO. I sat down with co-founder Michal Suski to learn how it works. 🎙️

📊 In this episode, we unpacked:

• 🛠️ How Surfer started inside an agency
• ✍️ Who Surfer helps
• 🔍 How Surfer picks the right competitors
• ⭐ Its top three features
• 🤖 NLP features on the way

🎥 Watch the full episode:

🛠️ How Surfer Started Inside an Agency

It began in a small agency in Poland. They struggled to hire experienced SEOs, so they built an internal tool to scale their processes. 🛠️

After about a year of using it, they decided to share it with the world, scaling the tool instead of the agency. Michal calls himself fairly new to SEO, about three years in: the niche is so dynamic you don’t need ten years to do the job. 💡

✍️ Who Surfer Helps

Surfer is for anyone who creates web content. Even a blogger who knows nothing about SEO can write well-optimized content that ranks higher. ✍️

For agencies, the big win is speed: Michal says you can create or optimize content up to ten times faster. For a deeper look, read my later interview with Michal. 🔗

🔍 How Surfer Picks the Right Competitors

Analysis starts with a keyword and is location-specific, so you can study direct competitors anywhere in the world. 🌍

The key difference: high-authority pages like Wikipedia or Amazon are excluded, because they rank thanks to authority and backlinks, not on-page work. 🔍

⭐ Its Top Three Features

1. True density in the audit: the quickest win. It shows which words and phrases you use less or more than top competitors, and does the math for you. 📊

2. Content editor: write powerful, optimized pieces even without SEO knowledge. ✍️

3. Missing common backlinks: links your competitors share that you don’t have. Backlinks still matter, and will in the future. For more on links, read Dixon Jones on link building. 🔗

👉 Check out Surfer SEO

🤖 NLP Features on the Way

To help with Google BERT-related fluctuations, Surfer was building features based on Google’s NLP API: entities, sentiment and more. While we recorded, the CTO was coding it. 🤖

Chiang Mai was Surfer’s first SEO conference outside Poland, and traffic went “like a hockey stick”, helped by people like Matt Diggity, Gael Breton and James Dooley talking about it. 📈 For Gael’s story, read Gael Breton on authority websites. 🔗

📝 Key Takeaways From the Michal Suski Interview

• 🛠️ Surfer started as an internal tool to scale an agency
• 🔍 Exclude high-authority pages when reverse engineering competitors
• 📊 True density is the quickest on-page win
• ✍️ The content editor lets non-SEOs write optimized content
• 🔗 Backlinks still matter

❓ FAQs About Michal Suski

Who founded Surfer SEO?

Michal Suski is a co-founder. Surfer began as an internal tool at a small SEO agency in Poland.

What are Surfer SEO’s top features?

Michal names true density in the audit, the content editor and missing common backlinks.

How does Surfer choose competitors?

It analyzes the top pages for your keyword and location, excluding high-authority sites like Wikipedia and Amazon that rank mainly on authority.

🎙️ More Inside A Hustler’s Brain Interviews You’ll Love

• Kyle Roof SEO Strategies, AI Tests & How To Rank #1 in Google 🚀
• Cyrus Shepard Spills Secret SEO Hacks to Rank #1 on Google 🚀
• How To Rank #1 for Big Keywords on Google By Steve Toth🚀
• Matthew Woodward Live Interview At AWA Asia Bangkok About SEO

Which Surfer feature would you try first? Share this with an SEO friend. 💬

🔔 Subscribe & Follow Jitendra Vaswani Everywhere

🎧 Subscribe to Inside A Hustler’s Brain on YouTube and Follow Jitendra Vaswani on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, everywhere. 🙌