5 Best Surfer SEO Alternatives 👉 Review 2023
In today’s digital age, a successful strategy is hardly possible without thorough content management. Managing content can be a time-consuming and complex task that requires expertise and specialized tools — that’s why many specialists turn to content management solutions to streamline their workflow and improve their SEO performance.
While Surfer SEO is one of the most comprehensive content management tools out there, it never hurts to explore alternatives. Alternatives to Surfer SEO can provide a range of features and benefits, such as easier content creation, better content optimization, and more effective content distribution. You may find that some Surfer SEO competitors focus more on your area of interest or that you can actually get a better deal at a lower price.
Besides, content creation implies performing lots of manual tasks that take up time that could be put toward more important tasks. That’s why most software has embedded AI generation tools that help with content generation and make the entire process easier to handle.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the best Surfer SEO alternatives available, making them essential SEO software for agencies. Their increasing popularity among SEO specialists and agencies underscores their effectiveness. Whether you’re a solo content creator or part of a larger marketing team, these alternatives can help you optimize your content strategy and achieve better results.
1. SE Ranking
SE Ranking Content Marketing Tool is a comprehensive digital marketing platform with a wide range of tools to help businesses improve their online visibility. One of SE Ranking’s standout features that make it a great Surfer SEO alternative is its Content Marketing Module, which is designed to help businesses create and optimize high-quality content that resonates with their target audience.
SE Ranking’s Content Marketing Module helps you simplify content creation at every stage, from generating content ideas to writing and optimizing texts.
One of the module’s key features is its Content Idea Finder, which can analyze a keyword that is most closely related to the topic you want to write about. It can also provide a group of relevant keywords for your new article. If you aren’t sure what to write about, this tool will help you brainstorm by showing competitor titles that rank in the top 10 on SERPs for the highest-volume keyword.
Another key feature of the Content Marketing Module is its Content Editor, which lets you build SEO briefs, write optimized texts, and evaluate content quality. This tool is supported by SE Ranking’s very own AI algorithm, which analyzes top-ranking competitive content to provide you with optimization recommendations.
First and foremost, the Content Editor feature allows you to create an article brief with ease. To assist you in creating a comprehensive brief, the tool provides structure suggestions, recommended number of words/characters, headings, paragraphs, images, and relevant NLP terms to include in the article. SE Ranking gives you more extensive keyword data than Surfer SEO, as each term comes with its search volume, keyword difficulty, count, density, number of active competitor pages, etc.
What’s more, unlike Surfer SEO, SE Ranking lets you set recommendations for the title, description and slug, as well as add internal and external links and questions to the brief.
In addition to its Brief settings feature, the Content Editor helps you create articles and lets you perform an in-depth analysis of your written content. Use this feature to:
Get a list of NLP-recommended terms, links, metadata, and questions to use in your article.
Verify that the structure set up in the brief was followed.
View an overall quality and relevance score based on factors such as word count, keywords, content structure, and number of media elements.
Get a review of the grammatical errors, readability, punctuation mistakes, and stop words in the text. This content quality section is not available in Surfer SEO.
Check your article for plagiarism.
SE Ranking, like Surfer SEO, has a powerful AI Writer that generates H1s, headings and subheadings, as well as paragraphs on any given topic, all while following SEO copywriting best practices. But unlike Surfer SEO, SE Ranking lets you choose the tone of voice.
SE Ranking’s Content Editor also integrates with Google Docs, allowing you to continue editing your article there as you access essential SE Ranking scores and metrics for analysis.
Overall, SE Ranking’s Content Marketing Module is the ultimate powerhouse for businesses looking to create top-notch content. With its comprehensive set of tools, you’ll have everything you need to take your content game to the next level.
2. Content Harmony
Content Harmony optimizes content management and aims to help users deal with their content in half the time.
You can easily improve the workflow with this Surfer SEO alternative — the software aims to automate the part of the marketing content your team still does manually. The software focuses on helping teams out with briefs, letting specialists create them within minutes, whereas before, without the software, a single brief could take up to an hour to create. Thus, you can build high-quality content that covers key SEO requirements, that includes keywords and entities.
Once the brief is ready, you can get additional tips on how to improve the final draft — it uses AI-powered tools to grade the content. Overall, the app is easy to integrate into the marketing process, which may help your team save a sufficient amount of time.
While Content Harmony focuses on brief templates, Surfer SEO has more features to support your writing. Content Harmony is an application that can be very helpful when you understand exactly what you want to get out of it and work with a sufficient number of briefs daily. For more complex or affordable solutions, we suggest you check out other tools before making a decision.
The pricing is based on the number of reports and amount of data your team needs each month — everything else, like the number of users or projects, is unlimited, which not all services provide very often. The most popular plans include standard and pro plans, which cost $99 and $299, respectively. You can also request a custom plan that includes both regular and advanced features, starting from $1,000 a month.
3. Frase
Frase and Surfer SEO are both software tools designed to help businesses and marketers optimize their content for search engines. Yet, Frase is a more complex tool that unites all content creation phases under one roof, from content briefs to content analysis.
While both tools offer similar features, there are some notable differences between them. In terms of features, Surfer SEO is primarily a content optimization tool that provides a detailed analysis of on-page factors such as keyword density, title tags, and meta descriptions. Frase, on the other hand, offers a broader range of features, including content research, SEO optimization, and content creation tools.
Frase outperforms Surfer SEO in terms of its design interface, content research tool, and AI features. Unlike Surfer SEO, Frase provides a content research tool that allows businesses to analyze their competitors’ content and identify opportunities to improve their own content strategy. Besides, its user-friendly interface is more intuitive and easier to navigate, based on numerous service reviews. You can also benefit from the AI-powered content optimization tool that uses natural language processing (NLP) to analyze content and suggest improvements.
The software contains a set of effective tools that can serve as a legit Surfer SEO alternative. Frase’s broader range of features and AI-powered capabilities may make it a better fit for larger businesses and more complex content strategies, while Surfer SEO’s more focused approach and lower pricing may be a better fit for smaller businesses or individual content creators.
Frase is generally more expensive than Surfer SEO, with plans starting at $99/month compared to Surfer SEO’s $29/month starting plan. However, Frase offers a broader range of features, which may justify the higher price tag for some businesses.
4. MarketMuse
MarketMuse is a content intelligence platform that helps businesses and content creators to optimize their content creation process, enhance content quality and visibility, and drive better business outcomes. The software uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technologies to analyze and understand the language and structure of content and provide actionable insights to improve it.
MarketMuse software operates in three main areas of content marketing: content planning, content creation, and content optimization.
In content planning, the software uses machine learning algorithms to analyze the user’s existing content and competitors’ content to identify gaps and opportunities in their content strategy. It then provides topic suggestions and content briefs to help digital marketing specialists create comprehensive and engaging content that resonates with their target audience.
In content creation, the software helps to produce high-quality content by suggesting relevant subtopics, questions, and data points to include in the content. The software also provides real-time feedback on the content’s structure, grammar, and tone to ensure it meets user objectives and is optimized for search engines.
In content optimization, the software helps businesses and content creators to improve the search engine rankings and visibility of their content by analyzing the content’s structure, relevance, and authority. You can get suggestions on how to optimize the content’s headline, meta description, tags, and internal and external linking to improve its search engine performance and attract more organic traffic.
MarketMuse is used by businesses of all sizes, content agencies, and freelance writers to streamline the content creation process, improve content quality, and achieve better business outcomes, which is why it is considered one of the Surfer SEO alternatives. The software’s advanced content intelligence capabilities, user-friendly interface, and integrations with popular content management systems make it a popular choice for content marketers looking to optimize their content marketing strategy.
You can consider MarketMuse as a free alternative to Surfer SEO if you are satisfied with the limited number of features. It will give you the same value as the content marketing platform, allowing you to run 5 queries and 10 projects a month. Paid plans start at $149, which is slightly more pricey than what Surfer SEO offers.
5. Topic
Topic is one of the alternatives to Surfer SEO that can help you optimize your content for search engines. While both software offer content marketing features, they have some differences that set them apart from each other.
Topic is an AI-powered content optimization tool that analyzes your content and provides real-time recommendations to improve its relevance and quality. It uses machine learning algorithms to understand the semantic relationship between words and phrases in your content and provides recommendations based on that understanding. Topic also provides insights into your competitors’ content and helps you identify gaps in your own content strategy.
Surfer SEO, on the other hand, is a comprehensive SEO tool that offers a wide range of features to optimize your website for search engines. It provides a content editor that analyzes your content and provides recommendations for improving its relevance and readability. It also offers a keyword research tool, a SERP analyzer, and a backlink analysis tool, among other features.
When it comes to content optimization, Topic focuses on analyzing the semantic relationship between words and phrases in your content, while Surfer SEO provides a broader range of optimization tools, including keyword research, backlink analysis, and SERP analysis.
Both Topic and Surfer SEO are powerful SEO tools, but they have different areas of focus. If you’re looking for a tool that specifically focuses on content optimization and provides real-time recommendations based on AI analysis, Topic may be a better fit for you. However, if you want your content marketing to be covered as part of a more comprehensive software that includes SEO and content optimization, keyword research, and backlink analysis, then Topic is not the best Surfer SEO alternative for you.
Pricewise, Topic starts at $99 a month and reaches $299 for a premium subscription, and prices are based on the number of articles you want to work with. The premium plan lets you work with 50 articles, but if that is not enough for your business, you can request the enterprise plan.
Conclusion
When digital marketing specialists start to prioritize content creation, they may feel overwhelmed with the amount of content they need to produce and manage. Routine tasks can take an enormous amount of time, and every step of the content creation process requires a sufficient amount of effort. You need to research, plan, create, edit, and optimize the content, ensuring it is right for the strategy and can be done within certain deadlines. Luckily, a vast majority of such tasks can be optimized nowadays.
Even if you have a content writer on the team, it does not mean that the automation of processes is unnecessary. Quite the opposite — if you set the routine work aside, a specialist will have more time to analyze, develop, and create fresh ideas, which will ultimately bring more profit to the business.
To stay competitive, digital marketers need to find ways to streamline and automate their content creation and management processes. That’s when solutions like Surfer SEO and others come into play. Content marketing tools are essential for digital marketing specialists as they help them to create, manage, and distribute high-quality content that engages and converts potential customers.