Surfer SEO AI Writer: My Favorite AI Article Generator! [2023]

As a blogger, I’m always looking for ways to make my life easier. 

One perpetual difficulty that I have (and I’m sure other bloggers would agree) is having the time to write all the posts that are needed on a blog. After all, the average blog post is 1376 words, and most bloggers publish as many articles per month as they can manage!

I love trying out new things, and so when my favorite SEO tool, SurferSEO, came out with an AI article generator, I had to try it out! 

I was honestly amazed. Who knew that AI had gotten so good already that it could write an entire blog post just from a keyword phrase??

I had so much fun with the tool that I even decided to compare it against other article generator tools that I knew about to see which was the best for bloggers (you can read all about how I gave 7+ different AI writing tools the same keyword phrase and then looked at each article to see which one I liked best… spoiler alert: it was SurferSEO!).

I’ve used the Surfer SEO AI writer about five times now, and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s actually a fantastic AI writing tool for bloggers.

Now, I’d never publish the output without editing it heavily, but it does give a fantastic place to start, and it can save you a bunch of time. 

Wondering how to get Surfer to create great articles for you? Let me show you how it works!

What is Surfer SEO?

Before we get into using Surfer to generate automatic articles, let’s talk a bit about Surfer SEO.

I’ve been using Surfer for this blog since March 2022. Surfer SEO is a content optimization tool that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to analyze your competitors’ articles and provide unique, valuable recommendations to create an ideal article. 

It does this by taking the keyword phrase you enter and analyzing the top-ranking articles for that phrase. It then gives you insights on aspects to consider, such as potential word count, number of headings, paragraphs, and images, and even keyword suggestions for within the article. 

Using Surfer when writing new articles is one of the reasons for the explosive growth of this site (we are at over 130k unique visitors per month already, and this is growing all the time!).

By putting together my expert knowledge and experience along with the insights I get from Surfer, many of my articles rank on page one of Google (with tons in the top three positions!). 

So, suffice it to say that I already knew and loved Surfer before they came out with their AI writing tool in May 2023.

Who Created Surfer SEO?

Surfer SEO was developed by five friends with diverse backgrounds in marketing, engineering, and development. They were driven by an entrepreneurial spirit and a shared vision to democratize SEO. 

The founding team comprised Sławek Czajkowski, Lucjan and Michał Suski, as well as Tomasz Niezgoda and Kazik Piętka. Their combined efforts since 2017 have transformed Surfer from an in-house tool used by one agency into a leading platform for keyword research, content creation, optimization, and SEO growth management. 

Today, SurferSEO is trusted by world-renowned corporations and individuals (such as bloggers!), with its use spanning over 140 countries and more than 15,000 businesses. At its heart, SurferSEO aims to make on-page search engine optimization accessible to anyone, regardless of geographic location or educational background.

What is An AI Article Generator Tool?

An AI Article Generator Tool is a sophisticated software application that leverages artificial intelligence, particularly natural language processing and generation techniques, to create written content automatically. 

These tools can produce articles, stories, essays, and other forms of textual content based on the input or prompts provided by the user (this is usually a keyword phrase in this context). 

The underlying AI models, like GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) from OpenAI, are trained on vast amounts of textual data, allowing them to mimic human-like writing styles and generate coherent, contextually relevant content. 

While the quality of generated content can be impressively high, it’s essential to note that such tools might not always guarantee accuracy or a nuanced understanding of complex topics. 

In my experience, I’ve found that many of these tools can be (extremely!) wrong about many topics that I write about. That’s why you always need to use your own prior knowledge and experiences when using any AI writing tool!

In general, I’ve found that the tools that allow you to create an outline first (before writing the article) will give the best article output. That’s because you can tweak and adapt the outline before asking the tool to write the article.

How to Use Surfer SEO’s AI Writing Tool

OK, let’s get into how to actually use Surfer to write an article from just a keyword phrase as input!

First of all, you need to know that in order to use Surfer’s AI writing tool, you’ll need to already have a subscription to Surfer. Their plans start at $69 per month for 180 content editors per year (this will allow you to analyze 180 different keyword phrases and use the information to write 180 articles). 

Once you have a subscription to Surfer SEO, the next step is to buy their AI writing credits. You can buy a single credit for $29, or you can get packages of credits. I ended up buying a pack of 5 credits.

Then, you’ll need to do your keyword research, so you know what phrase to target. There are tons of tools out there, but I mainly use AhRefs and Keywords Everywhere. 

Once you have your keyword phrase, you are ready to get Surfer SEO to write the article! 

Step One: Create a Content Editor for your Keyword Phrase

For the purpose of this article, the keyword phrase we are going to target is “sound design.” I used one CE credit (from my basic subscription) to create the document. 

Step Two: Click “Write With AI” and Create Your Article Outline

Creating an article outline is a step that you don’t want to miss. This is where your own knowledge and experience become important!

Surfer will first ask you to choose the competitor articles that you’d like to compare your new article against. Here, the best idea is to pick articles that score highly on Surfer for the keyword and that aren’t outliers in terms of word count. 

For example, if an article scores highly but only contains 500 words when the rest of the articles contain 2000-3000 words, you will want to exclude that outlier article! I’ve forgotten to do this step at times, and then the word count that Surfer gives you will be completely off!

Once you choose your competitors, it’s time to create the outline!

Surfer will take a few minutes to create this outline, but once it’s done, you can adjust and add both H2 and H3  headings however you like! 

For this article, you can see here what Surfer gave me for an outline:

For this article, I liked all of the headings, but I didn’t like the title that was generated. 

So, I was able to change the title to one that I liked better before I had the software generate the article.

Once you are happy with the title and outline, click “Let’s write!”

Step Three: Read & Edit Your Generated Article

Once you click the “let’s write” button, you’ll need to wait about 4-5 minutes for Surfer’s artificial intelligence to generate the article. 

You can click this link to read the exact article that Surfer generated (with no editing).

Here are a few things I noticed about the article when it was “straight out of the box”:

• It was a bit repetitive – all AI writing programs I’ve tried have had the issue of repeating themselves during the article. As the editor, you must read the article carefully to make sure you delete any repeated sections or information.

• It uses similar sentence structures – take a look and see if the sentences all look similar. I’ve found that AI tends to create sentences of a similar length most of the time. Make sure you change up the structure of your sentences! Make some shorter, some longer, and some into bullet points!

• There’s no personal experience – you’ll want to add personal anecdotes or stories to your article, especially in the introduction. Make sure to personalize the article, or it will sound “cold”.

• Fact-check everything!! AI is notorious for making up facts, quotes, and statistics. Ensure that you check all of these for errors or just inaccurate information. AI is not smart enough (yet!) to know the difference between a real fact and an incorrect one.

• Don’t forget about SEO – when you’re done writing your article, make sure that you look into SEO optimization. Ensure that Surfer has included your keywords in the article, and make sure that it reads naturally! This will help your article reach more people and be more likely to get shared. 

• Finally, ensure you proofread your article – it’s easy to miss errors when you aren’t paying attention. Check for typos and grammar mistakes (I use Grammarly for this). This will ensure a better quality of work in your end product!

A note about SEO-optimization

One of the best parts about using SurferSEO to generate your blog post is that it is automatically optimized for SEO.

I’ve found that my generated articles have come out with scores of between about 75 and 95 when Surfer generates them. This article came out with a score of 95, which is amazing!

If I’ve generated the article with another high-quality AI tool (such as Content at Scale or Koala), the score is not often that high.

That’s one of the primary reasons that Surfer is my top choice for article generation!

A Note About Images

Surfer SEO will automatically include places to insert images. It will also give you the alt text for the image it thinks would fit in well in that location. 

What I do with these image descriptions is put them into an AI image generator tool, such as Jasper, Nightcafe, or Midjourney. You’ll get a unique image (which Google loves!), and it will be perfectly related to your blog post!

Sometimes, there will be an image description that AI doesn’t generate very well.

Then you can look for stock images or even take your own picture (I often have to do that for screenwriting-related articles, as the AI programs cannot generate an image of a screenplay to save their lives!).

Surfer SEO Pricing

Surfer SEO offers a variety of pricing plans to cater to the needs of individuals, small teams, mid-sized teams, and agencies. 

Essential Plan: $69 per month for 180 Content Editor documents per year.

Advanced Plan: $149 per month for 540 Content Editor documents per year.

Max Plan: $249 per month for 1080 Content Editor documents per year, along with all of the add-ons included.

Enterprise: Contact them for custom pricing.

Ad-Ons:

To access the AI writing credits, these are the available packages:

$29 per article for up to three articles

$261 for 10 credits (10 articles)

$638 for 25 credits

$1218 for 50 credits

$2378 for 100 credits

Other ad-ons that are available include: 

• Grow Flow – Sufer will provide recommendations for how to improve your existing articles (with new keywords and potential internal links).
• Audits – Surfer will audit a published article and tell you how to improve it (by adding/removing keywords, changing the word count, adding images, etc.). Note: This ad-on is well worth the cost!
• SERP analyzer – Lets you analyze the articles that are currently ranking for the keyword phrase.
• Plus others!

Final Thoughts on Surfer SEO’s AI Article Generator

Overall, this is my favorite of the article generators at the moment. I’ve tried most of the options on the market right now, and Surfer generates the best articles!

I love that it gives image suggestions, and I love how the SEO scores are generally quite high immediately. While I still spend at least an hour editing a Surfer-generated article, it certainly saves me time when creating (certain) articles for my site. 

I love an excellent time-saving hack, and this is one of the best ones for bloggers!

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Frequently Asked Questions About the Surfer SEO AI Writer

Interested in AI writing tools? Check out these other helpful articles:

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