Lucjan Suski is the co-founder and CEO of Surfer, an all-in-one platform for keyword research, content creation, optimization and growth management for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
When did you first become interested in search engine optimization?
SEO has always fascinated me from a product person’s perspective. Most of the tools that were built in this space had inferior UX compared to what I was used to working as a product engineer for various product startups in different fields. I also knew that SEOs use their tools a lot and that usage is directly related to revenue, so I started digging deeper.
Could you share the genesis story behind the launch of Surfer?
In 2016, after a couple of years working as a product engineer, I started entertaining the idea of a startup as a technical co-founder. During this time, my brother Michal was hired as an SEO specialist at KS, a marketing agency founded by our friend Slawek Czajkowski. Michal quickly moved up the ladder to become Head of SEO, and I began to reflect on the problems he faced every day at work and ways to improve the performance of SEO teams. Some were obvious. For example, we thought of something not so innovative as a ranking tracker, but quickly settled on something truly unique: an on-page optimization tool that automatically analyzed hundreds of ranking factors to see what really makes all the difference when it comes to in the ranking Within weeks I put together a prototype that was immediately adopted by the agency, and the rest is history.
How does Surfer help with keyword research and becoming a topical leader in a niche?
Well, the way Google works now is that you could write the best content on the planet about a topic, say “how to lose weight”, but your chances of ranking well would still be slim.
What they want to see is a sustained and continuous effort to publish content in a particular niche. So, if you’re covering weight loss, be prepared to write about all things weight loss: nutrition, exercise, health, etc.
Think of your website as a book on a topic. Like a book, you need to cover topics with examples and sources in different chapters while demonstrating why you are a credible source in the niche.
This concept has been widely adopted and is known as a topical authority in SEO circles.
But just writing about different sub-topics in a niche is not effective. You also need to figure out which articles to write, how to link to them, and even which ones to prioritize.
This is where keyword research tools come in. Unfortunately, most keyword research tools act like keyword database tools: they give you tons of keyword information, but you have to act on it, breaking the information down into steps that you can actually do. implement into a content strategy.
This is where Surfer differs. We don’t just give you a bunch of keywords. Instead, Surfer takes a scientific approach to keyword research.
We break down which pages we have to write and in which order depending on which cluster they belong to. Grouping related articles helps website owners know which pages to link to, and of course we also provide keyword metrics like search volume.
Keyword difficulty is an individual metric. For example, Forbes and I should have different metrics for a topic because we are not the same. Unfortunately, most SEO tools ignore this.
We don’t, so our keywords are customized for your domain based on the keywords you’re already ranking for and how your organic presence looks.
Can you talk about Surfer’s content generation and how it differs from competitive generative AI tools like Jasper?
Our goal is to create content that ranks well in search engines. This is where we are different from other AI tools.
Most AI tools rely on creating well-written content based on their training data and instructions. The purpose of Surfer is to create articles that help you attract organic traffic by ranking for your target keywords.
To do this, we use a series of proprietary algorithms to analyze top-ranked articles to determine how they got there.
We investigate their content, determine what heading structures they use, NLP keywords and phrases and with what frequencies, among other things.
So if your search results show articles about “image seo best practices” when you search for “image seo”, Surfer will write an article about “image seo best practices” instead of “image seo tools seo of images”.
We also allow users a variety of customization features, from choosing a tone of voice, article type, and editing the headlines and talking points they want to include in articles before the content is generated.
Could you talk about how Surfer integrates with Jasper and the benefits of this integration for the end user?
Jasper’s SEO mode allows you to use Surfer directly within Jasper to optimize Jasper-generated content for search engines. As I mentioned before, we focus on content that helps users rank in search engines and drive organic traffic.
Surfer provides data-driven analysis and optimization for on-page SEO to improve content written in Jasper.
The integration is quite simple once you log into Jasper and does not require any great configuration on the part of the user.
The main benefit for the user is improved content optimization for SEO. The integration ensures that the content not only reads well, but is also optimized for search engines from the writing stage. This can save time and resources by reducing the need for extensive SEO reviews and adjustments after the content is created.
Because users are guided by Surfer’s SEO statistics as they type, this allows for a more streamlined workflow.
Most writers are not SEOs and don’t want to spend a lot of time optimizing their content. The integration allows non-SEO family writers to focus on what they do best while aligning with SEO best practices.
Especially for agencies and in-house content teams, this integration allows content production to scale. Teams can produce more content in less time, while maintaining high standards.
After publishing an article, there is an option to continue auditing articles, for post-publish optimization. Can you talk about what this is and how it works?
Well, SEO is a long-term and continuous process. Unlike social media or video, you can’t post content once and forget about it.
But of course, SEO also continues to attract visitors long after you’ve written an article, unlike these platforms.
The reason is that user behavior changes, as do trends and preferences. And so people are looking for different things and want to do tasks that weren’t done before. In the world of search, this means that publishers must adapt to these changes to stay relevant.
In addition to users, search engine algorithms are also continuously evolving. In fact, in 2016, Google announced that it conducted 130,336 search quality tests.
This is a mind-boggling number that users can’t keep up with.
This is where post-publishing auditing or optimization comes into play. Surfer allows users to keep up with these changes by continuously updating the results on the search engine pages.
So while one year, we may see e-commerce websites in search results, the next year we may see guides for the same search term. Surfer ensures that you can adapt your existing content in accordance with these changes.
It often takes weeks, if not months, for Google to find a ranking for your keyword. But instead of accepting what Google decides for you, it’s wise to continually optimize your articles for incremental gains that can help you rank higher in search results.
Surfer’s audit tools look at other pages that are ranking and will make recommendations about missing keywords and their density in your content, among other details.
Our focus is on highlighting low-level opportunities that you can take advantage of to maximize your search performance.
I personally believe that human writers should be augmented by AI, rather than AI replacing human writers. How would Surfer fit into this worldview?
Surfer will help here in two ways. First, while you want to write the most valuable and unique content by hand, you still need to back it up with articles that are less interesting. For these, you should consider hiring high-quality AI authoring tools such as Surfer or Content at Scale. What’s more, we aim to augment human content writing with a toolset that automates all the research people currently do manually, so they can focus on providing a unique point of view. This is something we have on our roadmap for the future.
Between 2019 and 2023, Surfer has increased its revenue by 15 times, to what do you attribute this success?
I think it’s about focusing on things that can really make a difference. When you’re a small startup without many customers, you can’t spend time on things like conversion rate optimization, which has the potential to increase your growth by maybe 20%. At this stage, you need 10x or even 100x improvements. These improvements come primarily from a focus on product innovation. We were always thinking, “how can we blow the minds of our customers”, and this mindset was quite easy to achieve since more than half of the co-founding team consisted of SEO experts. We had a very fast feedback loop during the day between myself and Slawek, Michal and Tomek, which led to delivering mind-blowing features quickly.
What is your vision for the future of SEO and Surfer?
As AI evolves, SEO will continue to evolve. Search engines will continue to adopt technology, but I don’t think we’ll see a rapid disruption event where search will change overnight. Remember, we’re talking about a couple of billion users who are used to search working the way it does today. ChatGPT gained massive traction and was adopted by 100 million users, but most of them are not giving up searching in the traditional way, they are increasing it.
At Surfer, we’ll continue to evolve our AI capabilities to help people understand what makes content good and actually rank higher. Regardless of the AI or non-AI way you prefer to write your content, Surfer AI will be there to help make it more SEO-friendly.
Thanks for the great interview, readers who want to learn more should visit Surfer.
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