Lucjan Suski is the co-founder and CEO of Surfer, an all-in-one platform for keyword research, content creation, optimization, and search engine optimization (SEO) growth management.
When did you first become interested in search engine optimization?
From a product person's perspective, SEO has always fascinated me. Most of the tools built in this space had poor UX compared to the ones I worked for as a product engineer at several product startups in various fields. We also knew that SEO professionals use the tool a lot, and usage is directly linked to revenue. So I started looking into it further.
Can you tell us the secret story behind the launch of Surfer?
Back in 2016, after working as a product engineer for a few years, I started dreaming up a startup idea as a technical co-founder. Meanwhile, my younger brother Michal was hired as an SEO specialist by KS, a marketing agency founded by his friend Slawek Chakovsky. Michal quickly rose through the ranks to become Head of SEO. I started picking his brain about the problems he faces every day at work and how to improve the performance of his SEO team. Some were obvious. For example, something less innovative like the Rank His Tracker crossed my mind, but I quickly settled on something quite unique. It's an on-page optimization tool that automatically analyzes hundreds of ranking factors to see what actually makes a difference. Go to the ranking. Within a few weeks, we had a prototype and it was quickly adopted by an agency. The rest is history.
How can Surfer help you with keyword research and become a trending leader in your niche?
Well, the way Google currently works, you can write the best content on the planet about a topic, like “how to lose weight,” but the chances of it ranking high are still low to zero.
What they want is an ongoing and ongoing effort to publish content in a specific niche. So, if you're going to cover weight loss, be prepared to write about everything related to weight loss, including nutrition, exercise, and health.
Think of your website as a book on a topic. As with any book, the various chapters should cover your topic with examples and sources to demonstrate why you are a trusted source in your niche.
This concept has been widely adopted and is known as a topical authority in the SEO world.
But just writing about different subtopics in your niche isn't effective. You also need to know which articles to write, how to link to them, and even which ones to prioritize.
This is where keyword research tools come into play. Unfortunately, most keyword research tools function as keyword database tools. There is a lot of keyword information available, but users need to act on that information in order to break it down into actionable steps. Implement it into your content strategy.
That's what makes me different from a surfer. We don't just provide a ton of keywords. Instead, Surfer takes a scientific approach to keyword research.
Classifies which pages to write about and in what order based on which pages belong to which clusters. Clustering related articles together helps website owners know which pages to link to. Of course, it also provides keyword metrics such as search volume.
Keyword difficulty is a separate metric. For example, Forbes and I are not the same, so we need to have different metrics for the topic. But unfortunately, most SEO tools ignore this.
Not so with us. So our keywords are customized for your domain depending on what keywords it already ranks for and what your organic presence is like.
Can you explain Surfer's content generation and how it differs from competing generation AI tools such as Jasper?
We focus on creating content that ranks high on search engines. This is what makes it different from other AI tools.
Most AI tools rely on creating well-crafted content based on training data and prompts. Surfer's goal is to create articles that help you get organic traffic by ranking for your target keywords.
To do this, we employ a series of proprietary algorithms to analyze top-ranked articles and determine how they got there.
We examine that content and determine things like what heading structure is used, NLP keywords and phrases, and how often they are used.
So if you search for “Image SEO” and the search results show an article about “Image SEO best practices”, the surfer will write an article about “Image SEO best practices” instead of “Image SEO tools” .
It also offers several customization features, such as allowing users to choose the tone and article type, as well as edit the headers and talking points they want to include within the article before the content is generated.
Can you explain how Surfer integrates with Jasper and the benefits of this integration for end users?
Jasper's SEO mode allows you to use Surfer directly within Jasper to optimize Jasper-generated content for search engines. As mentioned before, we focus on content that helps users rank in search engines and get organic traffic.
Surfer provides data-driven analysis and optimization for on-page SEO to improve content written within Jasper.
Once logged into Jasper, the integration is very simple and requires no special configuration on your part.
The main benefit for users is enhanced content optimization for SEO. This integration ensures that your content is not only easy to read, but also optimized for search engines right from the beginning. This reduces the need for extensive revisions and SEO adjustments after content creation, saving you time and resources.
Users are guided by SEO insights from Surfer while writing, allowing for a more streamlined workflow.
Most writers aren't SEOs, so they don't want to spend a lot of time optimizing their content. This integration allows writers who are not familiar with SEO to focus on what they do best, while aligning with SEO best practices.
Especially for agencies and in-house content teams, this integration allows them to scale their content production. Your team can create more content in less time while maintaining high standards.
After your article is published, you have the option to continue auditing it for post-publishing optimization. Can you discuss what this is and how it works?
Well, SEO is a long-term and continuous process. Unlike social media or video, you can't publish your content once and forget it.
But of course, SEO differs from these platforms in that it continues to bring in visitors long after you write the article.
The reason is that user behavior changes and so do their trends and preferences. Therefore, people look for different things and want to accomplish tasks that were not done before. In the world of search, that means publishers need to adapt to these changes to stay relevant.
Not only users but also search engine algorithms continue to evolve. In fact, in 2016, Google announced that it had conducted 130,336 search quality tests on him.
This is a daunting number and impossible for users to keep up with.
This is where an audit or post-publish optimization becomes necessary. Surfer allows users to keep up with these changes by continuously updating search engine page results.
So one year you might see an e-commerce website in search results, but the next year you might see a guide for the same search term. Surfer allows you to adapt your existing content to these changes.
It often takes weeks, if not months, for Google to find a ranking for a keyword. However, rather than accepting Google's decision, it's wise to continually optimize your articles to rank higher in search results.
Surfer's audit tool looks at other pages you're ranking for and makes recommendations about missing keywords and their density in your content, among other details.
Our approach is to emphasize low-hang opportunities available to maximize search performance.
I personally believe that instead of replacing human writers with AI, we should augment them with AI. How do surfers fit into this worldview?
Surfers can help here in two ways. First, even if you want to write the most valuable and unique content by hand, you will have to support it with articles that are not very interesting. In such cases, you should consider hiring a quality AI writing tool like Surfer or Content at Scale. In addition to that, we aim to enhance human content creation with a toolset that automates all the research that is currently done manually, allowing you to focus on providing unique perspectives. . This is something that is in our future roadmap.
Between 2019 and 2023, Surfer grew its revenue 15x, but what's behind this success?
I think it's all about focusing on things that can really make a difference. For a small startup that doesn't have many customers, you can't spend time on things like conversion rate optimization that could boost your growth by maybe 20%. At that stage, you need a 10x or even 100x improvement. These improvements primarily come from a focus on product innovation. We were always thinking, “How can we sway our customers?” Considering that more than half of the co-founding team was his SEO experts, achieving such a mindset was difficult. It was very easy. At the time, there was a very quick feedback loop between me and him, Slawek, Michal, and Tomek, which led to us delivering amazing features quickly.
What is your vision for the future of SEO and Surfer?
As AI evolves, SEO will continue to evolve as well. Search engines will continue to adopt this technology, but we don't expect a rapid disruption that will change search overnight. Remember, we're talking about billions of users who are used to how search works today. ChatGPT has gained a lot of traction and been adopted by 100 million users, most of whom have not stopped searching the traditional way, but rather enhanced it.
At Surfer, we continue to advance our AI capabilities to help people understand what makes great content and rank higher as a result. Regardless of how you create content with AI or non-AI, Surfer AI can help make your content better suited for his SEO.
Thank you for the wonderful interview. Readers interested in learning more should visit Surfer.