Trialled by Daniel Zuboff

Strategy at Loomery

Making your website visible to as many potential customers as possible is vital to any business operating today. A big part of the game you have to play is search engine optimization, or SEO for short. Google, for example, has a results page it displays after being queried and the placement of a link to your website, one of your articles, or a social media post can obviously have a huge impact on the draw of traffic to your business.

In order to increase traffic, you could pay for ads, but optimising the content you put out on the web can have just as big an effect. Surfer uses data analysis, coupled with AI, to try and turn the art of organic SEO into more of a science. Surfer has a bunch of features build in, some better than others. One thing the service is great at is prompting new article ideas. You input a few keywords; in my case product development, digital products, strategy, software development and out pops a list of 34 topic clusters.

These clusters act as excellent starting points for new articles. They each have an estimated MSV (Monthly Search Volume) which is a total of the MSV for all the keywords that are suggested for you to put in that article. For example, if the idea of writing something about product roadmaps now really appeals to me, I can click on that option and get a set of 9 keywords that they suggest I use in the piece to drive its search ranking upwards.

The software gets a lot more hand-holdy than that. It can get you started on writing an article with AI generated text, complete with the right keywords, headings and number of paragraphs for maximum SEO optimization.

It can also do this to existing content. I uploaded Ian Wood’s article on the Loomery website about creating a cloud platform for the University of Exeter, along with the keyword “product showcase” and it gave a bunch of suggestions about how to drive up its search ranking. It suggested shortening the article, adding more headings and way more images. On the right-hand side you can see a list of terms, which if included would drive the article up in the search rankings. The software can then use AI to insert these terms in appropriate places.