Honest Review: Semrush x SurferSEO Integration

When two powerful tools join forces, there is always the potential for greatness. However, the recent integration between Semrush and Surfer SEO falls a bit short. Recently, Surfer SEO unveils new Semrush SurferSEO integration.

Semrush’s website audit tool is unrivaled in its ability to show you what’s wrong with your website from an SEO perspective. Its list of features has expanded immensely over the years to include backlink audits, competitor analyses, site audits, content marketing assistance, and more. Meanwhile, Surfer SEO is an up-and-comer that’s shaking up the SEO world with its unique take on data analysis and Surfer for its cutting-edge SEO software. I’ve had a lot of success utilizing Surfer’s Content Editor to create SEO-optimized blog posts that rank on Google. I’ve been grateful to be able to focus on SEO and not have to worry about social media or other methods to share my content.

Recently, Surfer SEO introduced a feature called Grow Flow that helps you keep your site up to date with the latest SEO trends. With the Content Editor in Surfer SEO, you can make sure to include all the relevant keywords at a certain point in time, but the only constant in life is change, so Grow Flow helps you by suggesting where to add in new keywords. It also helps you brainstorm new topic ideas and optimize your internal linking strategy.

Since I’m a big fan of Surfer SEO, I was excited to hear about the new integration. I’d never used Semrush before the integration because I’d mainly been using Ahrefs. However, I was excited for an excuse to try out Semrush.

I decided to do a live walkthrough of trying it out for the first time. My initial experience wasn’t that great.

I started from the Surfer SEMRush integration landing page, and it’s entirely designed for new users, not existing users. I didn’t expect that and it confused me. The button to try out the integration took me to a Google sign-up page, not Surfer’s login screen. It was very unexpected and confusing. I ended up accidentally creating a new Surfer account because I wasn’t sure what to do with the Google sign-up page.

Making a Semrush account was easy and straightforward. Since I’m familiar with Ahrefs, the tool seemed fairly familiar to me. I set up my Semrush account and then expected to go back into Surfer SEO and find the Semrush integration easily.

The Semrush integration only seems to work in Grow Flow for now as suggestions that you should implement in addition to the keyword, internal link building, and content ideas.

I think it’s nice to have external backlink data within Grow Flow to grow your link building strategy, but the suggestions that came up for me were extremely low quality. I’m better off using Semrush directly than the suggestions it gave me in Grow Flow.

Right now, my take is that Surfer SEO‘s Grow Flow and Semrush are excellent tools separately, but right now they work best separately.

Hopefully, with new releases, the Semrush integration will be much better, and Grow Flow will have advanced even further. I hope to be able to come back in and update this article with a more glowing review.

For now, I suggest using each tool separately for the best results.