Getting Started: Audit
Updated over a week ago

Audit is included in the base subscription of Scale and Scale AI and does not need to be purchased separately as an add-on!

Audit does need to be purchased separately on:

  • Essential

  • Lite (legacy)

  • Advanced (legacy)

Surfer's Audit is a go-to tool if you want to:

  • Check if your old content is up-to-date and relevant

  • Find SEO errors

  • Revise your already published article in the surroundings of your website elements.

There are several reasons to consider generating an Audit report on your old work. Unfortunately, optimized work won’t stay optimized forever. Moreover, refreshing stale work is usually more resource-effective than creating something new! You can also reduce the pressure on content creators to always find new topics by returning to your previously published articles and boosting poorly performing pages.

An Audit report will provide detailed insight into things like keyword optimization, structure, and more. Refresh the report after making some of the recommended changes to see the effect of what’s been done!

Stay busy with up to 100 Audit reports per month for just $49!

Audit Step-by-step

1. Make sure your Surfer subscription is active, and if you're on Essential or Advanced (legacy), make sure the Audit add-on is purchased.

2. Open the Audit tab from the left-side menu inside your Surfer app.

3. Create a query by typing in the URL of the article you want to audit, targeting keywords, and adjusting location and device settings to your needs.

4. Choose your competitors.

Click on the Gear icon and based on your knowledge and experience, select the competitors against whom you want to benchmark your content. Here's a list of a few tips that will help you in this process:

  • Try choosing competitors who have well-optimized content. In other words, rather select those that have a Content Score of 60+.

  • Avoid selecting domains that have a high ranking place and high authority but a very low Content Score. It will be counterproductive to compare your content to theirs - they do not owe the high position to good SEO practices but rather to their domain's high authority - for example, Wikipedia, Quora, or Amazon.

  • Avoid selecting domains that serve a different search intent than your page. If you are running an informative blog, you should rather not select any e-commerce businesses.

  • Select at least 3 competitors for the best results.

Done! Now that your competitors' list has been reviewed, you can proceed to analyze the report and implement the changes based on our suggestions. It may seem intimidating at first, but once you take a deeper look, you will actually see it's not complicated at all!

Tips&tricks

1. To share your Audit, click the 'Share' button in the top right corner of the page. The URL will be automatically saved in your clipboard, and you can now send it to others.

2. Scroll down your audit report, and you will see a few sections. Each one of these sections corresponds to a specific part of your page that we've analyzed.

The analysis is enhanced with recommended ranges that are 100% based on your selected competitors.

Every section is filled with suggestions for you to follow. We may ask you to add or remove a specific term, build up your internal linking net, decrease the number of words on your page, increase the number of images, and more. That solely depends on the way your and your competitors' pages are built.

3. When your Audit query is running, Surfer is crawling both your page and your competitors' pages. To make it easier for you when it comes to tracking your changes and updates, we introduced the Refresh button. Clicking it will cause Surfer to re-crawl your page so you will see what the progress is.

After up to a few minutes, your suggestions will reflect on the changes you made on your page between running your initial query and refreshing the Audit.

❗Please note that it will not cause Surfer to re-crawl your competitor's pages. The refreshing purpose is rather organizational for you to be able to see your progress. If you want Surfer to recrawl the whole SERP for your targeted keyword, you will need to run a new query.

Stay busy with up to 100 Audit reports per month for just $49!

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