NLP

When it comes to SEO, it's super important to know more than just what people are searching for. You also need to get a handle on how they're saying it and the real reason they're asking. That's where Natural Language Processing (NLP) changes the game! ✨

At Surfer, NLP is the secret sauce behind all our cool content optimization features. 🚀

NLP stands for Natural Language Processing, and it is the ability of a computer program to understand human language as it is spoken and written.

Initially, NLP was introduced by Google during the BERT algorithm update. They created a bunch of new metrics to improve the interpretation of search queries and to understand what makes better content. It recognizes the user's intent and the overall sentiment. By sentiment, we are talking about the overall emotion for a word, sentence, and page as a whole.

But something was missing as the update did not really aim at helping marketers to generate quality content to the fullest. We've noticed room for improvement, and we decided to create our own NLP engine - Surfer NLP.

While Google created its NLP algorithms for general purposes, Surfer NLP is a little bit more SEO oriented. It will help you optimize your new articles from the beginning or enhance your old, existing content. Each top Google search result is measured and analyzed with AI-powered techniques, making SEO efforts more effective. Since search engines use machine learning technology, so do we!

NLP is available across all of our tools in Surfer. You don't have to turn it on manually for your queries. All you need to do is pick a location associated with one of the supported languages listed in the next section of this article, and your query will automatically be enhanced with NLP.

In Audit and SERP Analyzer, you can additionally enhance your query with NLP Sentiment. This option, however, has to be manually enabled. While advanced features like NLP Sentiment might require a manual toggle, the core NLP analysis is always at your fingertips.

Depending on the language of the query, Surfer uses either Google's NLP API or our own NLP engine to extract data about entities and sentiment. To deepen our analysis and make the data actionable, we cross it with our True Density calculation. Regardless of which group your language is in, we will support you in producing great content and help your page rank high.

Our approach to language support for our NLP features is multifaceted.

We've got a cool way of making sure our NLP features work for different languages because we use a combination of our own Surfer NLP and Google's Natural Language API.

This basically means if our Surfer NLP isn't super deep in its analysis for a particular language yet, we can still get you awesome NLP insights by tapping into Google's powerful Natural Language API.

So, when you pick a language for your content analysis in Surfer, we can send your text over to Google's service for processing if it's one of the languages Google's API supports.

This hook-up with Google helps us support way more languages, giving our global users comprehensive NLP data. While we've got our own specialized NLP for our main languages, linking up with Google's API lets us cover a much wider range!