Fatrank Podcast

Dan Grant: Hi guys, it’s Dan here, and today I’m going to show you how to use the SERP Analyzer tool inside Surfer SEO. For anyone who isn’t familiar, Surfer SEO is an all-in-one SEO tool that helps with SERP analysis, content research, keyword research, backlinks, and more. It puts all the important ranking information right in front of you so you don’t have to guess what Google wants. Today, we’re focusing on the SERP Analyzer, which lets you enter keywords and see exactly what is making pages rank.
Once you’re signed in, you’ll see a box where you enter your keyword. For this example, I’m using “tennis court maintenance.” You can choose desktop or mobile scraping — we’ll use desktop — and then select your country. You can even target specific cities, which is a great feature, but for now we’ll leave it set to the UK. After entering the keyword, let it load for a few seconds until the analysis appears.

When you open the SERP report, it can look daunting at first — lots of graphs, metrics, and sidebar options — but it’s actually very easy to understand. The main graph shows the number of body words plotted against ranking positions. You’ll notice that the top-ranking pages tend to have around 800 words, and once pages start dropping in ranking, that number decreases significantly. Surfer shows a 60% correlation between body word count and ranking for this keyword, which means more content seems to help for “tennis court maintenance.”

You can hover over the question marks to learn exactly what each metric means. The left-hand menu lets you toggle different factors on and off to see what correlates with ranking. For example, “exact keyword density” has almost no correlation — the graph is scattered everywhere — which means Google isn’t ranking pages based on how many times the exact keyword appears. But when you look at “missing common words and phrases,” the correlation is huge. Top-ranking pages include far fewer missing related terms, while pages ranking lower are missing lots of them. That shows you the importance of semantic completeness.

As you scroll through these sections, you can analyse structure, body content, paragraphs, keywords, images, and links. For example, “character count within paragraphs” has a correlation — top pages have more content depth. The “image alt tag” metric shows that sites ranking in the top 10 tend to use the exact match keyword in three or so image alt tags, while lower pages barely use any. That’s an actionable optimisation.

Links, on the other hand, barely show any correlation here. External backlinks don’t seem to influence this keyword much, which tells you this is a content-driven SERP. That means your time and effort should go toward improving content, not chasing links for this particular term.
This approach is what makes Surfer SEO more useful than traditional tools — instead of guessing whether backlinks or keyword density matter, you can see exactly what correlates with rankings. The green correlation bars help you prioritise what actually counts.
Scrolling further down the report, you’ll find additional features:
– SERP snapshots showing who ranks and what their pages look like
– Ranking keywords for each competitor, helping you find related opportunities
– Similar keywords you can add to your page to boost relevance
– Popular words and phrases frequently used by top pages
– Common words and common phrases used across ranking content
– Prominent phrases summarising what the best pages include
– Common backlinks, showing which sites link to multiple top competitors
All of these sections help you refine your content and expand topical authority. Similar keywords can be used within your article or for creating internal links to other pages. Popular words and common phrases help you identify terms you might be missing.

The main takeaway is simple: work through the left-hand menu, look for items with strong correlations, and focus on improving those. Just as important is dismissing factors that don’t matter — for example, “estimated traffic” has no correlation for this keyword, meaning you don’t need a high-traffic site to rank. For “tennis court maintenance,” Google is clearly prioritising content depth, relevance, and semantic completeness.

Surfer’s SERP Analyzer gives you a clear roadmap of how to rank better by showing exactly what the top competitors are doing. I hope this walkthrough helps you understand the tool more clearly and gives you confidence in using it to improve your own rankings. Thanks for watching, and I’ll see you on the next one.