When Talkersi, a Polish online language school, decided to get serious about SEO in 2024, they were starting from scratch. Competitors had years of authority and content behind them, while Talkersi’s blog had never been strategically planned or optimized.
The goal was ambitious: close the competitive gap and gain real visibility in a crowded market.
Eighteen months later, Talkersi had published 78 blog posts, generated over 16 million impressions and 230,000+ organic clicks, and saved the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of PLN in advertising spend.
Here’s how they did it with Surfer.
1. Writing that feels like a game (but wins rankings)
For Talkersi, the first breakthrough came in the writing process itself.
Each article was written inside Surfer’s Content Editor with a real-time Content Score, which gamified the process of optimization.
That gamification effect turned SEO-driven writing from a chore into a motivator. This motivation translated quickly into rankings:
- 100 keywords in the TOP 3 within 3 months
- 1,000 keywords in the TOP 10 within 7 months
By July 2025, Talkersi’s visibility peaked at 2,238 keywords in the TOP 10 and 459 in the TOP 3.
Our ‘aha!’ moment came when we realized the Surfer Score wasn’t just a number—it meant top positions in search results.
— Wiktor Jodłowski, CEO, Talkersi
For context, the Content Score shows a 0.28 correlation with rankings, so it’s scientifically proven to help content perform better.
The goal isn’t necessarily to hit a perfect 100, although it doesn’t hurt, but to outscore your competitors.
By following the Content Editor’s keyword, structure, and entity guidelines, Talkersi consistently published content that wasn’t just optimized; it was more competitive than what was already ranking.
2. Treating publication as just the starting point
Publishing content was never the finish line. After going live, every page was put back through Surfer’s Audit tool.
Audit gave the team precise recommendations:
- Adjust keyword usage.
- Improve internal links.
- Optimize meta titles and descriptions.
- Benchmark against competitors.
These weren’t guesswork changes. They were targeted tweaks that kept content competitive long after publication.
For Talkersi, this ongoing optimization cycle was key to sustaining growth, and the data shows why it matters.
In a recent study, we found that content updates with Surfer can nearly 2x your odds of appearing in the Top 10.
And for identifying which pages to update first, Surfer’s Content Audit tool makes it easy. By connecting Google Search Console, you’ll know exactly which pages have the most potential to benefit from a refresh.
In the Recommendations tab, you can spot underperforming pages that just need a few strategic updates to climb back into competitive positions.
Once identified, these pages can be re-opened in the Content Editor, where following the real-time guidelines ensures every update is comprehensive and competitive.
Features like Auto-Optimize and Coverage Booster make this process even faster, automatically adding relevant terms and strengthening topical depth so updates don’t miss critical ranking factors.
3. Future-proofing with AI search optimization
Talkersi’s SEO investment has also carried them into the next frontier: AI search visibility.
Their articles are now surfaced in Google’s AI Overviews, earning more than 1,200 citations with an average position of 4.05.
Roughly 6.13% of traffic from AIO queries already flows to Talkersi.
Just as importantly, their content ranks for specific high-value keywords inside AI Overviews, often alongside strong organic positions. Examples include:
- “present continuous słówka” [present continuous vocabulary/words] → ranking #1 in AIO and #1 organically
- “język angielski dla programistów” [English for programmers] → ranking #1 in AIO and #1 organically
- “duolingo chorwacki” [Duolingo Croatian] → appearing in AIO at #5
Behind these results is more than luck. In an internal Surfer study, we found that articles with stronger fact coverage are 25% more likely to be cited in AI search results.
That’s where Surfer’s Coverage Booster comes in. By pulling facts from SERPs and LLMs, it helps you enrich your content with the information AI systems prioritize. Including these facts not only boosts rankings but also increases your chances of being cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews.
Talkersi benefited from this approach by consistently covering topics in full, making their content not only rank-worthy but also AI-visible.
And the payoff is tangible: students are now finding Talkersi directly through AI tools like ChatGPT. As one learner shared:
This dual presence across SERPs and AI search ensures that Talkersi isn’t just visible today—they’re positioned for the way people will search tomorrow.
From visibility to business growth
Traffic gains weren’t just vanity metrics.
Each of those 230,000 organic clicks expanded Talkersi’s remarketing audience, drove brand awareness, and saved the company significant advertising costs.
Every click feeds our funnel. Without Surfer, we’d have had to spend heavily on ads to compete.
— Kuba Kłos, CEO, The Marketing (Talkersi’s agency partner)
By mid-2025, the SEO traffic generated with Surfer had the ad equivalent value of 136,400 PLN per month—budget Talkersi would have otherwise spent on Google Ads.
What other teams can learn from Talkersi
Talkersi’s journey shows that even without years of SEO history, it’s possible to compete with and even outperform established players.
Their visibility, once far behind competitors, now runs nearly parallel, showing how quickly late starters can close the gap.
Talkersi’s success highlights three key lessons:
- Make optimization engaging. Turning Surfer’s Content Score into a game kept writers motivated and aligned with SEO best practices.
- Treat publication as a starting point, not the finish line. Continuous optimization through Surfer’s Audit turned “good” content into “great” content that keeps ranking.
- Think beyond SERPs. By building topical authority, Talkersi secured visibility in both Google results and AI Overviews, future-proofing their brand in the age of generative search.
For teams looking to scale SEO without bloated budgets, Talkersi proves that a structured workflow with Surfer can turn ambition into measurable impact.
Surfer isn’t just a tool. It’s a system that makes SEO fun, motivating, and—most importantly—effective.
— Wiktor Jodłowski, CEO, Talkersi
👉 Ready to close your own competitive gap? Get started with Surfer!
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