Marketmuse Alternatives and ClearScope Alternatives
In this article I will discuss SEO content optimization, SEO benchmarking and explore Marketmuse alternatives and Clearscope alternatives. Both Marketmuse and Clearscope are great tools but also very expensive. Are there any alternatives for SEO Consultants or small SEO Digital Agencies? Yes! ArticleInsights - but we’ll get into this later, first...
The Start of Your SEO Journey
When you first started SEO you will probably have been thinking two things;
I need to find out the Holy Grail of SEO
I need the best SEO tool - what is it?
Searching for the SEO Holy Grail
You will quickly (hopefully) find out that there is no Holy Grail to SEO. It’s just a lot of details that need to be well executed. Diligence, patience and attention to detail are what it’s all about. This is how you get results. It’s tempting to think that there is some magic sauce or technique that will get you industry-leading results and shoot you to SEO fame but sadly, that’s not how it works.
What’s the Best SEO Tool?
You will also spend a lot of time researching and trying out tools. We’ve all been there, looking for that tool that will help us with point 1 - the search for the Holy Grail of SEO. At the end of the day, the best tools are the ones that support your workflow the best. There are tons of free tools but the ones that save you the most time aren't generally free - ultimately, time is money. That's why premium features like the SEMrush API tool can be expensive.
SEO is all about Implementation
Again, the best tools are the ones that help us implement those small details in the best and most efficient way. So, slick, efficient SEO workflow becomes your goal. Taking your expertise and attention to detail and implementing it quickly and efficiently. As I said above, time is money.
Optimising your Page Titles and Meta Descriptions
Whilst not the core topic of this article. This is going to be right up there with your first steps of optimizing a website. This can be done without the use of expensive SEO tools - although they can help. Research on Google apply some common sense and a bit of flair will and get you the results you need.
Optimising On-Page Content - Where to start?
Once you’ve got epic page titles and meta descriptions you are going to want to turn your attention to optimising the on-page content. This includes both the existing content and the creation of new content. This is where things get more complicated for you. Starting out, even with some of the best ‘all-round’ SEO tools out there, you are going to get confused as to how best to optimise an existing or new webpage. Even if you are a seasoned professional, writing good content can be hard, not to mention time-consuming.
SEO Benchmarking Tools
If you want your page to rank higher then a good place to start is to look at the top ten ranking pages for your target keyword(s). There are quite a few tools that will give you keyword densities for one word, two words, etc keywords. Very quickly this process can become very manual and ‘vague’. Why does one page that looks very average rank better than one that looks great? Sometimes you can have just too much data - what you need are the really valuable bits - but how do you find them?
SEO Content Writing Templates
SEMrush has an SEO Content Template feature and an SEO Writing Assistant feature. Essentially what these tools do is take that Top 10 ranked pages data and use it to create content templates for you to create well optimised on-page content. SEMrush has a Google Docs plugin for their writing assistant which is great but it’s still a bit limited. This may have you looking for alternatives.
Marketmuse and Clearscope - Awesome but Expensive
Let’s see how each of these SEO Software Tools, are described in the words of their own creators.
What is Clearscope?
“Content teams drive more organic traffic with Clearscope. Our AI-powered platform makes it ridiculously easy to get more out of the content you're already producing.“ - clearscope.io
What is Marketmuse?
“Our AI and machine learning technology helps you create the most relevant, authoritative, and helpful content on any topic. It’s the kind of content search engines love! Stop relying on guesswork and start making smart data-driven decisions. MarketMuse saves you hours of keyword research, reduces the cost of paid search, and builds thought leadership in your industry.” - marketmuse.com
All your content creating dreams come true - at a price!
Let’s cut to the case. Both of these tools are very good. But...they are also expensive. Marketmuse doesn’t have a price list on their website but you can reckon around $1000pm. Clearscope is quite a lot cheaper but still starts at around $350pm.
When your monthly SEO tool bill make your eyes water
Chances are you are already spending a LOT of money on your SEO Tool quiver. Screaming Frog, SEMrush or AHrefs, Buzzsumo, you get the picture. Adding another $350 - $1000+ per month is painful for an SEO Consultant or Small SEO Agency. The question you have to ask is if these tools deliver value to your business. If you can leverage them accordingly then maybe, otherwise, you should look for something cheaper. This is not a criticism of any of these tools, we're just talking business here.
Introducing ArticleInsights
I’m going to say it. ArticleInsights has to be one of the best SEO tools I’ve found for writing and optimising content. If I was a developer and was capable of writing code for an SEO content optimising tool, or SEO benchmarking tool this would be it. Sadly though I'm not so I'm glad someone else did this for me.
What is ArticleInsights?
Again, let’s see what the website has to say “Don't Struggle Writing Amazing Articles. Article Insights tells you exactly what keywords to use, how to use them and what keywords your competitors are using to maximize the traffic potential of all your articles.”
ArticleInsights - Functional but not beautiful (in a good way!)
ArticleInsights has a learning curve. It’s one of those tools that gives you tons of flexibility at the expense of simplicity. If you want a tool that doesn’t require any effort on your part - be prepared to spend $350 a month on Clearscope, or a lot more again on Marketmuse. They will be doing more for you in a slicker package. Again, this isn't being critical, an analogy would be that some people like a command-line interface for their computing needs, some people like a nice slick GUI. If you are prepared to spend some time learning the tool, then ArticleInsights is just awesome. It’s like all the data that everybody else uses (broadly speaking) but makes use of your intelligence rather than artificial intelligence.
What does ArticleInsights actually do?
I don’t know the backend technical details but from a users perspective - It takes your target keyword, grabs the top 20 ranked pages for that keyword and benchmarks them. The benchmarked data is then presented to you as a list of target keywords for you to include in your content. It actually selects what it thinks are the 15 most important to include in your article but you can still add and subtract from this using your own ideas. In this respect it’s very much like the SEMrush writing assistant, only a lot more detailed and flexible.
Target Keywords and Frequencies
ArticleInsights will extract all the valuable keyword data from the top 20 ranked pages and present it to you in a way that makes it easy to use in your content. To do this you have a text editor window where you can start writing your content. When you have used the target keyword it gets highlighted and counted against the target frequency suggested by the benchmarking.
Finding Inspirational Content
A unique feature of ArticleInsights is the ability to ‘grab’ sentences from the benchmarked content and drop it into the text editor window. If you select a keyword it will show you all the sentences that include that keyword from those top 20 ranked pages. You can then select any of these and add them to the text editor window where you are writing your article. This allows you to use this as inspiration for your content. It also helps you check that you haven’t accidentally duplicated any content. It goes even further in that it will also help you rewrite that content by suggesting synonyms rather than a full rewrite. I found that a combination of the two approaches works really well. This is emphatically, NOT an article spinner. It is a tool that gives you everything you need to help you write your own original and unique content. It just gives you inspiration and somewhere to start.
The Infinitely Flexible Content Writing Assistant
So, in summary, the tool does the following;
Benchmarks the top 20 pages for your target keyword
Allows you to intelligently select the best data and keywords from that content to use in your own content
Gives you a flexible text editor that tracks your progress against your target keywords and keyword densities. Letting you focus on the writing.
Let’s you quickly and easily add sentences from any of those top 20 ranked pages and rewrite them quickly and efficiently whilst avoiding duplicating content.
And the best bit....the price. $6 or $12 per month! That’s it. At that price, why wouldn’t you use it?
Summary
I thoroughly recommend trying out ArticleInsights, click on the link for a free ArticleInsights trial. Don’t be put off by the seeming complexity of the interface. There are videos linked to in the interface which explain things perfectly. Play around with it and try stuff out. It is way less restrictive than other tools I’ve tried and that’s what I love about it. You don’t have to rely on Artificial Intelligence, you can use your skill and insight. Match this up to some excellent data mining and benchmarking data and you’ve to yourself an epic SEO content writing tool for very little money. Writers note - This article contains an affiliate link to ArticleInsights. I recommend this tool wholeheartedly and use it extensively myself. I will receive a small commission if you subscribe to the tool but you can try it for free and make up your own mind.