Clearscope vs MarketMuse: Which is the Best AI SEO tool?

Clearscope and MarketMuse are popular content marketing tools that can help you plan, create, optimize and track content. 

If you’re struggling to choose between these two tools, we are here to help you pick the one that effectively meets your content marketing goals. 

We will take a deep dive into their features, pricing, advantages and disadvantages and even give you our final verdict on which tool is best suited for your business. 

Clearscope Overview

Clearscope is an SEO platform that helps businesses plan, optimize and track your content. Its core features include a content editor, SEO reports, a real-time content tracker, and a keyword planner. Clearscope is an ideal solution for content teams who are aiming to produce rank-ready content. Your content team doesn’t have to be a seasoned SEO professional to use Clearscope. 

Key Features of Clearscope

Clearscope offers

• Keyword planner 
• Content optimizer 
• Outline creator 
• Content Monitor 

Here’s an insider view of each feature. 

Keyword Explorer 

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Clearscope Keyword Discovery tool helps you with the fundamental keyword research process to find profitable keywords and relevant terms you can target in your next content piece. 

You can find the search volume fluctuations of a specific term in the past 6-12 months, keyword competition level, and Cost Per Click (CPC) to understand if a keyword is profitable and worth targeting. 

All-in-all, this keyword Discovery tool is a perfect solution for SEO-beginner and content writers who are exploring different content ideas and subheadings to optimize their content.

Brief creator 

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If you are a content head, SEO strategist, or content writer, Clearscope’s content brief creator can help you build a data-backed brief to provide direction to your writers. This tool includes insights about terms, research, and top-ranking competitors' content. 

Altogether, this helps you add relevant research sources and develop an outline that covers all the topics and subtopics of a particular keyword to garner your target audience’s attention. 

The research tool summarizes competitors' keyword usage; people also ask questions and AI-generated queries to help you address relevant details in your content. Moreover, suggestions like YouTube links, case studies, reports, and forums help you or your team conduct comprehensive research. 

Content Editor 

Clearscope content optimization tool helps you analyze your content optimization level to rank top on the SERP for targeted keywords. You will get a tailor-made keyword list to outrank your competitors for a specific term. This keyword list is curated using advanced NLP and machine learning technologies. 

The content grade system also provides filtering options like importance, heading, and keyword density to ease prioritizing specific terms. As one step further, it also helps users see how their competitors use each term cohesively in their content. This gives you an idea of where to place the term and how to use it naturally in your content. 

Moreover, your overall content score is indicated by a letter grade to scale your content’s optimization level. Additionally, the word count details and readability level evaluated based on the Flesch-reading-ease test help users understand the content's flow and structure to provide a good reader experience. 

All these deep insights are a summary of your content performance. So, ultimately, when you align your content with the provided guidelines, you increase the chance of outperforming the top-ranking pages.

Content Reports 

Clearscope’s content reports help view your content and your competitor's content optimization levels. 

The core function of this tool is to create a report for a piece of content and get deeper insights to understand its performance or optimize it for better ranking. 

Moreover, it allows you to maintain a database of all your content in one place. Similar to Google Docs, all your content will be accessible under one tab. You can also use the filter and search options to find the report you want to refer to. 

Additionally, if you want to analyze your competitor's ranking factors, you can just enter the URL and generate a report with one click. This gives you a complete breakdown of how your competitors are ranking higher, the keywords they are using, their content structure, and other ranking factors. 

Overall, this tool helps you maintain a centralized content database and run a competitor content analysis easily. 

Inventory 

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Clearscope's content inventory helps you keep tabs on your content's performance and competitors' rankings. Clearscope integrates with Google Console to display your content's performance, facilitating content tracking.

In this tab, you can see the overall impressions and clicks your content has gained over time. You can even access page-level clicks, impressions, and SEO value information to get deeper insights into your content's performance. 

Overall, this is an ideal tool for monitoring your content marketing efforts and knowing where you stand among your competitors.

Pros of Using Clearscope

• WordPress integration helps users optimize their content directly in their CMS and eliminates the back-and-forth to use updated content. 
• Shareable content reports facilitate collaboration and help team members work in tandem. 
• Google Docs Add-on migrates the power of Clearscope to users' workspaces and seamlessly integrates into their workflow. 
• Ideal tool for beginners who have little to no SEO knowledge, as it automatically generates a list of keywords. 
• Content optimization and tracking features in one place help users see how their SEO efforts translate into results. 
• Content brief creator helps content heads and SEO strategists guide the writer with data-backed and credible insights. 
• Real-time suggestions help users to fine-tune their content immediately for better ranking chances. 
• Clearscope sets top-ranking content as a benchmark to create keyword and optimization suggestions. This helps users follow competitors' best practices without doing much manual work. 
• The content report tool acts as a content hub to manage and store all content assets in one place, ultimately making it easy for users to access the content whenever needed. 

Cons of Using Clearscope

• Lack of accurate insights about keyword difficulty in keyword research tools restricts users from making data-driven decisions. 
• The absence of AI-writing assistance limits users' ability to leverage cutting-edge technologies to create quality content at scale. 
• Lack of In-depth SEO suggestions like link recommendations, meta titles, meta descriptions, and heading health checks prevent users from following the basic best practices to increase their ranking chances. 
• Even though the tool is ideal for beginners, its high price makes it inaccessible to individual service providers and growing brands. 
• The absence of SEO tools like keyword clustering, long-form SEO article writing, automatic outline generators, templates, and others are major drawbacks. 

Clearscope Pricing

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Clearscope only has three pricing tiers; however, you need to contact their sales team to get custom quotes for business and enterprise plans. You can find a detailed breakdown of the basic plan below. 

Clearscope's Essential plan starts at $199 per month for one user seat, ten content reports, 100 content inventory pages, and integrations with WordPress and Google Docs. 

The business plan includes five user seats, custom content reports and content inventory pages, and a customized account setup with all the tools and features offered in the essential plan.  

The enterprise plan provides unlimited domain monitoring, custom data pipelines, crawler whitelisting, and custom Geo-targeting along with all the features in the business plan. However, you need to request a demo to get a custom quote. 

MarketMuse Overview

MarketMuse is an AI content planning and optimization platform that analyzes websites and provides insights for optimizing content. It helps marketers identify gaps in their content, improve search engine rankings, and generate ideas for creating high-quality, relevant content that matches user intent.

Key Features of MarketMuse

MarketMuse offers, 

• Keyword research 
• Content Planning 
• Content Brief Creation 
• Content Optimizer 

Keyword Research 

The MarketMuse keyword research tool provides keyword insights, SERP analysis for a target keyword, a heatmap to view competitors' performance, and link suggestions. 

Generally, all SEO tools provide access to relevant keyword insights like volume and CPC. Whereas MarketMuse goes one step further and provides details about a topic’s performance over time (trends), keyword variants, and suggested keyword usage to help users make the best use of each keyword. Moreover, you can find a curated list of questions and keyword lists to create highly relevant content for a specific topic. 

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The SERP X-ray feature is one of the most useful tools in MarketMuse. It helps users get in-depth insights into competitors' content. Generally, content marketers and writers manually analyze the top-ranking pages to understand the best practices of their competitors. 

MarketMuse eliminates this time-consuming process by providing every trivial competitor detail, like H2 per page, word count, intent, images used, video attached, and link suggestions for the first 20 SERP results.

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The heatmap tool lets you see how your competitors perform at the SERP and website levels. Moreover, you can get must-have content suggestions and content gap insights from your competitors. This data helps you easily outperform top-ranking pages without hours of manual research. You can also generate a heatmap analysis based on website level to spot low-hanging content opportunities that your competitors left unnoticed. 

MarketMuse's keyword planner also maps out your existing content performance to provide personalized insights like your custom keyword difficulty score topical authority score for the keywords you aim to rank for. This helps you find out how you can improve your content's performance. 

Content Planning 

With MarketMuse's content planning system, you can quickly review your existing content hub and find new topic ideas that have the potential to rank higher on the SERP. 

The tool helps you examine your content's performance and analyze metrics like topical authority, competitive advantage, personalized difficulty score, SERP features, and more. 

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When you have an extensive content database, finding topics you have not covered might become challenging. That’s why MarketMuse facilitates managing all your content in one place. Moreover, the real-time content inventory helps you analyze content performance based on automatically updated data. This reduces the manual time spent updating new content in the inventory. 

Content Briefs 

Even though MarketMuse does not help create full-fledged AI content, it facilitates SEO-driven brief creation. 

The brief creation process is categorized into 3 steps, i.e., creating sections, processing, and reviewing. You cannot generate an automated brief with one click. However, you can find all the necessary details, like questions, subheadings, topic suggestions, and internal and external links to include in your content. 

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Moreover, you will get access to questions generated by artificial intelligence to create comprehensive content. The final brief will include topics, subtopics, word count expectations, and link recommendations to add to your content. Overall, the content brief provides all the details your writer needs to create content. You can share the brief with your team with just a click of a button.  

Content Optimizer

MarketMuse integrates with ChatGPT to evaluate your content based on SEO and readability. You can get custom keyword suggestions, content feedback, content score, and competitor ranking criteria. 

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You can use ChatGPT to reframe your sentences or develop content for a new section by providing relevant prompts within the content optimizer. This helps you fine-tune your content for better performance and provides a rich reading experience for your readers.

Advantages of MarketMuse

• The heat map and SERP-X-ray features provide in-depth competitor analysis to help users understand your competitor’s performance. 
• Content topic and planning tools allow users to maintain and track content in one place. 
• ChatGPT integration provides AI-assitance help users create highly engaging content and optimize it for better performance. 
• Saves manual time spent on research by providing details about competitors' content insights under one tab in a visually appealing manner.  
• Personalized keyword difficulty and topical authority scores are highly beneficial for finding profitable content topics and predicting content performance. 
• With raw competitor data, it is easier for users to find the weak spot and outcompete their competitors. 
• MarketMuse planning tool helps users build a content hub to easily analyze, manage, and optimize content for better performance. 
• The free plans with 10 monthly queries help users take advantage of the basic functions of the tool without spending. 
• Users can easily export content to Word, Excel, and Google Docs with just a click. However, this facility is not available for free users. 

Disadvantages of MarketMuse

• Even though the tool provides advanced features, the pricing plans are out of budget for some growing brands and individual service providers. 
• Their standard and team plans do not provide access to domain-level analysis, unlimited brief credits, or team training. This limits the user's ability to access the tool to its full potential. 
• Beginner and intermediate level content teams may find it hard to get used to the tool. 
• The absence of AI-powered content writers is a major disadvantage that limits the user's ability to increase content production efficiency. 
• The lack of plugins and Chrome extensions is another significant drawback. 
• The competitor data and other SEO information can be quite overwhelming to new users. 

MarketMuse Pricing

MarketMuse offers 3 premium plans and one free plan. You’ll find a complete breakdown of the pricing tiers below.  

MarketMuse's free plan comes with 10 queries (per month), limited page-level insights, and one user seat. For the first seven days, you can access the standard plan feature as a free trial. 

Their Standard plan starts at $149 per month with 100 queries, SERP analysis, site-level heatmap, topic navigator, ChatGPT integration, and other features. 

The team plan is an upgraded version of the standard plan. It starts at $399 per month and includes three user seats, unlimited queries, content briefs, and everything provided in the standard plan. 

The premium plan offers a custom quote that meets your requirements and provides all features, including domain analysis, managed topic ranking, and team, along with all the features offered in the standard and team plans. 

They also provide add-ons for each premium plan, namely inventory snapshots, inventory saved views bundles, and user seat upgrades.

In-Depth Comparison of Clearscope and MarketMuse

What’s Missing in both MarketMuse and Clearscope?

With Clearscope, you’re restricted to limited SEO and AI functions. Whereas MarkteMuse offers a lot of data that your content team may find challenging to translate into actionable steps.

That’s where Scalenut steps in and cements the gap at a much more affordable price. It helps you to plan your entire SEO content strategy, create an SEO blog in less than 5 minutes, optimize for better ranking and track your content performance over time. 

Scalenut is engineered to fit precisely into your content production workflow and increase your overall content efficiency by automating cluster creation, first draft creation, and optimization efforts.
Additionally, with MarketMuse, you have a steep learning curve, whereas Scalenut has an intuitive interface that you can easily navigate within a few minutes.

Comparatively, Scalenut has a more robust content optimizer and competitor analysis tool than MarketMuse and Clearscope. It ensures your content is equipped with all the on-page SEO optimization best practices. 

If you are looking for a comprehensive content marketing platform that offers both SEO and AI solutions, Scalenut is your best bet. 

How can Scalenut Help? 

Scalenut is an AI-powered content optimization platform designed to streamline your content creation process and improve your search engine rankings. 

With real-time content analysis and optimization recommendations, Scalenut offers advanced features to enhance your content's performance. 

Here’s how Scalenut helped a leading Pharmaceutical brand add 100K traffic to their website. 

How Scalenut Can Help You? 

Scalenut offers 

• Keyword Planner and Cluster Creator 
• Outline Generator 
• Cruise Mode (Article Writer) 
• Content Optimizer 
• SEO Content Editor

Keyword Planner

The Scalenut Keyword Planner helps you achieve topical authority in your industry and specific niche. You can insert your niche topic in Scalenut’s Keyword Planner to generate a report that groups relevant keywords together. 

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This report lets you view metrics like relevance, CPC, and search volume under one tab. You do not need to juggle between multiple columns or tabs as you do in SEO tools like Ahrefs or Ubersuggest to find relevant metrics that matter to you.

If you are a content writer, sometimes you might just have one seed keyword to target. In that case, you will need a list of relevant keywords to target. That’s why the Scalenut content editor suggests relevant key terms that your competitors are currently ranking. This allows you to easily outcompete your competitors without doing hours of manual research. 

Content Outline Generator

In Scalenut, you can create an AI-generated outline automatically or build a custom version by comparing top-ranking web pages under a single tab. With this information in one place, you can easily find content gaps, add frequently asked questions, and restructure your outline with the drag-and-drop option within minutes.  

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Moreover, Scalenut provides additional features like writing points and social listening tools to generate questions from forums like Quora, Reddit, and SERP. This ultimately reduces the time taken to search and create an outline manually.  

Cruise mode

Scalenut has an in-built AI writer to help you create quality long-form content at scale. The cruise mode function allows users to generate the first draft of their outline in less than 5 minutes. Once you have the first draft, compare it with your competitor's content. This helps you see what points and subheadings you have missed. Instead of juggling multiple tabs, you can find all your competitor's content under the research tab. 

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Moreover, you can fine-tune the AI-generated copy in Cruise mode using the rephrase, shorten, or expand options. You can generate additional information for each section using the write and instruct tools in the editor tab. Altogether, this gives you complete control over AI and allows you to generate brand-relevant content within minutes. 

Content Optimizer

One of the biggest obstacles for content writers and bloggers is producing rank-ready content. You might be spending hours and hours ensuring every piece of content you publish is optimized to rank on Google or other search engines. 

However, manually checking the keyword density and finding relevant key terms to target can be a hassle. In situations like this, a reliable content report can boost your confidence that a piece of content is optimized for search. That's why Scalenut's Content Optimizer grades your content to generate a score and necessary suggestions to help you find a place at the top of the SERP. 

Moreover, you can use the fix-it button to auto-optimize your content based on the suggestion list. This eliminates manual editing time and acts as a supporting tool to fine-tune your content. 

SEO Content Editor 

Scalenut has advanced NLP and machine learning technologies to help you create content that ranks on the first page of the SERP for target keywords. You can see real-time NLP scores and custom SEO suggestions to improve your content. 

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Scalenut's SEO editor evaluates your content from different angles, like keyword density, links, content depth, key terms, and more. 

Who can benefit from Scalenut?

• SEO strategists managing a team of writers. 
• Content heads who are responsible for creating content briefs 
• Writers who run a small team 
• Writers who create SEO-based long-form blogs and articles 
• Marketers who manage social media channels and content editing activities 

Pricing 

Monthly 

• Essential Plan - $39 per month 
• Growth Plan - $79 per month 
• Pro Plan - $149 per month

Yearly 

• Essential Plan - $20 (per month if paid annually)
• Growth Plan - $40 (per month if paid annually)
• Pro Plan - $75 (per month if paid annually)

What do users think about Scalenut? 

• G2 review - 4.7/5 stars
• Product hunt review - 5/5 stars 
• Capterra review - 4.8/5 stars

Which is the Best Tool? 

By now, you will have an idea of the features of each SEO tool. This gives you more clarity about your requirements and what each tool offers.  

If you’re looking for advanced SEO functions you can opt for MarketMuse. However, if you’re looking for a content optimization tool, Clearscope is an ideal option. If you need a combination of both SEO and AI solution at an affordable price, Scalenut is your tool. 

Scalenut offers all the features and functionalities that MarketMuse and Clearscope have for just $79 per month. Even Scalenut’s Pro plan only costs $149 per month.  

If you want to know how Scalenut can help you streamline your content efforts and drive traffic to your website, feel free to hop on this 7-day free trial to play around with the tool. This will give you an idea if Scalenut can meet your demands.