MarketMuse is an AI-powered content planning platform famous for its advanced SEO and planning functions.
As the tool provides advanced features, it falls under the high-price category, making it not feasible for many growing brands, teams, and individual service providers.
Even though the free plan provides access to the basic functions, the advanced tools are reserved for premium users. Despite the price hindrance, some users have generated significant ROI from using the tool.
However, if you’re in a dilemma about opting for the premium plan, this blog will help you make a smart decision. We analyzed each function of the tool to demonstrate how it can help you with your content efforts.
P.S. Is MarketMuse way out of your budget? These top 10 MarketMuse alternatives provide similar features at a reasonable price.
TL;DR
- MarketMuse is an SEO platform that facilitates content planning, optimization, and management.
- MarketMuse provides in-depth insights about your competitor's content to help you find profitable opportunities and gain a competitive edge.
- Integration with ChatGPT helps users leverage the power of AI to create quality content faster.
- Personalized metrics like topical authority and keyword difficulty insights allow users to spot easy wins and boost their content's performance.
- MarketMuse inventory lets users build a hub for their content and facilitates management with configuration settings.
Here’s what you can expect in the upcoming section
- What is MarketMuse?
- MarketMuse Features Review
- Pros of using MarketMuse
- Cons of using MarketMuse
- MarketMuse Rating
- MarketMuse Pricing
- MarketMuse Alternatives 2024
- Is MarketMuse worth the cost?
What is MarketMuse, and What does it do?
Marketmuse is a content intelligence 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.
MarketMuse Features Review
The core functionalities of the tool are content planning, keyword research, content management, and competitor analysis. Here is an in-depth review of each feature in the upcoming section.
Keyword Research
The MarketMuse keyword research tool provides keyword insights, SERP analysis for a target keyword, 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pros and Cons of using MarketMuse
Even though MarketMuse offers ample features, it has its own pros and cons. Here are a few of them you might want to consider before opting for their premium plan.
Pros of using 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.
Cons 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.
- The tool can be quite advanced for new users with limited SEO knowledge.
- 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.
These are the top factors you should weigh side by side before opting for MarketMuse's paid plans.
MarketMuse rating
Now that we've explained all the features in detail, here is our quick rating for the tool based on our first impression. These ratings are highly relevant to users who have limited SEO knowledge.
What do users think about MarketMuse?
MarketMuse is reviewed by different users on platforms like G2, Capterra, or Product Hunt. Here are a few comments and average ratings from MarketMuse users.
Let’s hear it from the users about MarketMuse.
MarketMuse Positive Reviews
“What makes MarketMuse stand out from the competition is the quality of data it brings back during the research. Unlike other tools, MarketMuse focuses on topics and clusters, not individual keywords. This approach simplifies content writing and helps me create better content faster. I especially enjoy the simplicity of the optimized application and its related topics section. I don't think there's another tool with such an amount of data.” - Darek B. (Sales); Source: G2
“I recently started using MarketMuse to help our business refine posts on our blog. We were drawing decent web traffic for several key terms and phrases, but we also felt like we could do better. Using the tools available within MarketMuse, we could easily see how to refresh our content (or add new content) to better align with what people are searching for. I believe this is a win-win. We draw better, more focused traffic to our site, and users more quickly find the information that they find helpful.” - Mike.M (CEO and Founder); Source: G2
MarketMuse Critical Reviews
“Overall, we like MarketMuse. We have some challenges with the initial onboarding. The online help was not as straightforward as it could be and sometimes directed us into a learning path that did not meet our needs. We resolved that fairly quickly and started using the tools within MarketMuse quickly.” - Mike.M (CEO and Founder); Source: G2
“The only thing I dislike is the price. MarketMuse is like the Rolls-Royce of content optimization software. It's the perfect software many wish to use, yet very few can afford it. Or maybe many do use it, and it's just me who can't afford it. Either way, the software is amazing, and I'll keep using their free version until I'm able to take advantage of their premium offering.” - Darek B. (Sales); Source: G2
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.
Alternatives to MarketMuse
As MarketMuse falls under the high-price category, you might be looking for other SEO and content marketing platforms that offer the same features at an affordable price. So, here are the top 5 MarketMuse alternatives you can check out right away.
- Scalenut
Scalenut is an AI-powered SEO and content marketing platform that includes keyword planner, AI writer, content optimizer, and other SEO tools. Scalenut can assist you with the entire SEO lifecycle, i.e., content ideation, planning, creation, and optimization. Its basic plan starts at $39 per month with 1,00,000 AI words, 5 SEO articles, cruise mode to write long-form content, and SERP analysis features.
- Outranking
Outranking is a comprehensive SEO tool with the combined power of AI. Its core functions include researching, writing, and optimizing content to drive ROI from content marketing. This tool aims to help you with end-to-end content marketing, from content ideation to creation. Their basic plan starts at $29 per month with AI writing and optimization for 5 SEO documents.
- Dashword
Dashword is beginner-friendly content creation and optimization software that allows SEO writers and bloggers to create content that ranks on the first page. It only has three features: a content brief generator, an optimizer, and a monitoring tool. Despite that, it helps you create rank-ready content. Their basic plan starts at $99 per month for 30 content reports, five user seats, content briefs, and an AI writer.
- Clearscope
Clearscope is an SEO-optimization platform that helps businesses create an SEO-driven content marketing plan. This platform provides SEO tools like content editor, SEO reports, a real-time content tracker, and more. Clearscope is an ideal tool for businesses trying to produce SEO-friendly content. Their basic plan starts at $199 per month with one user seat, 15 content reports, 100 content inventory pages, and integrations.
- Page Optimizer Pro
Page Optimizer Pro is an SEO optimizer that helps you plan and optimize an SEO-centric content strategy. Unlike many tools, Page Optimizer Pro does not claim to automate all your content-related tasks. The tool is designed to help you improve your current SEO performance with ON-page SEO tools. Their basic plan starts at $34 per month with 20 POP credits, POP EEAT, NLP, and Watchdog credits.
Which tool is the best?
MarketMuse offers a handful of SEO and content tools to help you boost your content's performance. However, their basic plan, starting at $149 per month, can be quite expensive for growing brands.
Moreover, the standard and team plans do not include the advanced features of the tool, such as domain analysis, managed topic tracking, and team training. Users need to opt in for the premium plan and get a custom quote to leverage the full potential of the tool.
Overall, if you can afford their plans in the long run, then MarketMuse is an ideal investment. However, if you need a budget-friendly SEO tool, it's best to explore the other alternatives mentioned in this blog.
If you’re looking for an all-in-one AI-powered SEO and content management tool, then Scalenut can be a perfect fit for your content requirements.
You can analyze your competitors’ content, get a custom SEO score, target profitable keywords, and use AI to craft rank-ready content using Scalenut’s AI-powered tools.
Moreover, in-built tools like cruise mode, content optimizer, keyword planner, and article writer help you rank higher on the SERP and gain topical authority in your industry.
With Scalenut’s 7-day free trial, you can experience firsthand how Scalenut can simplify your content creation process. Sign up here now!
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