MarketMuse vs. Clearscope
If you’ve read our post, What Makes MarketMuse Different, you already have a good idea of our differentiating factors. When you compare us to Clearscope, you’ll see just how different we are. As for the similarities, when you take a closer look, you’ll see that MarketMuse is a much more robust solution .
Let’s get started!
On-Demand Inventory
MarketMuse helps you understand your content and how you rank for topics, keywords, and competitor analysis. You can use Inventory Views to quickly find opportunities or risks, or customize your own.
It also provides insights for any page, so you can identify mismatches and create clusters to better represent the intent. Finally, the Content Inventory shows topic and page combinations that you can filter against URL information.
Whether you have hundreds of pages, or tens of thousands, MarketMuse can accomodate any size content inventory.
Clearscope also has a content inventory of sorts. It’s extremely limited and doesn’t know anything about your site. It seems best suited to just tracking what content has been optimized and when.
Personalized Metrics
MarketMuse provides personalized metrics that show how hard it is for your website to rank for a specific keyword. This provides an accurate representation of your Topic Authority, Page Authority, and Competitive Advantage. This data points to what is needed to own a topic, enabling you to make an informed decision about how much time, money, and effort is required to rank.
Clearscope has no personalized metrics.
Research
MarketMuse provides a comprehensive topic research process that identifies important concepts, related keywords, user intents, and competitor coverage. It also provides a site-level gap analysis to help identify opportunities for improvement.
Clearscope has some basic research capabilities, but you’ll need to align your expectations with what their tool actually provides. For example, they talk a lot about search intent, but you won’t find it anywhere in their software. Compare that with MarketMuse where we not only show the prominent search intent for a keyword phrase, but the search intent of the top 20 ranking posts as well. Their Keyword Discovery Tool includes a competition metric taken from Google’s Keyword Planner. But that’s for ad competition, which has nothing to do with search.
SERP X-Ray
MarketMuse offers an analysis of the quality and comprehensiveness of content — the number of in-content external and internal links, and the Content Score. It also provides insight into search intent and the high-level structure of the page.
SERP X-Ray provides a detailed look at the current search results page and reveals the role images and videos play. With this information, you can compare your existing page to the averages to understand where you are superior or inferior.
Clearscope doesn’t offer this.
Heatmap
MarketMuse’s Heatmap solution provides a comprehensive view of a piece of content compared to the SERP competition. It shows what concepts the competition is covering and which ones they are missing, allowing writers to differentiate their content and become experts in their field.
Heatmap also provides two views, one to show what nobody is covering and one to show what everybody is covering. It even goes a step further than other solutions that just look at the SERP, allowing you to explore any competitor’s website. It’s a great way to get inside information on their content clusters.
Clearscope has their Term Map, which is similar. However, it’s only available for SERP competitors. You won’t be able to apply it to a competitor’s website like you can with MarketMuse.
Content Cluster Analysis
Our cutting-edge cluster capabilities allows you to easily identify and fill any knowledge gaps across your content. Our solution offers an overview of the entire cluster, enabling you to pinpoint any areas that need investigation. This makes it easy to strengthen your content and ensure it matches the buyers’ journey. While it’s great for evaluating your own content, it’s even better for keeping tabs on your competitors. This process used to take 40 hours of intensive labor. Now, with our on-demand cluster analysis, you can get the same results in seconds.
Clearscope has no content cluster analysis capabilities.
Linking Recommendations
We offer a high-level recommendation solution for internal and external linking that takes into consideration the topic model for integration. Along with external links, we can provide cross-linking opportunities for multiple sites on your network. Additionally, our research solutions can identify named competitors and other sites that you don’t want to link to.
Clearscope doesn’t offer any linking recommendations.
Content Optimization
While Clearscope and MarketMuse offer content optimization, we analyze hundreds and sometimes thousands of documents to build the topic model using our proprietary technology. Clearscope relies on a third-party API and only analyzes the top 30 ranking pages, which puts a severe limit on data fidelity.
Look at it this way. How much expertise will you gain by reading 30 pages on a subject. Compare that with someone that has read hundreds, if not thousands of pages. They’re going to have a more nuanced understanding of a subject. That gets reflected in the topic model.
Additionally, we integrate with ChatGPT to augment your content creation process. Clearscope doesn’t.
MarketMuse vs Clearscope: The MarketMuse Advantage
Content strategy is more than just content optimization. Only MarketMuse has personalized metrics that enable content marketers to make sound and strategic decisions. Our content inventory and topic ranking powers deep understanding of a site’s potential through personalized metrics, page and site-level analysis, and competitive content analysis. Then there’s our detailed content briefs and ChatGPT integration to augment your content production.
I should mention that our Standard plan allows for generous usage to optimize and create content. Our Team and Premium plans go even further, offering unlimited queries and content briefs. Whether you have hundreds or tens of thousands of pages, our Premium plan can accommodate any size of content inventory.
