What Makes MarketMuse Useful to SEOs

Like many SEOs, you’ve probably devised a bespoke process that’s amazingly beautiful and useful. But the downside is that your system is likely tedious, highly manual, and reliant on lagging indicators.

While your current system may be effective, it’s time-consuming and can be improved upon. MarketMuse can make your life a little easier in many ways. Here are a few.

Create and Update Content Inventory Without Lifting a Finger

As part of the onboarding process, MarketMuse creates an inventory for you, along with personalized SEO content metrics (more on that in a minute). Then we update that inventory on a regularly scheduled basis — usually monthly, depending on your plan.

That’s far easier than:

• Using a crawler to create an initial set of inventory pages in a spreadsheet.
• Considering XML sitemaps, Google Analytics (GA), Google Search Console (GSC) and other sources.
• Filtering down to only consider indexable pages (excluding those with noindex, canonical errors, etc.)
• Layering in Google traffic data (from GA and GSC)
• Bringing in 3rd-party metrics like keyword ranking data.

And then repeating that all again the next month.

Quickly Find SEO Content Opportunities That Really Move The Needle

Use the content inventory along with your personalized domain metrics, plus competitive content and topical analysis to create high-performance content plans. Slice and dice your inventory to discover:

• Pages at risk due to low Topic Authority (you’ll want to find these).
• Topics where you have a high Competitive Advantage (you’ll want to create more around this).
• Intent mismatches.
• Opportunities with the biggest ROI

Those insights come about through different views and filters into your content inventory. You can create your own and save them for repeated use. We call them Saved Views and you can read more about them on our blog.

What Should I Write About?

Existing pages are a wonderful starting point to updating and creating content, even if you’re starting something brand new.

Where Should I Focus My Efforts?

Here are two Saved Views to help answer four questions on focusing your efforts around traffic, ROI, results, and rankings.

What Content Should I Optimize?

Here’s a collection of Saved Views that will help you find and prioritize the best content to optimize.

What Content Should I Create?

These Saved Views offer six different ways to help determine what content you should create.

Use Personalized and Predictive Metrics That Work

The problem with standard SEO metrics is that they’re generic and serve as lagging indicators in the best of circumstances. Take keyword difficulty, for example — the value calculated applies to any website, regardless of their content. Accordingly, a pizza site has as much difficulty ranking for the term “SEO” as Search Engine Journal.

Intuitively, we know that doesn’t make sense.

MarketMuse takes the content on your site, its performance, and other site-specific factors into account when determining Personalized Difficulty. We feel it’s a much more accurate measure because it’s reflective of your sites Topic Authority.

Here are some additional resources about using these metrics.

Why Keyword Difficulty Doesn’t Work and How to Make It Better

What if I told you that keyword research platforms are playing you? Here’s why that happens and how to fix it.

Content Inventory Analysis: 3 Decision-Making Metrics

Tackle content opportunities confidently using these metrics that offer a reasonable expectation of success.

What is Personalized (Topic) Keyword Difficulty and Why You Need It

A look at why keyword difficulty was created, its current limitations and how it’s changing for the better.

How to Create an ROI-justified Content Plan

How to use a content inventory analysis to create an ROI-justified content strategy and clear-cut business plan to get all the budget and buy-in at your next 1:1.

Create Content Plans That Leverage Existing Pages

Use a Saved View to quickly identify high-authority topics and pages. Then build a plan for a content cluster that takes advantage of your site’s prominence.

Alternatively, start with a topic and we’ll show you what other pages are contributing to that cluster, along with their personalized metrics.

Keyword Research That Helps Create Comprehensive Content

In typical keyword research, relationships are based on strings and not things. You may have thousands of terms, hundreds of which mean essentially the same thing, according to Google. And in the end, that knowledge doesn’t help writers craft better content.

Topic-focused keyword research (topic research) gives insight into the semantically related topics you need to cover when writing about a subject. That’s especially important for content teams focused on creating relevant, helpful, and high-quality content.

The Difference Between Keywords and Topics

Bewildered with the difference between topics and keywords. This post will clear up the confusion.

How MarketMuse Identifies Topics That Make a Page More Comprehensive

Wonder how MarketMuse determines semantic relationships and what topics to cover in your content?

Competitive Content Analysis at the SERP and Site Level

Using MarketMuse, you can discover how well (or not) a competitor’s site explores a specific subject. Learn about their coverage strengths and weaknesses so you can exploit them.

Apply this at the SERP level as well to determine how to structure your content and what you need to cover to compete.

How to Conduct Competitive Content Analysis Using MarketMuse

Get the advantage in your content strategy with MarketMuse’s competitive analysis. Get insight into your competitors’s content clusters.

A System to Produce Content That Satisfies Humans and Search Engines

MarketMuse topic modeling and content scoring encourages writers to go both wide and deep in creating a comprehensive piece of content. We offer SERP-based guidance on content quality and length, plus relevant questions to address — all designed to lead writers in producing best-in class content.

We also offer internal link and anchor text suggestions to highly relevant quality sites based on our topic model. We’ll also suggest links to sites within your network (i.e., they’re on a different domain but you control them) if you like.

Suggestions for external links come from lower down in the topic model so they complement your content as opposed to compete with it. Tell our platform your competitors and we won’t suggest them!

All this gets wrapped up into a content brief so that writers, without being SEO experts, can create SEO-optimized content.

Ditch Those Spreadsheets (If You Want)

A lot of SEOs are happy for their content team to work within the MarketMuse platform. It removes the need to use spreadsheets to piece together disparate forms of data and then share that with others, only to see their formulas get accidentally erased!

But you can export the research data to a spreadsheet if you wish.

Takeaway

MarketMuse streamlines the content creation process and helps produce high-quality SEO-optimized content. With personalized metrics that fit the individual needs of websites, it eliminates the need for tedious manual processes and lagging indicators.

Use MarketMuse to quickly identify SEO content opportunities that have the potential to move the needle. Then conduct competitive content content analysis, at site and SERP level, before making a commitment. The platform also offers topic modeling and content scoring, along with internal and external link and anchor text suggestions.

With all of these features, MarketMuse is the perfect tool for SEOs who want to create content that satisfies both humans and search engines.