Clearscope Review: A Deep Dive and Clearscope Alternatives
Last updated on March 4th, 2023 at 01:32 am
In today’s Deep Dive, Dani gives you a Clearscope review. Not only that, she will also give you two viable alternatives to Clearscope and let you decide which one works best for you.
Clearscope Overview
Clearscope is an AI-powered content optimization tool designed to help content marketers and SEO writers get the most out of their efforts.
With Clearscope, you can quickly review all your digital assets with keyword insights, competitor analysis, and more – all in one place. From there, you’ll be able to create the best possible optimized content to overtake your competition.
Clearscope Content Editor
Clearscope’s content editor user interface is rather simplistic and clean. I like that.
Image courtesy G2.com
Clearscope’s content editor assesses your content on three metrics:
- Content grade
- Word count
- Readability
On the right of the Clearscope editor is a list of keyword suggestions and terms related to your particular topic, sorted by importance. The further down you scroll on the list, the less important the terms are as they are used less frequently by top-ranking results.
When you click on one of the terms, you can see how important it is in the scheme of your content workflow and how to use it against your competitors.
Your content is evaluated based on your usage of terms, so naturally, using more terms will improve your overall grade.
As you can see on the left, the word count simply counts the number of words in the piece while the Flesh Reading Ease Test is used to measure readability.
The one thing I don’t like about Clearscope’s content ranking is that it uses the letter system (A++ through F) as a grade summary as opposed to a numerical system SEO Surfer uses. I prefer SEO Surfer’s system as it is more specific and it’s easier to follow.
Content Briefs
Clearscope has great content briefs and outlines that ensure the content production workflow in your organization stays consistent and of high quality.
Image courtesy Clearscope’s YouTube
You can either start from scratch or paste in a content outline brief and just fill in the spaces.
- Main work area
- Terms Tab
- Research Tab
- Competitors Tab
Terms Tab
This tab shows you headers and shows you which headers are being used by the competitors.
Research Tab
The tab has 4 different sections:
Themes
- Consider more high-level concepts. Clearscope scans the top 100 results, including their title tags and meta descriptions to arrive at these recommendations.
Questions
- Comes from PEOPLE ALSO ASK in Google. GPT-3 is used to generate some of these terms in order to bring you good suggestions as far as comprehensive content coverage.
Common Citations
- What your top-ranked competitors link out to and if you need to score some good statistics.
External links
- Where there are links to external research.
Competitors Tab
This is where you can see all the top-ranking Google search results on both desktop and mobile. In addition, you can see exactly how they’re structuring their content.
You can quickly look through some of the top-ranked search results and get some suggestions for the results that you want to consider as you (or your writers) work on that particular piece of content.
Subsections to include can come from what your competitors are doing and using this list as a brainstorming jump-off point.
You could also navigate to the terms and sort by heading presence. What heading presence allows you to do is to see which one of these terms is being used in competitive headings of H1s through H6.
Keyword Tool and Research
Clearscope comes with a really cool keyword research tool. It’s great for content strategy planning. It’s super simple to use: type in a target keyword, and then it will start suggesting related topics, synonyms, and other long-tail phrases that you can use.
As you can see from above, pardon the JPEG, the keyword tool offers the following:
- Average monthly searches
- Competition score
- Cost per click
(All pulled from Google, I may add.)
Other Clearscope Features
Google Docs integration.
WordPress integration.
Free training.
Great customer support.
Clearscope Pricing
Holy moly! Here is where Clearscope is at the disadvantage.
$170 per month to start. Pretty steep compared to Surfer SEO and Frase, in my humble opinion.
Alternatives to Clearscope
Surfer SEO
Clearscope vs Sufer SEO
I have to admit, I’m a little biased toward Surfer SEO; it is a great search engine optimization tool. What I love about SurferSEO, is that it offers more specific and granular data than Clearscope does.
However, Clearscope does offer an advantage because of its research tool and keyword suggestion feature. The competitors’ tab also gives you some insight on how your competitors are faring in the search engines.
Surfer SEO’s keyword research tool is unique in the sense that when you type in the keyword, you get the results of relevant keywords in clusters, which can help your content marketing plan as you can plan different articles around each cluster.
In addition, Surfer SEO’s content optimization, in my honest opinion, is superior to Clearscope.
SurferSEO, unlike other content optimization tools, brings into account issues like word count, headings, paragraphs, and images. It even includes where you put the keywords, regardless of whether they’re in paragraphs or headers.
Surfer SEO also has its own search engine results pages analysis. All you need to do is pop in the site address and Surfer SEO will tell you how your top competitors are doing.
The above image tells you how the competitors are faring as far as content quality and backlink strength.
Other SurferSEO Features
- WordPress integrations
- Google Docs integration
- Site Audit
- Domain Planner
Pricing
Paid monthly:
Basic: $59/month
Pro: $119/month
Business: $239/month
Enterprise: contact them
Notice how the pricing for the two lowest packages are cheaper than the cheapest Clearscope package.
All in all, Surfer SEO lives up to its SEO part as a superior SEO tool.
Frase.io
Clearscope vs Frase
Never mind that I wrote a Frase deep dive just recently, but I am more than happy to elaborate once again.
Frase is an excellent content optimization tool in the sense that it uses natural language processing to understand your content and make recommendations for improvement.
What makes Frase unique amongst other content optimization tools is that it not only offers you the ability to analyze the performance of your current content but also helps you generate new ideas based on topics that perform well.
Frase, like Clearscope, also offers features as content brief and outline, keyword search, keyword research, and you can optimize content in a one-stop place.
I’ll demonstrate.
RESEARCH — find the top 20 articles for your keyword term/phrase.
OUTLINE — You can yoink outlines from said top 20 results and organize how ever you want as far as your content optimization plan.
AI WRITE — where, like Jasper, you can write content with the click of a button.
OPTIMIZE — here’s the fun part. Just like Surfer SEO and Clearscope, you are offered relevant terms to insert into your content for the ultimate in competitiveness.
LINKS — where to research your competition’s content.
Other Frase SEO Tools
- Google Search Console Analytics
- Rewrite existing articles
- Wikipedia Concept Map
- Topic planner through SERP analysis
Other Frase Key Features
- AI writing tools
- Crash Course
Frase Pricing
Frase is actually the cheapest of the whole lot in all its packages, even if you choose to add on the Pro add-on that is an extra $35/month.
Other Clearscope Alternatives to Check Out
So Which Should Content Optimization Tool Should I Use?
Clearscope vs SurferSEO?
Clearscope vs Frase?
Frase vs SurferSEO?
Best all-around package: Frase, however if Jasper and SurferSEO were to merge as one, I would give it to them.
Frase has the editor, the optimization, AI prompts, AI writing, SEO writing, among so many other things. Right now the trophy goes to them.
Conclusion
All these aforementioned content optimization tools have been gaining traction in the content marketing space. Whether you’re optimizing existing content or researching for more ideas, these three tools provide what you need in terms of finding the best keywords to rank in the search engines.
Think Clearscope is all that? Surfer SEO? Frase? Let us know in the comments!
Dani Lehmer is the Founder and Head Honcho of Dani Digs In.
She is a Quality Assurance Analyst and blogger whose natural curiosity allows her
to dig in (pun intended) to help people build their businesses and satiate curiosity
in regard to data science, analysis, and crypto.
Connect with Dani on LinkedIn.
