Clearscope vs. Topic

Clearscope shines if you're using freelance writers or even just need a way to easily keyword optimize long-form content. While it can be used for marketing pages, I've found it does best with longer-form blog content in the hands of writers. So, if you have inexperienced writers or those less savvy/comfortable about SEO optimization, I'd recommend only using it for blogs. articles or other long-form content. Have some SEO experience under your belt? Use it for EVERYTHING that needs keyword optimization and is over 300 words. It'll help give you ideas and give you a better idea of how to work in that semantic SEO.

Incentivized

Great at providing content briefs as well as for seeing the types of topics that rank well competitively. It's also good with finding content that needs to be refreshed which is a super easy way to drive near term SEO results.

• Helps produce relevant and engaging content.
• Integration with WordPress through an easy to use plugin.
• Deliver data-driven results.
• The content rating system makes it easy to understand how your content is performing now based on your specific keywords.

Incentivized

• Content Brief
• Competitive SERP ranking analysis
• Grouping content topics together to see related keywords/ content clusters easily
• Analyzing Google Search Console data for content refresh opportunities

• Cost is a little prohibitive for small teams/businesses.
• Running reports could be more intuitive. Some users have run them incorrectly, costing credits (which Clearscope has been kind enough to refund).

Incentivized

• Using the GSC data to find new, adjacent content opportunities.
• They are using GPT-3 for title generation and would love to see it used to provide more content suggestions beyond the titles/descriptions
• Sometimes it doesn't surface 'questions' that people are asking related to lower volume terms but not sure of a way to solve that

They're all similar but different. We use Frase and MarketMuse during other parts of our content creation process. I have used Surfer when clients supply reports and think it's also a solid tool. But nothing beats Clearscope when it comes to content optimization as you finish drafting.

Incentivized

Topic was way less costly than MarketMuse with similar functionality. It was agnostic to CMS (WordLift is designed for Wordpress only). So it was priced well with all the functionality we needed.

• It's made it easier to create content that is ready to rank with little effort.
• Articles updated with Clearscope have started ranking.
• Articles created with Clearscope rank better out the gate than ones written without it.

Incentivized

• It has greatly reduced the number of hours our SEO team has to review content
• Has sped up our content briefs by hours per brief
• Great for helping us to see what content is performing well / needs help via the Google Search Console integration