MarketMuse Review: An AI Content Planning & Optimization Software

Your blog is not one of a kind.

It’s not the only one that has content about your niche.

There are millions of other blogs that publish similar content.

Sucks right? But that’s where we are now in 2021. There’s just too much competition for content writers and bloggers to rely on their wit and grammar knowledge to grow their audience.

It takes way more than that because you have to make sure your content ranks for the right keywords. It needs to be optimized for search engines, and most of all, it should be SEO-friendly.

This is a lot to take in, especially when you’ve never considered these factors for your blog content. The good news is that there are SEO tools that you can use to optimize your content.

One of these tools is MarketMuse, it’s designed to help content creators plan and research their content using AI Content Intelligence.

In this article, you’ll learn more about its specific features, pricing, and whether it’s worth investing in or not. Let’s jump right in!

Marketmuse is one of those SEO tools that is designed for content creators.

Its whole purpose is to make the process of content creation faster, easier, and more efficient.

The AI Content Intelligence and Strategy Platform that MarketMuse has to create incredible opportunities for users to transform their content.

The software helps analyze your content and compare it with your competitors while giving you detailed content briefs that help you improve your content.

This is crucial now more than ever because of the overwhelming amount of content being published on a daily basis. With MarketMuse, you get to see what your competitors are doing and how you can do it even better. Pretty sweet, right?

When you log into your account, you’ll be able to start the content optimization process. All you need to do is enter a topic with the keywords you’re trying to rank for.

When this is done, you add a URL to the site you’re trying to rank for.

This is important because MarketMuse gives you a personalized difficulty score based on your site and the kind of content you produce.

This means that you do not get general information about your content. This is really important to help users understand what kind of topics will succeed the most on their sites.

When you have finished writing your content, and you want to make it better, or you want to optimize it, MarketMuse has the perfect tools for that.

The content briefs are designed to guide you through the process of optimizing your content.

You gain insight into topics and keywords to add, word count and KPI’s for your content.

In this case, my keywords are “lead generation.” This is what my content brief looked like:

On the right-hand side, you can see the research data that shows which topics or keywords should be added to my content.

On the left-hand side, you can just copy and paste your content for MarketMuse to analyze and score.

So far, my score is 9, and the target score is 36. In order to improve that score, I’ll need to include the keywords indicated on the research panel. That includes phrases like “B2B marketer,” “qualified lead,” and “B2B lead generation.”

When I add those keywords, my score changes in real-time and the colours change from red and yellow to green.

These features are visually appealing and quite helpful for writers to know how to make their content more SEO-friendly. This is crucial to publishing content that ranks highly.

After adding the keywords that were suggested and including the topics that I needed, I could see my score change in real-time.

This is what it looks like now:

Notice how my content score went from a 9 to a 26. Also, take a look at the right column. Almost everything is green because I added those keywords between 3-10 times as suggested.

All that’s left is to increase the word count and to continuously improve the keyword frequency.

See how easy that was?

Complete Data Analysis:

Based on the “lead generation” keywords, MarketMuse created an analysis of the top-ranking pages that cover the same topic.

The top 6 articles have a content score of 30-47, mine is at 26. This tells me what exactly? It tells me that if I optimize the content slightly, I’ll be at the same level as my competitors.

You’re also given data on the word count of each of the top-ranking articles. So if you’re content is between 700-1,000 words, but your competitors are above 3,000, then you have to do something about that.

Higher ranking content is often long-form content, meaning 2.5k words and above. This is a helpful insight because it shows users why you’re not ranking and how you can match up to your competitors.

You even get the links to top-ranking articles so that you can see them for yourselves and learn what you can do better.

This is an essential part of optimizing online content. Since there is so much out there, it’s now all about outdoing your competitors. MarketMuse has tools to get you there!

Feed:

The feed feature gives more detailed suggestions for improving your content. It shows that I have overused the keywords “lead generation” and suggests that I reduce it to less than 10 times.

This shows me more detailed feedback than the research feature and is great for those that are trying to optimize to their highest potential.

Dashboard:

Your dashboard contains these applications:

These are the three key features that help you with your content. Depending on what you are focusing on, those applications are there to help your process be quicker and easier.

Compete

When you click “compete,” you enter a topic or keyword that you want a competitive analysis for. Then MarketMuse will deliver the top 20 ranking pages for those keywords for your reference.

This application enables users to analyze the competition even before they start writing content for those keywords.

Here, take a look:

I chose the driest topic I could think of and chose “almond milk.” MarketMuse gave me links to the top 20 articles with those keywords along with their content score.

This layout doesn’t quite make sense at first. It takes time and practice to better understand how MarketMuse presents this data. It’s not as self-explanatory as the research feature is, which you will see in a moment.

Research:

This application enables MarketMuse users to choose a topic or a keyword they want to research and receive thousands of pages about that topic.

This can help in the initial stages of building content analysis and trying to collect data to build your research.

This is what the research looks like after typing in the keywords “almond milk.” When you click on each field, you get an even more detailed analysis of the keywords you should use when writing your content.

I clicked on “almond milk” and got even more results on different kinds of almond milk…how exciting.

As you can see, this data is very useful for building content from scratch so that it can be optimized even before putting it in the MarketMuse optimize application.

Full disclosure Marketmuse will definitely cost you a pretty penny. So make sure you understand what features you want and whether you’re ready to commit to this.

Premium Payment Plan

Pro Payment Plan

Plus Payment Plan

Optimize Payment Plan

Before choosing either one of these payment plans, MarketMuse offers a 7-day unlimited usage free trial. This is great because most tools only have limited features during free trials.

This means that users get the opportunity to see what MarketMuse really has to offer before making a purchase!

These are the Pros of MarketMuse:

These are the Cons of using MarketMuse:

MarketMuse may be a content writer’s right-hand man!

The way this tool is designed to make content creation faster, easier, and more effective is so relevant to the content needs of today.

MarketMuse can also be used to republish old content that you now realize needs optimizing.

It’s a great tool for research, competitive analyses and content optimization. The downside is if you’re on a tight budget, the less expensive payment plans offer little-to-nothing compared to Premium and Pro.

However, if you are dedicated to improving your content creation from here on out, and you have the money to invest, then MarketMuse may be a great fit for you!

The final verdict is: MarketMuse scores 95%

If you want another alternative, try using Page Optimizer Pro.

But if you like this tool, then you can sign up for MarketMuse here.