Content is the critical section of any search engine optimization strategy. That’s why you’ll find many tools that focus on helping you create top-quality content. Clearscope claims to be the “A++ content optimization platform” that leverages AI to deliver the best possible service to clients.
Our Clearscope review checks what this tool can do for individual and business clients. We analyzed the entire process of working with this platform and left no stone unturned. Here are our impressions of Clearscope!
Pros
- An easy-to-use interface with a minimal learning curve
- A comprehensive editor for creating content
- Keyword discovery can help identify the right phrases to use as topics
- Content inventory is a great way of analyzing existing content
Cons
- No free trial option to test the tool (demo is only available upon request)
- The lowest-priced subscription option is quite expensive
- It’s not an all-around SEO tool
Overview
Clearscope is an AI-based search engine optimization tool with a strong focus on boosting your content. The idea is to analyze the existing market and deliver suggestions on how to create the most relevant content for your site. Clearscope reviews competitor pages to come up with these ideas, and it can even help discover the right keywords to pursue to improve your SEO results.
The company behind Clearscope is Mushi Labs. The business name comes from the animated show Mushishi, which focuses on Mushi, primitive life forms that greatly influence the lives of humans.
Mushi Labs started in 2014 as a consultant agency for SEO and SEM. A year later, the team developed Twitchmetrics, which helps streamers analyze data about their Twitch viewership.
In 2016, the company created Clearscope, a tool that turned out to be a big success. Some big-name clients include YouTube, IBM, Binance, Adobe, and Shopify. That shows that the tool can be helpful in creating content across different industries.
Pricing & Plans
After our review of Clearscope pricing options, we discovered you can pick between three plans:
- Essentials. The subscription includes unlimited users but a single project. You get 15 content reports, along with 30 keyword discovery credits and 100 content inventory pages per billing cycle. The price is $199 monthly.
- Business. The package includes all features from the Essentials package, along with a customized account setup, custom content reports and inventory pages. Single sign-on is also available. For the price, you’ll need to contact the company.
- Enterprise. On top of everything from the previous two subscriptions, you get a custom data pipeline, unlimited domains to monitor, custom geo-targeting, and crawler whitelisting. The Subscription also comes with custom pricing that requires contacting the creators.
Each option includes free onboarding and live training. All packages include unlimited exporting and sharing, and there’s an option to purchase a yearly plan and be invoiced annually.
Clearscope Features
It’s time for the most detailed part of our Clearscope AI review, which focuses on the main features of this SEO tool. Whether you want to optimize existing content or create new articles or pages, this platform can be a smart choice.
The first thing we noticed is an intuitive and user-friendly interface. Our Clearscope review team underlines that the integration options are at a decent level. You can use the WordPress plugin designed by the platform creators if you work in this CMS. Alternatively, it’s possible to integrate the editor with Google Docs or use the classic shared link option. Here are more details about working with Clearscope!
Content Inventory
Content inventory is a place where Clearscope reviews your existing content and helps to improve it. It makes sense to start with this when using this platform. Once you log into your account, you’ll see the Content Inventory menu on the left. Pick the Pages section and connect to the Google Search Console.
The next step is to create a Clearscope project and add the desired pages to insert into the Content Inventory. It’s possible to add up to 100 URLs in a single go, and you can also insert up to three queries per page.
Our Clearscope review team had to be patient until the grades for the monitored pages first appeared. The tool shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes for the ratings to emerge. Clearscope will show Content Health ratings, including the distribution of grades and the overall progression of the average rating.
You will be able to see the following information on the Content Inventory page:
- URL info. The title and the URL are here, along with information about the type of article and writer, if available.
- Monitored queries. Here’s where you can check the queries monitored for each page.
- Inventory links. The platform will show the number of inbound and outbound links for each page.
- Clicks and SEO value. Along with this information, you can also learn when you add the page to the Content Inventory.
Keyword Discovery
The next tool at your disposal is the Keyword Discovery, which indicates our review of Clearscope isn’t only about auditing, improving, and creating content. The platform can also help in researching the right keywords, which could assist in discovering ideas for new pages on your site.
It’s interesting that Clearscope has a Topic Research submenu on the left side, and that’s how you access Keyword Discovery. Once you are on the page, you’ll see the option to enter the desired query or URL.
That’s pretty much all that your keyword research will need, especially if you consider the adjustment options to tailor the search. You can pick a market in the desired country or choose the preferred language to narrow the results.
Our Clearscope review team mentions that it will take a bit of time for the tool to load the results. The good news is that you’ll have a progress bar, so you’ll know how long it will approximately take for the search to complete.
You can filter the results based on several columns. The first one will show all results, along with useful statistics regarding the average monthly searches, cost-per-click range and the estimation of the amount of competition for that query.
If you click on a particular keyword, it will open a graph with statistics regarding monthly searches for that query. The details are not as impressive as in some other SEO platforms, but considering that Clearscope reviews your content and helps create articles as the tool’s primary tasks, keyword discovery is a useful addition.
The remaining tabs will show trending keywords, those that are included as a part of the question, and queries that are exact matches to the phrase you entered. Trending keywords are an excellent way of discovering queries that might be popular during a particular season or have recently progressed significantly in the rankings.
As for the questions, they can be useful when creating the FAQ section of your article. You’ll know what questions users usually search regarding the primary query, which will enable covering all the bases and everything potential visitors of your website will be interested in.
You can access the Content Reports from this tool. Once you scroll over the desired query, you’ll find different buttons, including the icon that takes you to this feature.
Content Reports
Apart from accessing it from Keyword Discovery, you can also navigate to Content Reports from the tool’s homepage. If you click on All Reports, you’ll find different options, but it’s the Optimize Your Content link that will take you to this feature.
The function essentially checks search engine page results for the chosen query. It will analyze the best pages and collect information that will help you cover all the essential parts of the chosen topic. That way, you can create the best possible content that covers the topic to the smallest detail and is better than your competition.
It’s easy to create a content report from the Create Report page. You’ll see that you can run single or batch reports. A batch will allow the creation of up to 100 reports in a single go, as well as extracting certain URLs. That will ensure the pages you want to include in the content report are surely covered in the results.
Our team mentions that you’ll need a bit of patience until Clearscope reviews the search engine page results and creates a report. If you run a batch, that means it could take minutes for all results to complete.
After the results are ready, you can proceed to the Editor section, where you’ll receive details from the conducted analysis. The Editor will be the main part of our Clearscope review, so let’s move to that section.
Editor
Considering that we are reviewing a content optimization SEO tool, it’s understandable that the text editor is its main part. Our Clearscope review team indicates that the editor is where the magic happens. Whether you are creating new content or editing the existing one, this is where you’ll do it. However, it’s worth mentioning that creating a Content Report for the chosen topic is the starting step that will ensure you have the relevant data from SERP results available.
The Clearscope review team notes that you’ll be right at home with the editor as long as you ever worked in Google Docs, MS Word, or another text editor. The interface is intuitive, and you have the choices to adjust the font type, use lists, add links, and bulleted or numbered lists. Here’s where you’ll also see if the text was recently saved and check version histories. There’s also an option to insert a content brief or extract content from the desired URL.
The thing that sets this editor apart from others is the insights it provides based on the SERP analysis conducted. In the left section, you can see the overall content grade. You should always aim for the highest, which is A++, although the tool will suggest the preferred rating based on the collected data.
Clearscope AI review of the SERP results will also display the preferred readability rating and word count to target. That will tell you how comprehensive your content should be and whether it’s easy to read. The platform uses the Flesch reading-ease test to determine this rating.
The right side is reserved for suggestions that could be helpful for your article. The Terms tab is crucial since it contains phrases to insert based on the analysis conducted. Clearscope reviews search engine results for the chosen topic and lists phrases to include in your article.
Apart from listing actual terms, the platform will even show the typical number of inclusions in other articles. For example, the tool might suggest using a particular phrase one to three times but another term up to 11 times.
Our Clearscope review team mentions that the editor will count how many times you included each phrase in your content. That’s convenient because you don’t have the need to do it manually. If you are having problems with adding a particular keyword to your text, click over that phrase and pick Examples. The tool will show how that particular term is used on other websites, which is great if you encounter writer’s block.
According to our Clearscope AI review, you can see the importance rating for each keyword and its heading presence. The importance has a scale up to ten, and the higher the grade, the more recommended it is to include the term in the article.
You can remove a particular phrase, which will exclude it from the calculations for the content grade. If you feel there’s a need to add a specific term, simply click on the + button to do that. Our Clearscope review team mentions that you can also export terms by clicking the download button. The tool will prepare all the terms in a CSV file that contains all details like in the editor, from typical uses to importance.
Clearscope will list the terms by importance by default, but you can also pick to show unused words. It’s a convenient option when you only have a few phrases to include since it will help avoid unnecessary scrolling.
If you find it better, you can also check the term map. That will show all terms in a grid and also display if a competitor page uses that phrase. The term map will also help check the outlines of the best-ranked articles. Seeing how other pages look can help make your content even better and tailor it to the smallest detail.
Our Clearscope review team mentions that you can visit the Competitors tab. You can see how the content of the competition ranks. It’s possible to check it by content grade and organic position. Additional statistical details include desktop and mobile ranking position, the exact URL and the page title of each page listed, as well as the word count for each competitor URL.
If you want to share an article via Clearscope, you can do this from the Content Reports page. You will find the sharing icon next to the Editor button. Once you click it, activate the link for sharing and copy it to the receiver. All they need to do is to type the link into a web browser and access the report.
Brief Templates
Our Clearscope review team mentions that this is a great collab feature if you are working in teams or planning to outsource your work to a writer. The idea of brief templates is to prepare a document where everything will clearly be explained to the writer. You will include all basic details, along with the sections that you’d like to be a part of the content.
You can access brief templates from the Content Reports in the main menu, but they are also available in the Editor. In the Insert drop-down menu, you will find links to creating or managing brief templates.
Once you are on the page, you can see the list of existing templates. According to our Clearscope review team, you’ll have the standard content brief already available. It’s possible to create a customized template by clicking the Add button in the upper right corner.
That will launch a new screen where you should pick a name for the template. You can then adjust the font size and use the editor to create the desired brief. Some general suggestions are to add the writer, desired word count, due date, target audience, and other details. However, you have total freedom to tailor the template to your requirements, and our review about Clearscope pinpoints that as an important addition for all user levels.
Once you are happy with how it looks, you can return to the Clearscope Editor. From the Insert menu, load the desired template. It will appear on the screen, and you can now edit the desired details and save it.
You can also find the two convenient extra Clearscope features in the main menu. These include the following:
- Striking Distance. The feature analyzes your content and displays which pages have the potential to reach better rankings. It essentially collects URLs that are on the second page of Google search engine results, so close to the first page. Another condition for pages to appear in this list is that they have at least 100 (or 1,000, depending on which you pick) average monthly searches.
- Content Decay. The idea is to detect pages that have dropped the most in the number of clicks in the previous 12 months. You can pick the minimum decay percentage required when generating the list. You can see the specific drop for each page in the table and also check if that page is a part of your content inventory.
Conclusion
Clearscope does a good job as an SEO tool focused on content optimization, although it seems a bit expensive. The platform has decent keyword research features to help you discover new topics. Our Clearscope AI review team found the editor incredibly easy to use. Before you start using the editor, the tool will execute a detailed analysis of top-ranked pages for the chosen key phrase. Based on that, it will suggest the preferred terms to include in the article, word count, and other details.
Using brief templates and sharing options to delegate tasks and work with teams increases the tool’s value. Clearscope reviews the edited content as you write it, showing you the current overall grade, word count, and uses for each term.
Overall, Clearscope is an intuitive content optimization platform that can help both individuals and agencies. If you don’t mind the price tag, you’ll find streamlining the content creation process with this tool to be very useful when creating your website pages. And if you don’t think this platform is the best fit, you can always check out Clearscope alternatives and look for a better match.
Quick Answers Questions
What Is Clearscope?
Clearscope is an SEO tool that prioritizes improving your content and helping to optimize it for search engines. The tool analyzes your competition for a certain keyword and gathers the best suggestions for a top-quality content brief.
How to Use Clearscope?
Clearscope is a web-based tool, and there are no iOS or Android apps for it. That means you’ll need a web browser to access the platform. As there’s no free trial, you can either sign up or request a demo to see how the tool works.
What Is Clearscope Used for?
Clearscope primarily serves to create and optimize top-quality content that will help boost your search engine rankings and SEO efforts. The tool performs keyword research, analyzes the content of your rivals for the chosen phrases, and suggests the best topics and terms for your website. The platform helps you come up with the most relevant subheadings and create content that stands out from the crowd.
How Much Is Clearscope?
The default subscription is $199 monthly. You get the Essentials package, which includes a single project, unlimited users, 15 content reports, 30 keyword discovery credits, and 100 content inventory pages monthly. Business and Enterprise packages with extra features are also available, but they come with custom pricing.