Top 8 Clearscope Alternatives

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TL;DR:

• Clearscope is a popular SEO tool but has been on the market for a while, doesn't offer much by way of AI-assisted writing, and has become increasingly outdated.
• Unfortunately, most of these alternatives promote keyword stuffing as a primary ranking factor.
• Letterdrop offers a comprehensive ecosystem of SEO tools that includes optimizing for search intent, information gain, and other modern SEO best practices. It also incorporates generative AI and automated technical SEO fixes.

Clearscope is one of the most well-known content and SEO-optimization tools on the market today and was one of the first to apply NLP to SEO.

But it's been around for some time now. As the SEO landscape evolves, marketers are looking for optimization tools that help them give a more complete answer to questions and that help them write optimized content faster with generative AI.

Maybe you're wondering what new alternatives are out there and how they compare to Clearscope.

I've put together a list of its top contenders.

For each of these tools, I give a rundown of the offerings that set it apart from Clearscope to help you make your choice. I also include tables that compare their capabilities for:

• Keyword research
• Topical optimization
• Technical optimization
• Generative AI and automation capabilities

1. Letterdrop

We're putting Letterdrop forward as a more modern and full-service alternative to Clearscope that's won companies like Scribe an 11x boost to qualified traffic and paid signups from SEO.

Founded by former PMs on the Google Search team, Letterdrop is one of the first SEO assistants built to put people first, prioritizing new perspectives and search intent over keyword stuffing.

Our suite of SEO tooling can identify and auto-fix SEO issues both on-page and across your site, taking SEO off your hands.

Standout Features

In a nutshell, Letterdrop's SEO tool semantically understands your content and can:

1. Identify Search Intent and let you know you whether the search is informational, navigational, commercial or transactional. It analyzes top pages and suggests the best format you should use to get ranking
2. Provide a fully-fledged draft or "research dump" depending on top page information of your choice and custom instructions
3. Suggest topics and new angles that haven't been covered yet so that you optimize for Information Gain
4. Give you an EEAT guide specific to your content to make sure all your bases are covered.
5. Automatically fix over 60 on-page technical SEO rules, such as internal links, keyword placement, alt text, and more
6. Auto-fix links and publish them across your site
7. Monitor your pages for you for necessary content refreshes, including keyword cannibalization fixes, People Also Ask questions, and more

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We're not here to tell you to repeat your keyword 20 times, but to help you create content that:

a) Ranks better in the new SEO climate, especially in the wake of Google's SGE

b) Your customers actually want to read

Clearscope vs Letterdrop

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2. Surfer SEO

After you've put in your keyword, Surfer SEO analyzes the content of top competitors out on the SERPs. Much like Clearscope, Surfer assigns an SEO score to both SERP content and your own written content on the basis of:

• Inclusion of relevant LSP keywords
• Word count
• Image count
• Page structure (headers and paragraphs)
• Keyword density
• Page speed
• Backlink count and quality
• Meta tag structure

It then produces a customizable guideline for you with real-time SEO recommendations. It covers structural tips, keyword suggestions, and topic ideas.

(We wrote a specific article on Clearscope vs Surfer SEO.)

Key Features

Outline and Draft Builder

Surfer's outline and draft builder lets you generate headers and even full paragraphs into the editor based on your target keywords.

But remember, you can't just take this output as-is. It still demands a lot of editing from a person in order to make it actually usable.

Customizable SEO Targets

Surfer allows you to adjust your specific goals per article, and assigns you a score on how well you're meeting these goals. This sets it apart from Clearscope.

For example, you can adjust:

• the competitors you want to be valued against
• structural goals
• topical goals by selecting the most relevant "People Also Ask" topics

It Gives You Suggestions for SEO Improvements

Surfer looks at your pages and tells you instantly how to make them better for search engines.

Here's what it does:

• It points out other pages on your site you should link within your content
• It spots keywords you've missed and tells you how many times to use them
• It flags if your content is too long or short and if you need more or fewer headings
• It checks if your keywords show up often enough in your text
• It offers tips to make your pages load faster
• It highlights backlinks you're missing
• It advises if your meta tags need fixing

Clearscope vs Surfer SEO

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3. Frase

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Frase is another smart SEO assistant that uses learning algorithms to produce actionable SEO insights based on user engagement with published web content.

Frase processes your content and compares it to the top 20 search results for your keyword. Just like Clearscope and Surfer, it awards a content score, which you can improve by bringing your page to semi-parity with top pages.

(We also have a more specific look at Frase vs Surfer SEO if you're interested.)

Key Features

AI Writing Assistant

Frase may have a similar editor and outline builder as Clearscope at first glance, but it goes a step further by allowing you to generate a complete first draft based on your keywords.

You can use its AI to:

• Build drafts or outlines based on your instructions
• Generate headlines and topics from competitor pages (direct-paste or AI-generated versions)
• Generate questions from People Also Ask, Quora, and Reddit
• Generate stats from the SERPs

It should be used as a foundation for your final article, but it kickstarts the writing process and can save some time.

View Top Questions from the SERPs

Frase allows you to see top questions from the SERP (including from websites like Reddit) which can help you target better topical coverage.

Clearscope vs Frase

4. MarketMuse

MarketMuse makes use of AI to help you research, plan, and generate competitive content.

With it, you get an analysis of published content, covering keyword research, basic content gap analysis, and competitor insights.

We wrote a more in-depth side-by-side comparison of Clearscope versus MarketMuse, if you're interested.

Key Features

Better Guidelines for SEO

MarketMuse takes its SEO suggestions a step further than Clearscope. While you still get a grade based on keyword inclusion and word count, you also get:

• A "Related Questions" feature to help broaden topical coverage
• Custom SEO targets
• Suggestions for distribution
• Projected ROI for certain topics

Internal Link Suggestions

MarketMuse offers a series of Applications you can plug into your writing, including a feature that alerts you to possible internal linking opportunities.

Drag-and-Drop AI Draft Builder

The tool offers a drag-and-drop, AI-powered draft builder that lets you put together your draft using outputs based on the SERPs.

You can also instruct the AI to help you expand on points, rewrite sections, and summarize sections.

Clearscope vs MarketMuse

5. Content Harmony

Content Harmony is primarily a smart SEO outline-builder and a strong competitor to Clearscope.

It offers a full workflow for content briefs, from keyword research straight through to grading your content like the other tools on this list.

Key Features

More Detailed Topical Coverage Suggestions

In addition to keyword relevance, the AI assistant suggests the following improvements to make to your content in terms of bringing it to parity with competitors:

• Relevant sub topics
• A compilation of frequently asked questions on the subject, compiled from People Also Ask sections, Quora answers, and other SERP features

Image and Video Analysis Included in SERP Reports

When evaluating your content against that of top pages, which includes keyword frequency and word count, Content Harmony also includes top videos and images.

This helps you better understand what kinds of media content you should be including to rank.

Brief and Outline Builder

As you write, you get structural suggestions from the Content Harmony AI to help make your briefs and outlines more competitive.

You can use the AI to write these for you.

You can create templates to standardize your content across your organization as well.

Clearscope vs Content Harmony

6. GrowthBar

Much like Clearscope, GrowthBar simplifies SEO by analyzing search engine results pages (SERPs) to assess how user content measures up against top-ranked pages in terms of keyword density, word count, URL structure, heading layout, and more.

Its content generator has a simple drag-and-drop content builder to help you structure outlines and drafts on the above.

Key Features

Metadata Generation

Aside from its content builder, GrowthBar has one-up on Clearscope with its metadata generator, built on ChatGPT 4.

It takes into consideration optimal word count, too.

More Content Generation Options

With GrowthBar, you can use AI to help you write:

• Press releases
• Product descriptions
• Sales outreach emails
• Newsletters

Internal Link Suggestions

As you write, GrowthBar scans your content for potential internal linking opportunities.

Much like MarketMuse, it will then offer linking suggestions.

Clearscope vs GrowthBar

7. Dashword

Like Clearscope, Dashword evaluates your content against:

• Relevant keywords
• Image count
• Keyword density
• Word count

It's perhaps one of the tools most similar to Clearscope.

It does incorporate a better AI assistant, though — it can correct grammar, rephrase sentences, and generate metadata for you.

Key Feature: Content Monitoring

Dashword integrates with Google Analytics to track your content performance overtime and highlight assets that need updating or improvement.

SEO housekeeping is a key trick to staying relevant, so this is a great feature to have.

Clearscope vs Dashword

8. Page Optimizer Pro

Page Optimizer Pro (known colloquially as POP) compares your content to that of top results, like any other tool on this list.

Its standout feature is that it's able to alert you to recent SERP and algorithm updates.

(We wrote an article on Page Optimizer Pro versus Surfer SEO, as Surfer is one of its biggest competitors. Check it out if you're interested.)

Key Features

Watchdog Alerts

POP's "Watchdog" feature keeps you informed of the latest changes in Google's algorithm and SERP adjustments.

This enables you to update your content proactively, maintaining its relevance and optimizing its performance in search results.

Better Topical Coverage Suggestions

POP supplies a detailed, actionable list for on-page optimization. It also suggests relevant topics and subtopics to expand your content's scope and relevance.

More Advanced SERP Analysis

In addition to evaluating your page's word count, keyword density, and more to reach an overall SEO score, POP also:

• Analyzes schema structure against competitors
• Checks basic EEAT compliance
• Identifies Google entities categories to suggest keyword variations for improved ranking

Clearscope vs Page Optimizer Pro

Which Clearscope Alternative Is Best for Me?

You don't want to end up in a situation where you're telling your CEO that you wasted money on an SEO tool that is doing nothing for your content.

Unfortunately, Clearscope and most of its alternatives heavily emphasize keywords as a primary way to get ranking. This is untrue and promotes keyword stuffing.

An arbitrary score based on keyword density and word count won't help you create content that puts the user first and answers their search intent. This way of thinking is very outdated and could harm your SEO efforts.

Letterdrop is thinking about the future of search and how to use AI to take the SEO basics off your hands, from topical coverage to internal linking. Reach out to us to put SEO best practices on autopilot.