Letterdrop vs Clearscope
TL;DR:
- Clearscope is a popular content optimization tool that assigns a grade to your content based on LSI keywords and suggests improvements. This is outdated and doesn't help you rank.
- Letterdrop is a newer SEO tool that offers a suite of smart SEO features and is constantly updated to reflect changes in the search climate. It's best suited for teams with a dedicated content marketing operation and aims to optimize content for future search changes.
With so many SEO optimization tools out there, it's difficult to know which will best serve your SEO efforts as a Content Marketer. You've probably come here from Google and are wondering how Letterdrop, a relatively new and modern player in the SEO field, compares to something like Clearscope, a trusted keyword research and content optimization tool.
This article will break down the unique SEO features of the two tools in the hopes of clearing things up. Hopefully, it helps you invest in the best-suited SEO platform to drive the desired results.
Letterdrop
Letterdrop was founded by ex-Googlers in 2021 and includes a suite of smart SEO tooling to help optimize your content from top-to-bottom. It's powered by a GPT engine and integrates its single ecosystem of SEO tools with an end-to-end content management platform.
Who is Letterdrop For?
Letterdrop is for any team seriously thinking about content operations, but it's best suited to companies with the following:
- A full-time Content Marketing Manager
- Multiple writers
- A dedicated operation around content marketing
It's also for teams who hope to optimize content no matter the search changes that get thrown their way in the coming years. The tool is constantly updated to reflect changes in the search climate, including helping you optimize for Google's SGE and Perspectives.
Standout Feature #1: The SEO Optimizer
Letterdrop's SEO Optimizer semantically understands your content and compares it to top pages, EEAT guidelines, and Google's search rater guidelines. It can:
- Identify and auto-fix technical SEO issues.
- 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
- Provide insight into what has been covered on the SERPs so that you know exactly what needs to be addressed. You can even auto-generate original sections into your content based on these top pages
- Provide a fully-fledged draft or "research dump" depending on top page information of your choice and custom instructions
- Suggest topics and new angles that haven't been covered yet so that you optimize for Information Gain. You can also prompt and auto-publish subject matter expert quotes to YouTube and then embed that into your blogs.
- It gives you an EEAT guide specific to your content to make sure all your bases are covered.
Here's a video overview of what the SEO Optimizer can do.
Standout Feature #2: Letterdrop Can Fix SEO Across Your Site
Letterdrop's SEO fixes aren't limited to individual posts. It can:
- Identify internal linking opportunities for you and automatically insert them into the content you're currently working on or publish them in bulk across your site.
- Give you a real-time overview of which pages need to be refreshed, including keyword cannibalization fixes, People Also Ask questions, and more
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Clearscope
Founded in 2015, Clearscope is a popular, AI-powered content optimization tool and a go-to choice for many content teams.
Clearscope assigns your content and top-page content a letter grade based on "Latent Semantic Indexing keywords" (LSI keywords) or keywords relating closely to your target keyword. The tool suggests other LSI terms you can add to make your content more SEO-friendly.
Once you run a report on your chosen keyword, Clearscope compares your content to top results and gives you a rundown of:
- which top or relevant terms you've included
- which top or relevant terms you've left out
- which top or relevant terms you should include in your headings
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Who is Clearscope For?
Clearscope is a one-off tool for basic SEO checks, making creating high volumes of competitive content easy.
But while some may argue that Clearscope is for everyone, it's focus on keyword density to drive traffic makes it better suited to B2C companies looking to see high initial traffic.
It's also compatible if you work with an agency and freelancers.
Letterdrop vs Clearscope: A Side-By-Side Comparison of SEO Capabilities
We've rated the two platforms' SEO capabilities according to four grades:
- Absent — The tool completely lacks this feature.
- Basic — The tool meets basic requirements.
- Average — The tool meets requirements satisfactorily.
- Robust — The tool exceeds requirements.
Why Letterdrop Is the Obvious Choice: What to Consider when Choosing an SEO Tool in 2024
Just like you've come here from Google looking for an honest and helpful answer, SEO tools must prioritize user search intent.
Clearscope has been a go-to SEO assistant for some time now and was one of the first tools to apply NLP to SEO. But it's started to become outdated.
An arbitrary score on how often you repeated a keyword or whether or not you're achieving the same word count as top pages are not Google ranking factors.
- Repeating keywords doesn't give the user the information they need. So, search intent isn't answered
- Google debunked the myth that word count matters in ranking
While Clearscope may not explicitly tell you to repeat keywords, your score depends on it. Keyword stuffing won't get you ranking in the modern search climate. Google's PaLM2 is smart enough to semantically crawl pages.
As we've demonstrated earlier, Letterdrop takes these factors into consideration when analyzing content. That's because the team is actively thinking about the future of SEO and adapting accordingly. The platform, like its creators, prioritizes users over search engines — which you need to consider when choosing your SEO assistant.
Choose an SEO Tool That's Actively Thinking About the Future of Search
Tools like Clearscope are sadly falling behind when it comes to truly optimizing for SEO in 2024. Whether or not you repeat X keyword Y amount of times won't get you anywhere, and it hasn't for a very long time.
Letterdrop, on the other hand, can help you scale content that is actually helpful to users, which in turn will stand your pages in good stead for ranking high on the SERP.
If you're looking to get ranking in the changing search climate, reach out to us.
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