Humans and machines have started collaborating in almost every industry and vertical today. These interactions are happening even in something as dynamic as content creation - or, to be more precise, SEO content creation.
There was a time when businesses used to spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours to create a single content piece that was SEO-enriched. Things have changed a lot today with the advent of powerful SEO tools that automate almost every task associated with the process of SEO content creation.
A popular SEO tool currently available in the market is Outranking. It is one of the few tools that take a data-driven approach to planning, creation, and optimization of an SEO content piece. However, when compared to other tools like Scalenut, Outranking has some serious flaws like a lack of Chrome Extension, free trial, and shortage of tutorials, to name a few. And that’s why we have come up with this post where we take you through the 7 best Outranking competitors that you can try in 2024.
7 Best Outranking alternatives to consider
Here are the top 7 Outranking Alternatives that you can consider for your SEO needs -
- Scalenut
- Frase
- Clearscope
- Surfer SEO
- Jasper AI
- Marketmuse
- Dashword
#1 Scalenut: The best Outranking alternative offering maximum value
Scalenut is an AI-powered content management platform that offers a comprehensive set of tools for enhancing your SEO and content marketing strategy. With features such as the Content Optimizer, Keyword Planner, and AI SEO Blog Writer, this Thruuu alternative streamlines the entire content lifecycle from creation and planning to optimization.
The platform's user-friendly interface and intuitive features allow users to optimize content using the best SEO practices and SERP results. Besides, Scalenut offers a full suite of features for crafting compelling marketing copies that drive action. Let's learn about its features in detail below.
Key Features
Content Optimizer: This is a powerful solution designed to help you create top-notch content that's fully optimized for SEO. With this tool, you'll be able to produce high-quality content that ranks well and resonates with your audience, using SEO factors such as meta tags, outbound linking, keyword density, etc.
Cruise Mode: It is a long-form SEO blog writer that helps create SEO-optimized blogs in just 5 minutes. Powered by AI, you can simply input your desired title, outline, and keyword and let the AI engine do the heavy lifting for you. With Cruise Mode, creating a compelling and SEO-optimized first draft for your content has never been easier.
Keyword planner: This Scalenut tool helps provide insights into keyword clusters you should be targeting based on your primary keyword. This helps your business optimize the SEO strategies to fit the desired content and marketing strategy accordingly.
SEO Topic Research: This tool helps provide insight into top-ranking URLs by scouring the search engine for your targetted keywords. These insights cover competition overview, important citations, NLP key terms to use, and more that help cut down on research time.
AI template: This Thruuu competitor or alternative offers a suite of 40+ AI-powered templates that assist in crafting marketing copy that drives action, saves time and effort and produces high-quality content that resonates with your target audience. These templates cover various marketing formats, including landing pages, email campaigns, and social media posts.
Traffic Analyser: This function lets you monitor and analyse your website under one tab. All the details are categorized into different sections, such as top gainers, top losers, position changes, traffic sources, etc., to provide all details at your fingertips.
Pros
- Scalenut leverages advanced AI technologies to produce optimized content for search engines and engage the intended audience.
- It offers Copyscape integration that can help detect plagiarism in content and produce 100% original content.
- It offers a 7-day free trial and a forever-free plan with a 2000-word limit.
- Its Chrome extension allows easy access to Scalenut tools.
Cons
- Scalenut has a steep learning curve for a beginner to navigate the platform, but it also offers an expansive help centre and boot camp to help with navigating the platform easily.
Pricing
- Essential Plan: This plan caters to the needs of solopreneurs and freelancers looking for robust content creation tools. With this plan, you get access to five SEO reports and up to 100,000 AI-generated words every month, all starting at just $19/month paid annually.
- Small Business Growth Plan: This plan is custom-made for startups and small businesses that want to elevate their content game. You get unlimited AI-generated words, 30 SEO reports, and advanced features like Instruct AI to Write and Topic Clusters, all starting at $39/month paid annually.
- Pro Plan for Large Teams: The Pro Plan provides top-quality content at scale for established businesses and large teams. This plan comes with all the features of the Growth Plan, a dedicated customer success manager, and multi-user support, priced at $74/month paid annually.
Best Suited For
- Entrepreneurs
- SEO professionals
- Agencies
- Marketing managers
- SEO strategists
- Freelance writers
2. Frase
Frase is an AI content generation and optimization tool that helps businesses, agencies, and teams of writers create content faster. Even though Frase is popular, its core functions only include research, outline, writing, and optimization.
Frase can be a go-to solution for anyone who doesn't like to start working on a blog post from scratch. It eliminates the manual process of skimming and summarizing Google's first-page content.
Key Features
AI researcher
Frase uses the GPT-3 Open AI model to generate AI-written content.
Using this tool, you can find all your competitor's details, including their word count, backlinks, ranking position, headers, and image count. This helps you to know how to polish your content to outrank your competitors.
AI Outline Tool
Frase has three ways to create an outline. You can generate an automated outline with the help of AI that pulls together frequently asked questions, SERP analysis, the top 20 competitors sections, and questions used. This eliminates the manual time spent researching competitors' content.
If you have pre-set templates, you can easily import them into Frase. This allows you to compare your standard templates with the top-ranking pages and add a brief for each section.
AI Writer Tool
The Frase AI writing assistance focuses primarily on building the first draft after creating a detailed summary for each blog section. This feature is quite similar to Scalenut's writing points.
As soon as you generate an outline, Frase AI comes up with a short brief to give you an idea of what will be covered in each blog’s section. This feature can help content heads provide more detailed content briefs and precisely guide their teams.
The AI writer needs significant support from users to create relevant long-form content. The AI Write option may only produce effective results if you provide descriptive prompts or clear starting lines. Frase’s AI writer is a writing assistant and does not yet take content creation entirely out of your hands.
AI Optimization Tool
The content optimization tool allows users to identify SEO gaps within their content and bridge them using the list of suggestions provided by the AI.
However, Frase's content optimization tool is quite a step down compared to Scalenut's SEO optimizer. Its suggestions are based on competitors' content performance, whereas Scalenut considers different content aspects to provide accurate suggestions.
Pros
- The curated list of competitors' headers allows you to easily compile your outline manually.
- You can access add-ons like questions from Quora, Reddit, SERP, stats, and other elements that can improve the quality of your content.
- You can add instructions to train the AI to follow a specific tone or content angle.
- The heatmap feature in the content optimizer allows users to quickly view the keyword density of each term used in competitors' content.
- Frase can be handy if you're tired of manually conducting competitor research.
Cons
- Unlike Scalenut's first draft, this tool doesn’t generate an optimized first draft using AI.
- The tone of voice feature is not available as a standalone option; you need to include that as an instruction to customize the content to your brand.
- There could be more NLP suggestions and an appealing scoreboard to guide the users.
- The absence of templates, one-click content production options, an AI-powered document management system, and social media content generation capabilities are obvious limitations of the tool.
Pricing
- Solo Plan - $14.99 per month
- Basic Plan - $44.99 per month
- Team Plan - $114.99 per month
You can access features like keyword search volume, SERP Data
Enrichment, and Frase AI Writer for $35 per month as a Pro add-on.
Best Suited for
- Content writers
- Head of a content team
- Content manager
#3 Clearscope
Clearscope is an SEO-optimization platform that helps businesses create an SEO-driven content marketing plan. This tool provides more advanced features than Frase. Its core functionalities include a content editor, SEO reports, a real-time content tracker, and more. Clearscope is an ideal tool for businesses trying to produce SEO-friendly content.
Key Features
Here are the core features of Clearscope.
Content Reports
Like Scalenut Content Editor, Clearscope lets you get a detailed report on your written content. Additionally, you can import your published content to the report tab with just a click, ultimately saving you from manual copy-pasting.
Content Inventory
The content inventory system allows businesses to track their overall content performance in terms of traffic, impressions, content health, and clicks. Adding to this feature, the Clearscope keyword planner, which displays monthly searches, competition, and CPC, will help you decide the profitable keyword you should target in your next content.
Content Editor
Clearscopes' Content editor has advanced NLP and competitor analysis features to help you optimize your content for search engines. Clearscope editor’s grades and suggestions are comparatively less accurate than Scalenut's as it does not provide a specific content score or recommendations. The report includes keyword lists, competitor analysis reports, and readability grades.
Pros
- The Clearscope report allows you to label each piece of content based on different categories, which acts as a content management system.
- The filtering option in the content editor tools enables users to filter keywords based on importance, unused, and heading categories.
- You can access additional research materials from YouTube, Quora, Reddit, and SERP, as well as questions to include in your content.
- Integration with Google Docs and the WordPress Plugin helps users easily include the tool in their workflow.
- The keyword importance grade in the content editor helps you see the necessity of using a particular keyword in the content.
Cons
- Instead of a specific SEO score, Clearscope provides a letter grade, which some users may find vague.
- Clearscope outline generators cannot automate the content brief creation process. It only acts as a brainstorming tool to create outlines manually.
- The lack of AI writer, templates, and keyword clustering options limits the tool's ability to help content marketers perform end-to-end SEO.
- The credit-based pricing system generates reports that often hinder users while searching for previous reports and creating new ones.
- Sometimes the keywords and other suggestions become irrelevant to what the users try to achieve through the content.
Pricing
- Essential - $170
- Business and enterprise custom
Best Suited For
- SEO strategist who works with different clients
- Content writers
- Content managers
#4 SurferSEO
Surfer SEO is a content planning and optimization software that enables users to create a basic SEO plan and optimize content to rank higher in Google. The tool has gained credibility and has attracted a large following since its launch.
The core features of Surfer SEO include the content editor, keyword research tool, Surfer AI, Grow Flow, and content audit. A few of these tools only come as add-ons to your Surfer premium plan.
Key Features
These are the core features of Surfer SEO.
Content Editor
The Surfer content editor is one of the most popular yet expensive SEO optimizers. Its content editing features include NLP suggestions, outline generator, brief creator, and content guidelines.
The suggestions are backed by NLP and machine learning technologies. This feature is similar to Scalenut's Content Optimizer. Both tools provide data-backed content suggestions to help your content rank higher.
Keyword Planner
Similar to Scalenut, the Surfer Keyword Planner groups relevant key terms based on their similarities, like Scalenut. This feature allows users to create more content for topics in high demand in their niche and industry. However, Surfer lacks tools like social listening, research, statistics, and others to help users sharpen their content.
Surfer SEO ranks a level low compared to the Scalenut keyword planner. It is because Scalenut provides users with a long list of keywords that allows users to choose brand-relevant keywords manually. As much as clusters are helpful, it is necessary to manually analyze raw data to find subjective content ideas relevant to your brand. However, Surfer does not offer keyword lists yet.
Pros
- Multiple language support makes it easier for users worldwide to create and optimize content using Surfer.
- The Surfer Plagiarism Report helps. allow users to detect duplication in AI or human-written content to save the site's reputation from Google.
- Sharable content editor workspaces promote team collaboration.
- The audit tools allow you to improve your existing content's performance and refresh it to stay relevant to the time period.
- Surfer AI collaborates with Semrush to help users build a robust backlink system.
Cons
- The absence of a free trial restricts first-time users' ability to know how the platform can help them.
- It is an expensive tool that does not Fall under individuals' or growing brands' budgets.
- The Surfer SEO article is not yet worth $29 because of its quality and efficiency.
- The add-ons like Grow Flow, Content Audit, and Surfer AI are too expensive for beginner and intermediate-level users. Moreover, there are tools like Scalenut to replace Surfer at a much more affordable price.
Pricing
Monthly
- Essential - $89
- Advanced - $179
- Max - $299
- Enterprise - Custom
Yearly
- Essential - $69
- Advanced - $149
- Max - $249
- Enterprise - Custom
Best Suited For
- SEO Strategist
- Content Writers
- Editors
#5 Jasper AI
Jasper is a content tool that can help writers, bloggers, and content creators curate highly engaging and non-robotic content. Users can generate both short-form and long-form content on Jasper.
Similar to Scalenut, Jasper is rife with content marketing tools and templates. However, comparatively, Jasper's prices are higher than Scalenut's.
Key Features
Here are the core features of Jasper.
Content outline and brief generator
Generating content outlines or briefs from Jasper can be performed under one tab. Jasper works on a command basis. Usually, you enter a prompt in the AI writer interface, press the command, and it will generate a few paragraphs for your query.
Similar to Scalenut, you have complete control over the AI-generated content. Jasper allows you to provide input on new happenings to create time-relevant, unique content.
SEO
Jasper pairs up with Surfer to help users with on-page optimization. As a standalone tool, Surfer SEO mainly helps users with NLP suggestions, outline creation based on competitor content, and content briefs relevant to a topic. You can access all the features when you use Jasper in SEO mode.
AI writer
Jasper AI is known for its accuracy and relevancy. The tool is super intuitive and filled with templates to ease the prompt creation process. However, to generate brand-centric content, you need to give more context, like who is your target audience, their funnel stage, and the purpose of the content.
Additionally, collaborating with Copyscape and Grammary makes it an even more writer-friendly tool.
Pros
- You can easily train Jasper to follow your brand voice. This helps you maintain uniform messaging across different channels and content.
- The voice mode feature allows you to use a microphone to provide prompts, ultimately helping you speed up your content creation process.
- In comparison to Frase, Jasper has a handful of templates and use cases. Additionally, their knowledge base feature allows you to pre-train the tool to act according to your brand voice and goals.
- Surfer SEO and Jasper work together to optimize your content. Surfer SEO is considered one of the best content optimizers; hence, their collaboration is perceived to be powerful.
- Integration with Copyscape and Grammarly makes Jasper an all-in-one content tool.
Cons
- You only get limited brand voice access in the content creator pack, which can restrict you from doing trial-and-error and diversifying your content types.
- Most customizable features, like templates, SEO mode, API access, etc., are stored for a high-end offer.
- The content creator, aka the basic plan, only has access to email support.
- Jasper uses high-end yet necessary integrations like Surfer, Copyscape, and Grammerly. So the offers start at a high price.
Pricing
- Creator - $39 per month
- Teams - $99 per month
- Business - contact sales
Who can use Jasper?
- Content writers
- SEO writers
- Content marketers
- Copywriters
#6 Marketmuse
MarketMuse is an AI-powered content planning and optimization platform solely dedicated to helping businesses create tailor-made content strategies. The core goal of the tool is to help users get optimal ROI from their content marketing efforts.
The key tools of MarketMuse include a competitor content analyzer, content planning, content clustering, keyword research tool, and content optimizer. All these tools work cohesively to streamline the manual work that SEO strategists and content heads perform on a day-to-day basis.
Key Features
Here are the core features of MarketMuse.
SERP X-ray
MarketMuse's competitor analysis tool helps you see a detailed report of what works for your competitors in the SEO and content categories.
You'll get to know more in-depth details about your competitor's content, like internal links, external links, pages with videos, H2 per page, content score, page intent, and many more.
Content Clusters
The MarketMuse content clusters tool helps you analyze your content and spot the obvious content gaps in your website. With the heatmap tool, you can easily find your competitor's content clusters to locate their weak points and capitalize on the opportunity.
Content Planning
With MarketMuse's content planning system, you can easily review your existing content hub and find new topic ideas that have the potential to rank higher on the SERP.
The tool can also help you examine your existing content's performance and analyze metrics like topical authority, competitive advantage, personalized difficulty score, SERP features, and more.
Moreover, you can generate an automated content inventory that updates frequently to give you real-time insights about your published content.
Keyword Research
MarketMuse's content keyword planner has a simple and easy-to-understand user interface. One of the common issues that users find with SEO tools like Ahrefs, Ubsersuggest, or Semrush is the overwhelming amount of SEO data.
That's why tools like Scalenut, Surfer and even MarketMuse aim to simplify the data into a consumable format. With the MarketMuse keyword planner, you can access primary data like volume, CPC, trends, and personalized difficulty scores. Their cluster-centric approach allows users to cover highly relevant and rank-ready content.
Content Optimization
ChatGPT and MarketMuse integration bridge the absence of an in-built AI writer in the tool. ChatGPT does decent work reviewing content from an objective point of view.
Many content creators, like Tommy Walker, founder of Content Studio, mentioned using ChatGPT to edit their content. Basically, MarketMuse and ChatGPT work together to provide personalized content and SEO suggestions.
Pros
- The personalized difficulty score is a unique feature that allows users to see the keyword difficulty that's highly relevant to your site.
- The MarketMuse’s content briefs allow users to provide more context to their writers regarding the structure of internal and external links to be added, word counts, targeted content score, related topics to cover, and more.
- The data-backed content marketing efforts help individuals and businesses predict their ROI better.
- This tool is highly relevant for beginner- to intermediate-level SEO strategists.
- The ChatGPT editor can be handy for SEO strategists reviewing the final content.
Cons
- The lack of a full-fledged AI writer is a major drawback. If you're looking for a content marketing platform with the combined powers of SEO and content creation, you should probably consider other tools.
- Even though the content briefs cover basic needs, the absence of writing points and an AI-backed outline is a significant weakness.
- MarketMuse falls into the high-price category.
Pricing
- Free - $0
- Standard - $149 per month
- Team - $399 per month
- Premium - Custom plan
#7 Dashword
Dashwood is another SEO optimization software that mainly helps you with creating briefs, optimizing your written content, and monitoring your published works. The tool only has limited features yet proves to effectively contribute to content marketing activities.
Key Features
Here are the core features of Dashword.
Content Brief Builder
Dashword's content brief builder is designed in a visually appealing way to save endless scrolling and let users create their outline in a few clicks. Similar to most SEO optimization tools, Dashword has both an AI-based and a SERP-based outline generator.
Ultimately, you can choose whichever is more relevant to the purpose of your content. You can easily export the ready-to-use outline to your workspace with just a click using their export and share option.
Content Monitoring
With the help of the content monitoring tool, you can find your ranking position, volume you generate, trend frequency, and content score.
Whenever you see content ranking lower in the SERP, you can instantly get an alert or check the status on the SERP position tab and make necessary changes based on suggestions.
Keyword research
The keyword research tool is quite intuitive to use. As soon as you enter your seed keyword, you'll generate a list of relevant terms that you can target in your next piece of content.
You'll get access to the monthly search volume count, trend analysis, competition, CPC, and keyword difficulty. All-in-all, these tools can help you follow basic SEO practices and assist you throughout your content creation process.
Pros
- The Google Docs add-on is a recent introduction to the tool that fits right into the content team's workflow.
- Minimal user interface that makes it easy for beginners to get used to the tool.
- The content optimization feature follows the basic rules and works effectively for SEO writers.
- You can access the weekly status of your content's performance in a short and concise manner.
- You can create a report for each keyword with just a click, which simplifies the outline and briefing process significantly.
Cons
- Limited SEO features restrict users' ability to attain their full SEO potential.
- The content monitoring interface could have been much more neat and organized.
- The content optimization tool is not backed by strong NLP and machine learning algorithms to meet Scalenut's level of accuracy.
- The absence of additional content editor tools like readability scores, research sources, citations, and questions from forums are major drawbacks of the tool.
- Competitors' analysis reports can be more detailed to provide in-depth content insights to outcompete competitors.
Pricing
- Startup - $99 per month
- Business - $349 per month
Conclusion
And that’s a wrap. In this post, we explored the top 7 Outranking IO alternatives that you can consider for optimizing your content in 2022.
As you already know by now, the importance of creating good content is on the rise. Search engines are rewarding websites that generate quality SEO-enriched content frequently. And that is why it’s important to support your content team with a powerful SEO tool that can improve your organic search rank.
Scalenut can be a great choice for your SEO needs because it comes with many advanced features that propel your content piece to the top of the SERP without letting you break the bank. Get started with Scalenut for free
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