Verified purchaser
Not bad, but was definitely expecting more
Given the amount MarketMuse normally charges its users, I was obviously very excited when I saw the deal pop up on Appsumo. There are a lot of players in content strategy and optimization, and MarketMuse is well established.
Unfortunately, I was left feeling quite disappointed after taking MM for a spin. I can only presume most of MM's value lies within the content briefs or first drafts (which cost credits that are finite within the AppSumo LTD).
I haven't tried them yet, but I've tried the Research, Questions, Compete and Optimize modules which are the truly lifetime parts to this deal. Overall, I'm underwhelmed. Here are some thoughts:
1. The content optimization tool feels very bare-bones. It lists important keywords to cover and grades your content based on your coverage. I was expecting it to totally outclass Frase given the price difference, but it suggested fewer keywords and lacked several features Frase includes e.g. Highlighting examples of each keyword being used in context by other sites, and giving you any statistics that were included in other articles.
2. The content optimization tool doesn't count plurals or hyphenated words. Do I really need to include "car" instead of "cars" for it to be picked up by the grader? Other tools I've used handle them just fine.
3. Research/Questions/Compete by themselves are very light in functionality. As it stands, a single content brief from frase or usetopic includes just as many insights as the output of running 3 queries from MM's Research/Questions/Compete combined.
I hope I haven't come across as overly negative in this review. It's still a good deal considering how much you'd end up otherwise paying for content research and optimization SaaSes. But compared to Frase, I feel like I'm getting less information from the queries I'm running. I understand that MM's scoring system is supposedly more intelligent and sophisticated than TF/IDF tools, so I'm hoping that it'll remain a worthwhile tool to have alongside all the others.
StephenJeske-MarketMuse
May 9, 2024Thanks Max, I appreciate taking time to offer your detailed feedback.
Here’s a few observations.
1 - MarketMuse is focused on data quality over quantity. Our topic model is based on analysis of thousand of pages of content, not just the top 20 search results. https://blog.marketmuse.com/how-marketmuse-identifies-topics-that-make-a-page-more-comprehensive/Â This is the way to go if you want to create expert articles and not copy-cat content https://blog.marketmuse.com/content-optimization-why-you-need-to-go-beyond-the-first-page/
Because we analyze thousands of pages in creating a topic model it wouldn’t be helpful to show where a term was used.
2 - A common misconception of SEO is that linguistically equivalent/similar terms are treated the same in Search. Contrary to popular belief, Google handles these differently if there are distinct intents associated with them. Those other tools don’t “handle them just fine”. More details here: https://docs.marketmuse.com/en/articles/92-how-optimize-handles-hyphens-plurals-gerunds-prefixes-suffixes-subscripts-and-superscripts
3 - Again it’s not the quantity but the quality of the insights. As far as I know, the brands you mentioned do not offer a competitive heat map that shows content gaps and helps create differentiated content.
About getting less information than Frase. Yes, you’re right. Frase is a wonderful data aggregate tool. That overwhelming amount of data may inspire you to write content. You may be successful with it, but then again you might not.
One last point, it’s not the scoring system. It’s the topic modeling that’s much more advanced than any TF-IDF tool. https://blog.marketmuse.com/why-your-content-optimization-is-failing/
It’s the topic model that enables anyone to create expert-level content more efficiently.