Scribe – Content Marketing Software Review

As businesses devise new ways to leverage the power of the Internet to boost sales through online marketing, the need for more efficient tools can only increase. Marketers are investing more in content so they need the right tools to streamline and measure their efforts. Content marketing softwares like Scribe are now the tools of choice for scaling content operations, right from collecting ideas to audience development. As such, online marketers and businesses alike can better manage their content marketing strategy through a structured and streamlined business process.

In this post, we take a closer look at Scribe, a WordPress-based content marketing tool from the Copyblogger crew that can help you optimize your content for your keywords through advanced content analysis.

Overview

Scribe is a full featured content optimization application that analyzes keyword usage within content on a web page against the backdrop of the website that serves that page. By and large this was the main function for which the original version of the plugin was created but it has since evolved to include a slew of other features as well to accommodate changes in search engine metrics. It is not an enterprise grade tool with collaboration features, for instance, but it fulfills all the key goals of a sound content marketing process.

Scribe’s features work best if you have a SEO plugin installed.

What Does Scribe Do?

Scribe’s main function is to perform keyword research for web page content. After thorough analysis, it generates a Page Score along with the info you need to revise the content and optimize it for a particular set of keywords.

There’s quite a bit more that Scribe does depending on how you use it.

It is tailored to content-heavy sites with a lot of text-based material including articles, tutorials, sales copy, product reviews, and more. Basically, any website that has a need for search engine optimized content will find great use for this plugin.

Note, however, that Scribe cannot transform sloppy content into quality content. It simply provides you with the right info you can use to transform the content yourself.

Main Features

The current version of the plugin (Scribe 4.0) has for main function areas: keyword research, content optimizer, link builder, and site connections.

The plugin comes with a keyword research component that takes your keyword suggestion and generates a comprehensive analysis report on the provided keyword. In the report pane, you’ll see a list of several variants of the keyword, its popularity, and the anticipated level of competition. In the same pane, you’ll see the action your keyword is generating on Google+, Google Trends, and Twitter.

Moving onto the next feature, the content optimizer compares the content on a given page with your chosen keyword and the info you entered into your SEO plugin. It then generates a Page Score, a number that determines how good a match a page’s content is for the selected keywords. It also generates a Site Score, which is basically a comparison of that page’s content in context with the content on the entire site; each page will have a unique Site Score. Values above 50 are deemed pretty good.

The optimizer provides specific suggestions for improving your score, such as adding more content related to our keywords.

The link builder component researches and locates internal links on your site. For a small site, this function would not be of much use. For large sites, however, it is a handy feature that selects links applicable to keywords in your posts.

Subscription Plans

Understandably, Scribe is a premium plugin given that a great deal of research and effort goes into refining the core code that performs the analysis. As of this writing, Scribe is available in three monthly subscription plans: Agency ($247 per month), Professional ($97 per month), and Enterprise (price depends on needs). All plans work on unlimited websites but keyword searches and evaluations are capped at 2100 keyword searches and 900 evaluations for the Agency plan and 700 keyword searches and 300 evaluations for the Professional plan.

Wrapping Up

On the face of it, there isn’t much that this plugin does that you couldn’t do manually, but you wouldn’t manage if you tried for the simple reason that it wouldn’t be efficient at all. And this is where Scribe’s practicality becomes apparent: it combines multiple functions and performs them in a centralized place. What’s more, it does that inside your WordPress site.

Like similar tools, however, Scribe doesn’t do any magic; what you put into it is what you get. Sure, the tool saves you a lot of time in the content optimization department, but you still need to invest some time in the “implementation” department.

So is Scribe worth the $97 monthly charge? That’s entirely up to you. Given the enthusiastic reviews by selected users on the plugin’s official website, it appears many people agree that it is worth the money.