You may have noticed I’ve been writing a lot about SEO copywriting lately. More than that, I’ve been working on a content optimization software solution for the last 6 months with a team of very smart people.
It’s called Scribe, and it makes SEO copywriting simple. Creating search optimized web pages, blog posts, and press releases used to be time consuming at best and mystifying at worst.
Not anymore.
What is Scribe?
It’s an SEO software service that analyzes the content of web pages, blog posts, online press releases, you name it… at the click of a button.
The API then reports back and tells web writers, bloggers, affiliate marketers, and small business owners how to tweak their content to get more search engine traffic, all while maintaining quality reader-focused copy.
It’s like having an SEO expert as an editorial assistant.
How does it work?
Right now Scribe works through a WordPress plugin combined with an API (tech jargon for saying one piece of software talks to another). The Scribe API key you’ll receive when you sign up allows you to tap into our content optimization algorithm on our servers right from your WordPress interface.
Scribe works with WordPress if you’re able to fill in a custom title tag and meta description for the post or page. Scribe now has a web-based version, Joomla and Drupal versions, and is compatible with many more WordPress plug-ins and themes.
We’ve got other platforms coming soon, including a standalone web version next month, and you’ll have access to all of those additional platforms at no extra charge when you sign up for our great introductory offer.
Why is this different from other SEO tools?
What’s innovative about Scribe is the way it differs from typical SEO tools. Instead of asking you for a keyword phrase and then pushing you to construct content around it, our software service:
- Analyzes what you’ve already written, preserving your natural flow
- Reveals what search engines will think you’re writing about
- Suggests changes to better reflect the language searchers are using
- Guides you through remaining content elements based on SEO best practices
With Scribe you’ll:
- Optimize content faster
- Eliminate guesswork about keywords
- Employ SEO best practices
- Preserve people-focused copy
- Increase targeted traffic!
What’s this Going to Cost Me?
As many of you know by now, I like to reward early-adopters with the best pricing, unlike general business “wisdom” that says you extract the most cash from the most willing.
The service is available in 3 plan levels at 3 different monthly price points:
- Advanced: 300 evaluations a month (around 100 pages or posts) for $97
- Publisher: 120 evaluations a month (around 40 pages or posts) for $47
- Starter: 30 evaluations a month (around 10 pages or posts) for $27
You can see what our customers think by checking out these Scribe SEO reviews.
- Take the Scribe tour
- Buy Scribe Now
- Who’s Behind Scribe?
- Frequently Asked Questions
- Take Scribe on a Free Test Drive
About the Author: Brian Clark is founder of Copyblogger and CEO of Unglued Media. Get more from Brian on Twitter.
A powerful product.
Thanks for sharing Brian.
I’ve used this, and it is completely freaking brilliant.
Awesome job, Brian.
The starter price is a great deal. I’ve used this service already on a couple of blog posts and it definitely makes it easier. I can concentrate on what I want to say and not worry so much about SEO.
I can’t stop playing with Scribe. The only thing that would make this plugin cooler is if it came with a writer robot to do the actual writing work for me.
The best way I can describe it is that it would be like having a VA help you optimize every page you are writing, are going to write, or have already written. Except instead of paying the VA by the hour, you pay them by the month. And their salary is the cost of half a tank of gas.
Wow..
This sounds like an awesome product, am looking forward to try it
Congrats on the launch.
Yeah, this will certainly create some instant buzzzz
Scribe will be an integral part of changing the game; as it levels the playing field even more. Can the world get any flatter? When you think about it http://bit.ly/9EwRof this is very timely and. well.. brilliant.
Very nice product! I know you’re just launching it, but does it have multilingual support? Namely Spanish and Portuguese?
Beny, not at this point. We have several platforms to release in English first, and then we’ll look at other languages. I think Spanish makes the most sense as a first step into multilingual support.
Unfreakinbelieveable!
Exactly what I would have done if I’d been a uber-sharp, ultra-visionary, slick, programmerish type with a giant brain and a Magic 8-Ball !
Multiple tools, rolled into one, easy to use tool.
We’ve been doing most of this all along, but it took WAY TOO LONG to do all of this individually.
“Thanks” seems insufficient, so how about “hugs, love and kisses”
Great idea. I can’t wait to use it. Thank you for making my job easier!
This looks awesome! I’m going to give this a shot.
Smart money making idea from them! Seems value-added.
Unfortunately, I can’t bother with SEO. It drains the soul from writing, and I’ve promised never to alter my writing for SEO.
Best, Sam
Hello Brian,
I make my living as an independent Web content writer. Part of the service I offer my clients is optimized content. If I’m understanding how this works, a client could hire me to write their content, then run it through Scribe to optimize it instead of paying me to do so. It seems that if all I’m providing is the content, and not optimizing it, the client would be less inclined to pay my usual rate. Am I understanding this correctly?
Brian,
Congratulations on the launch of Scribe. Having beta tested the plugin, my comments are:
- A huge time saver that will open the eyes of even the SEO savvy blogger.
- rock solid plugin from a code perspective.
- Intuitively integrated into the WordPress UI.
I’ll admit that when I guest write on blogs that don’t have Scribe, I feel a little uneasy.
This plugin will be a requirement for our clients and has become a staple on our team.
Hi Brian,
Is Scribe already included in Thesis or is it an additional feature that needs to be purchased if I am using Thesis?
Hi David. While Scribe was designed with Thesis in mind, it’s an add-on additional service, not included.
@Michelle, I get paid for writing and optimizing SEO content as well, but I see this as an additional way of making money rather than something that could impede my ability to make it. Yes, you might have some clients who are using WordPress, with a compatible theme, who are also willing to subscribe to Scribe. But you’ll also have plenty of clients who won’t. For them, you’ll be able to do what you do, but possibly better and faster. This will allow you to either take more clients or raise your rates. It doesn’t matter how you arrive at their results, as long as you’re getting there.
Michelle, I’ll add that Copyblogger’s audience may seem relatively large, but it’s really tiny in the grand scope of things. The people who hire you likely will never read Copyblogger, and will never have heard of Scribe. Our audience is mostly made up of people like you and Sean, so it’s the competition you worry about, not the clients.
Wow! This sounds super sweet! I am looking forward to test running this baby!
Thank you, Brian. Super innovative!
Loving it… also wishing for a Scribe forum to ask some general questions, or even some specific ones… also looking forward to the affiliate program
Sean and Brian,
Thanks for the responses! You both make excellent points. I wanted to be sure I was understanding what this tool is, and who its target audience is, rather than just getting all ranty.
My feeling is, if it did replace something I do, it would be impetus for me to adapt and change, and augment my currently provided services in some other way. Sure, it would be a pain in the butt, but hey, things change, and sometimes people find better/faster/easier ways of doing things. I just wanted to understand what this was before I went and changed anything I’m doing because of it. Thank you both for your help.
And Sean, it’s always nice to connect with others who are in the same line of work. Thanks again.
Great looking service Brian, looking forward to testing it out in the near future!
This sounds awesome! Looks like I finally need to make the switch to Thesis.
Michelle,
Great question you’ve put out here. In addition to Sean’s response, I’d add that Scribe is a tool that helps a SEO savvy copywriter. . not replace them. As a provider, you bring an SEO mindset and experience to the table. Scribe will save you time and increase your effectiveness. For a client, Scribe is also a great tool but their usage of it will be different from yours. It will open their eyes to keywords and SEO copywriting. You will be using it to take your work to the next level.
In my review of Scribe, I tell about this post I wrote on Twitter name squatting. On a young blog, I couldn’t compete on that keyword so I strived to surface for some keyword’s like Twitter’s fax number and longer tail combos of trademark infringement, etc. Scribe allowed me to ensure I achieved that goal and not wreck my post at the same time. No one wants to read a post about a corporate fax number. . .had to get it in there under the radar screen. With Scribe I got methodical and the result was I surfaced above the fold on page 1 for the keywords. Needless to say, the post drives traffic.
Will you be supporting Platinum SEO plugin? Many of us are going with it now instead of All-in-One-SEO or the SEO fields built into Thesis.
I think its awesome but I am new to blogging and I can’t afford it yet. What should I do?
Gail, ditto on the Platinum SEO Pack question. . . standard for our non-thesis blogs.
Thanks, Derick. That’s an interesting way to illustrate use of this tool. I’m going to play around with the free test drive and then make a decision about signing up.
Looks like a good service Brian – I look forward to trying it out.
Brian – I went to the Scribe website and am stunned by the simplicity and brilliance. I am signing up today. Thanks for the great suggestion.
I’ve only taken a cursory look at this product, but I fail to see why it’s a monthly charge instead of one time? Is it making calls to a central server where data is stored? Why would it need that to analyze how well optimized a blog post is?
$324 a year is pretty steep for something that could have been coded to be stand alone. Even if updates as updates are needed in the future, a small charge would be tolerable. Especially considering that most premium plugin developers offer lifetime updates for free.
My intention is not to sound like a hater. If I can be shown the value and necessity of another monthly bill, I am more than willing to consider purchasing your product.
Aaarrhh! I keep promising myself not to buy any more SEO stuff .. and then you hit me with another ‘must have’. Have to say, this really does look great though. I’ve signed up for a test run. Thanks .. I think.
Sounds like a wonderful tool, especially since I am just learning earnestly about SEO. However, I use typepad to write my blog, not wordpress. I’ll be paying attention to which blogs get the most traffic and if wordpress blogs have the edge!
Dan, you don’t sound like a hater. Let me answer your questions so it’s a bit more clear how Scribe works.
Yes. The WordPress plugin for Scribe is a piece of functional trivia in the larger scheme. It simply allows the Scribe algorithm on our servers to interface with the WordPress CMS via an API.
Next month there will be a web standalone version, then a Microsoft Word plugin, then other blogging platforms. So WordPress is just the starting point of a multi-platform puzzle, not the essence of Scribe itself.
Scribe pulls data related to keywords and search patterns from the engines themselves, and this is how Scribe is able to evaluate how engines will view your content and what you might want to change. That data combined with the proprietary Scribe algorithm works to tell you what other algorithms — the ones that power the engines — will think of your on-page elements.
And of course Scribe can be tweaked to reflect changes demonstrated by the engines in the future as necessary, with no interruption or hassle to the end user. Running all that on your server, on the other hand, is not desirable, nor is it the way modern software development is going. API services allow you to tap more computing power for way less money.
I think this is where the confusion is. Most “premium” plugins are stand-alone functional pieces of software — they’re the whole deal. Our plugin is just a way for Scribe to talk to WordPress via API so you can work with it directly in your CMS. The standalone web version of Scribe was developed first, but we decided to launch with WordPress for various reasons. And people who join now will get the standalone before the end of their first month of subscription.
Scribe’s model is similar to what 37signals does, except we’re a bit more user friendly — we’ll have a web-based app AND we’ll build plugins that work in your interface of choice.
So, plenty of people pay more than $324 a year for project management through Basecamp, right? Lots and lots of people, because if they get things done, and get them done more efficiently, they make money. Perhaps even more money if Basecamp sufficiently improves productivity.
With Scribe, people who do freelance web writing *will* improve their productivity, so the price is a drop in the bucket compared to the return if you can produce even one more piece of billable content a month (I’d say you can produce a ton more billable content).
Copywriters who don’t currently offer SEO copywriting services can now confidently do so, and add an entire new revenue stream.
Small business owners, commercial bloggers, and affiliate marketers can simply make more money from better search results and more targeted traffic.
Scribe is completely ROI-focused or we wouldn’t bother to make it. It’s not a cost of doing business on the web, it’s a business booster.
Hope this helps.
Thanks for the excellent response, Brian.
That is where the confusion was. My opinion of the price point and the value of the service are completely different taking all that into consideration.
I’ll take more of a look at this.
Thanks for sharing about Scribe – A powerful plugin
So if I’m reading this correctly, there is an MS Word addon coming soon, included in the $27/mth, that will let those of us who do a lot of copy writing in Word to do all the SEO optimization before we copy the content into client blogs?
Is it the same as the WordPress one? How does it optimize your title if you’re still in a Word doc and not in the WordPress admin panel?
Sounds like a great product.
Paul, yes… all future platforms will be available to all subscribers. The version coming soonest is the the web standalone version (less than a month from now), and differs only in that you have to paste in the various fields of content.
The MS Word plugin is in development, so I haven’t used it. But my guess is it will create fields or macros for each element (title, body, title tag, meta description).
Question: If we have multiple blogs how does that count towards the number of evaluations? If we purchase 300 evaluations per month is that only on one wordpress blog or can it be across 2,3 or 4?
CJ, you can use it on as many sites as you want, subject only to the number of evaluations included in your plan.
http://scribeseo.com/faq/
I’m so ecstatic about this product! I feel like a kid in a candy store. It’s heaven sent. Thank you Brian and Co. for creating a streamlined, user-friendly, writer-friendly product. When is the affiliate program launching? Count me in!
I have to admit, my first response was exactly the same as Financial Samuri’s. And since you didn’t address his concern, I thought I’d tell you the conversation I had with myself before deciding to buy it.
I’ve been writing for years, but have only worked with a few editors who really provided useful feedback. If you’ve never had that, you might think it would cramp your style to have someone “redlining” your work, but it’s not. It’s actually great to get constructive feedback, which you’re free to respond to or not.
If someone catches your typos, you’d want that, right? Well now we have spell check. If someone catches your broken links you’d want that. We have automated link checkers. If you could tell someone “I want this article to be about this topic,” and they can point out you didn’t mention your topic in your headline or any of the subheads, wouldn’t you want someone to do that?
Well now that’s automated, too. If you want your work to be readable, you need spell check. If you want it to be reachable, you need link check. If you want it to be searchable, you need SEO check.
I’ve already found a headline formula that, by itself, gets me steady search traffic to blog posts. What I don’t have is good traffic to landing pages. I expect to change that within the next couple of weeks using Scribe.
I’ve been through the free test drive. Awesome. I just subscribed for the paying version.
It is really good for on-page optimization. Something it does not manage is the links to (and between) my posts, and the anchor test of these links (for example I’d keep a title if it corresponds to the anchor text of inbound links, even though it might hurt a little in terms of the “primary keywords” I am chasing).
So it does not do 100% of the SEO job, but definitely more than half.
Running the free test drive when the service went down last night. So far, I have found it very helpful. But what stands out at the moment is not the tool itself – which has already helped me tremendously – but an email I just received Brian Clark and his team concerning the outage.
It was straightforward, honest, and told my what I needed to know. I admit I was frustrated – I in fact was ready to purchase when it went down. I need to know I can trust my technology! But he explained exactly what happened and what they are doing to fix it. A very good response from a start-up. So I am going to subscribe – not just because its a very useful tool, but because they really seem committed to the customer. I’m tucking his email away as a great example.
Remarkable tool.
This takes a lot of the guesswork out of the day-to-day SEO decision making process.
Nice!
Great tool. I just started using it. Thanks!
I was so excited about this tool, I bought it without doing a trial. It hasn’t worked for me so far due to the problems they are having (which they have been very honest about).
I am still very excited about what this plugin will do once it is up and running. I just wish they had worked this all out in beta before asking me for my money.
Lisa, if it helps, we tested everything in beta, other than one thing… a whole bunch of people using at once. Hard to test for that.
Thanks for sticking with us.
Hey Brian,
That makes sense. I’m in it for the long haul anyway – no worries:)
Actually Brian, there are ways to test it. If you need someone to work up a test plan for your next product launch, let me know. That’s what I do at the day job.
Scribe looks like a great service but I will definitely do some more testing before I buy. So I hope Scribe gets well soon and is ready for serious traffic
Andreas
Scribe is working perfectly now and I must say it was worth the wait. I’ll be spending my weekends tweaking articles I’ve already written and will go forward optimizing my articles with precision and ease! Oh man – I love it!!
Great product … I am loving it. Hopefully, the effort expended optimizing my posts and pages will pay off.
Will we be able to use this to help with SEO for e-commerce websites, such as Magento cart systems? If so, that would be HUGE!
I just installed the Scribe plugin and ran one of my blog posts through it as a test. (I am not new to SEO and have a pretty good grasp on how it works).
I have to say… I’m kind of confused by it. The page I tested is optimized for a specific keyword phrase I selected based on both MicroNicheFinder and Wordtracker – it’s in the title, 1st sentence, and appears throughout the copy at a density of 1%.
However, Scribe is showing zero usage of any primary keywords in either the title or body – even though combinations on the terms it suggests clearly appear in the title and body??
Is this tool NOT meant to work with longer tail keyword phrases? I am assuming this because the suggested phrases are all 1 – 2 words in length and quite frankly, there isn’t a snowball’s chance I’m going to rank in the top 3 by targeted those broad phrases.
I obviously have great respect for what you do – or I wouldn’t have signed up. But, would really appreciate some insight on how to effectively use this tool.
Thank you!
Trish, I just left a comment over at your blog. Contact support and let them know what’s happening. They’ve dealt with every strange issue you can imagine.
Brian – I agree with Trish. I am seeing the same thing. I am not sure what it takes to have a keyword/phrase considered primary. But if I use mine as the first few words in the title, it still often is not catching it. And many times is is saying it cannot find primary keywords in the post. If I write them much more, I would have no content…
I was trying to optimize some upcoming posts, and I am puzzled.
Jodi
Oddly, other posts are doing fine. It seems almost at random.
Jodi
Brian –
First, thank you for being so responsive to my concern!
I have submitted a ticket via support and am looking forward to hearing back from them.
Thanks again for caring enough to reply.
Trish
@Brian – I read Trish’s blog post, which brought me back here. I have to say I’m as curious as she is about how Scribe determines the relevant keywords from one’s copy, and whether it can deal with longtail keyword phrases made up of 3 or more words. I can’t imagine we’ll be the only ones asking this question. Just food for thought.
Pat
Hi everyone, I am the technical architect of Scribe. Thank you all for the response and questions.
A couple of points. One, we have posted a number of response to questions in our support forum at https://my.scribeseo.com. We are working questions and support tickets as fast as possible to help our community.
Second, some people have had questions about Primary Keywords. I created a post last night in our support forum under Community Support to address this and will be doing a quick video overview that shows a great case study from Copyblogger.com.
Finally, thank you all for your interest. I know you have questions and I and my team are working to answer them for you. You are important to us and we are using our support system at https://my.scribeseo.com to address your questions.
Hi Sean
Thank you for reply.
I think it is great that these and other concerns are being addressed within the support forum for those of us who have already invested in the product. I will definitely swing by and take a look.
To take it one step further – I believe addressing these concerns publicly (outside the support forum for current users) will be of great benefit to those who are still thinking about investing in your product – and will help your affiliates market it more effectively to their readers, as well.
Just a thought.
Trisha, we were just discussing that. We’ll have a public document linked from the tour, along with a bunch of other public information like video tours, etc. One thing I’ve learned, you figure out a lot of communication sticking points from the first two weeks of being open for business.
I agree, thanks for bringing it forward, Trish. As Brian said, it’s a huge help when folks let us know what’s not getting communicated clearly!
Also, Brian, go have a margarita please. (The man is theoretically on vacation.)
@Sean – Thanks for posting more details about the primary keywords over at the support center.
@Brian – I hope all is well now that the big crunch is over and the early-bird pricing is gone.
I finally finished my Scribe SEO review, a bit later than everyone else. Let me know what you think.
Pat
It’s great to see that there is constant improvement being made to Scribe. It is something that I am more and more recommending to people, not only to improve their content but also as a means to learn various concepts and techniques of SEO.
Keep it up guys.
I was looking for something like Scribe for a long time. Scribe got almost all the needed feature which is going to help in my upcoming projects
Thanks for the great post. I went ahead and gave Scribe a try, and I must say, this is what I was looking for…like eons ago. In fact, I was wondering with all the technology out there these days why wouldn’t they have something like this.
The fact that it works so simply as a WordPress plugin makes it even better. There is no tool I can recommend more if you plan on doing any writing for your business. That means get it now people!
I’m a big fan of the WordPress platform. Scribe seo is one of the best plugin in WordPress that works with WordPress to analyze your posts, give you information about them, and make suggestions about improving your post from an SEO Perspective. Once you’ve finished writing your post, the plugin checks to make sure you’ve written an optimized version of your title in the custom title field.
If you have old post in your blog and you expected a little more out of? Use this tool to go back, re-evaluate, and tweak things a bit to improve them.
I just overviewed that article and so far I can say that this product definitely attracts my attention.
Really interesting!
So I have actually used Scribe SEO for my personal website and I personally really like it. I am a novice at SEO and didn’t really know any best practices for search. After reviewing the WordPress SEO plug ins, I finally picked this one and it was super easy to use.
I personally love the page grader feature. It was simultaneously able to teach me some SEO best practices while letting me know some short comings I had in the content. I always try to get about a 90-100% on each of my pages to ensure that my website will be easily found through search.
After reading through some of these postings it seems like I did the right thing purchasing Scribe SEO. Does anyone know if there are going to be any new updates to Scribe SEO that will be coming soon? I can’t wait to see what they add to this plug in to make it even better.
Stephanie, thank you so much. We truly appreciate your kind words.
Yes, we are planning on the next version of Scribe for the summer of 2011. A couple of ideas that are being finalized for the new release.
Our goal is to enhance our current feature list. Toward this goal we will be making a series of improvements to our Keyword Research functionality with more details on who is using the keywords. Our idea is to help writers better target their audience through more in-depth information about who and how people are using keywords on search engines.
For the content analysis, we are working to incorporate more elements into the scoring process based on recent developments in semantic, or word usage, and how it applies to on-page content.
For link building suggestions, we will improve on identifying more sources (like Facebook users), etc with the idea of making it easier to find people and sites that are discussing the topic you are writing towards – with a strong emphasis on social media connections, beyond Twitter.
And finally, we will be making a number of improvements to Scribe Web. These changes will include improvements to the Microsoft Word report feature (used by many writers for their consulting clients) and better integration with your blog so that you can manage your content across different installations of Scribe.
The goal of version 3.0 of Scribe was to introduce key elements of the SEO copywriting process. For version 4.0 of Scribe, our goal is to build on these features to make it easier and more intuitive.
Stephanie, we want to make your investment in Scribe worth it and we will never give up on making it better, easier for writers to achieve their SEO copywriting efforts.
Brian,
I am a huge fan of Scribe, evangelize it on my blog, and recommend it to all of my customers. Blogging without any Scribe evaluations left is like blogging in the dark!!!
That being said, my Mexican client is finding that Scribe does not work well with Spanish. I already contacted your support team and have suggested a “Global Terms to Ignore” workaround. I understand that English is main priority, but I do hope you’ll join others who are dreaming of a day when Scribe works as well in Spanish as it does in English…
Thanks for listening!
Neal, we’d love to get Scribe in other languages, and Spanish would be the logical first move in that direction. It’s not an easy task, but we’ll make an announcement as we get closer to that goal.
Can’t wait Brian! Thanks for the quick reply
#scribeforever
is there any discount available for scribeseo?
Not tried it but that short 1, 2, 3 video is brilliant.
The thing that puts me off buying is the ongoing payments.
Now if it was a one-off payment like the Genesis Pro Plus package… that would be different.