March 9, 2010Scribe Wordpress Plugin: a review
As a copywriter, I often get asked to make my work SEO compliant. In short, people are relying on me to know what works in terms of SEO — where should keywords go, and how often should they be repeated? Until now, I’ve relied more or less on a working knowledge of search engine optimization best practices I’ve learned from working with web designers, bloggers and other copywriters. This week, I’ve started using Scribe — a Wordpress SEO plugin developed and promoted by Brian Clark of Copyblogger.
What does it do?
In short, Scribe is an SEO analysis tool that provides a full report on a Wordpress post or page once you’ve written it. So rather than suggesting that you build a page around a set of keywords, Scribe analyses you writing and tells you how search engines will see it — indexing keywords based on position and frequency, rather than relying on you inputting keywords for it to analyse.
This review gets a 95% score for SEO purposes!
Scribe’s unique approach might take a few passes to get your head round. I analysed the same page seven times making minor tweaks so I could see how it worked. And admittedly, some of it still doesn’t make sense to me. When looking at my own marketing, I changed the page so that “freelance copywriter” appeared as a keyword more often than any other phrase. Yet it still insisted words like “creative” and “London” were more important. Maybe I haven’t got the hang of it yet, but therein lies the biggest problem. It’s a subscription service and you only get so many reports per month.
The flaw: A limited subscription model
Yes, it’s relatively cheap — $27 will buy you 30 reports a month, but $97 will buy you 300. At a dollar a report, it’s pretty steep. But if you’re a professional buying in bulk, 30 cents seems like a good deal considering the quality and depth of the analysis Scribe provides you — at first. But how much value will does Scribe really give you?
I used up most of my ten free tries making very, very minor tweaks to my copy. Infuriatingly, Scribe charges per report, not per page — so even though I was perhaps only changing a word at a time, it still counted as another report. So it’s probably better to get value for money by writing two or three very different versions of your post, and comparing those. But copywriting can often be a tweak-by-tweak process, especially when the client gets involved. Personally, I’d be a lot happier seeing an unlimited reporting option — or are the folks behind Scribe really trying to tell me that it costs them nearly 30 cents every time I request a report? I’m willing to bet that the marginal cost of each additional report is next to nothing.
OK, so I’d have to write one blogpost a day and analyse each one ten times to run out of pre-paid reports, but I can imagine quite a few pro bloggers doing just that, if they’re ‘tweakers’ like me.
I guess this is a very back-handed endorsement of Scribe.
The Scribe SEO plugin is easy to use, valuable, and I can see myself using it, a lot. There’s really nothing else like it on the market at the moment, and a web version and MS Word version are on their way. But the pay model doesn’t sit well with a tweak-by-tweak approach to writing. Which is, obviously, the best way to learn.
I think Pat O’Brien’s review of Scribe says it best:
“I think the intro price [$27 for 300 reports] was great, but the full price may be a bit much for some. But that’s true about a lot of products.”
I’ve got some very keyword heavy blogposts to write this month for some of my clients, blogposts that are purely for SEO optimization purposes. I still say that original content and linkbuilding should usually come first when blogging, with on-page SEO coming a distant second. SEO copy frequently looks lifeless and clumsy. Scribe is better, because it analyses your copy after it’s written. But it’s still more important to write copy that actual people, not robots, will read.
I’ll be using Scribe to double-check my posts this month. But as a pro blogger, I’m scoring 95% first time — so how much use is this software going to be to me in the long term?
Scribe wins bonus points for
- being very user friendly and easy to set up
- showing you how a search engine is likely to see your page
- providing reports in plain English, not tech-speak
- offering helpful suggestions to improve your copy, title and meta tags
but
- it may be hard for beginners to understand why certain changes improve or worsen SEO
- …without requesting a lot of reports with only minor changes
- …which cost at least thirty cents a time.
- …and pro users already skilled at SEO best practices might not learn anything new.
Is it a game changer? Probably not.
Is it good for intermediate users? Yes.
Is it worth the price? That’s for you to decide.