Scribe SEO Review

Scribe SEO is a wordpress plugin/service which analyzes your blog posts and tries to help you improve your posts on-page SEO. Since I’m a SEO guy, I thought it would be interesting to take it for a spin and try it out on this blog. Does Scribe SEO actually work? Well lets find out…

Scribe SEO comes in a couple of flavors. There’s a web based version, and then a plugin which works with WordPress. In this Scribe SEO review I tested out the WordPress version which I installed on this blog.

So to try out Scribe SEO, I decided to first have it analyze some of my existing posts. I first ran it on my Traffic Dashboard Review, since it already ranks pretty well.

In order for Scribe SEO to analyze your content, you need to have a Title Tag, Meta Description and some content. Since I’m using Thesis Theme, I had my post specific title tag and meta description all ready to go and I just hit Analyze. After waiting a few moments, the Scribe Content Analysis box popped up.

As you can see, my post got a score of 87% which seemed pretty good.

Looking at the Analysis and Recommendations, most of them seemed pretty reasonable. Although I had never really heard of having a minimum number of links in the body of my posts (Scribe SEO recommends 1 link for every 120 words). Still, you can do pretty much the same thing with a free copy of Traffic Travis and the Page Analysis module.

Next I took a look at the Keyword Analysis tab. I liked the fact that it determined that ‘traffic dashboard’ was my primary keyword. But it also identified ‘traffic’ as another keyword. Which I can understand I suppose, but it’s too general a term to really be useful to me SEO wise. Most of the other keywords it found were like that as well, except for maybe ‘kim roach’ which I might be able to optimize my post better for.

The Change Keywords tab is where Scribe SEO recommends what actions you need to take to make the keywords that it found in the previous tab more relevent. I could see it being useful if it had actually found some interesting keywords, but since it didn’t in this case, it wasn’t very helpful.

The Alternate Keywords tab shows you keyword suggestions based on the keywords found earlier. It didn’t suggest any additional keywords I felt I could use, so I didn’t find it too helpful.

The Tags tab is kind of cool. I’m sometimes too lazy to think up all the relevent tags in my posts, and having tags suggested for me would definitely be useful. Not all the tags Scribe SEO found were relevant, but there were some listed that I could definitely use.

Finally, there’s a SERP tab which shows how your listing will look in the search results. Which is fine, but nothing noteworthy.

Scribe also has built-in Keyword Research functionality as well. You can type in a keyword and it will suggest additional keywords for you, along with their annual search volume. I’m really not sure how much value add there is to this, as you can use the free Google Keyword tool to do the same thing.

Just in case this was a one-off result, I had Scribe analyze some of my other posts. Unfortunately, I was continually underwhelmed with the results. Would it work better in a non-IM niche? Maybe. The main problem I think is the keyword results it returns. I just don’t think it’s good enough to make any of the analysis it provides that useful. And the bits of interesting info it does return (like SEO score) can be replicated by other free programs like Traffic Travis.

Coupled with the fact that it is a monthly paid service, I don’t think I can really recommend using Scribe SEO. Download a free copy of Traffic Travis instead and build links using one of these link building services. That’s the real secret to top search engine rankings.

Tagged as: Scribe SEO, Scribe SEO bonus, Scribe SEO review