Can Tools Like Clearscope, MarketMuse and Surfer Hurt SEO?

The SEO world is awash with tools ranging from simple automation and tiny task apps to huge SEO power suites and platforms meant to do everything. Some of these tools are very good at what they do and can instantly help you level up your SEO game to rank better and pull in more traffic. Others are powerful but have the potential to backfire if you use them incorrectly. Still others are essentially weaponized spam or negative techniques that violate the rules, with the assumption being that you hit them hard, gain short-term benefits, and abandon them when you no longer need them.

Tools like Clearscope, MarketMuse, and Surfer SEO fall somewhere in this spectrum. The question is, are they an unmitigated good, or can they hurt your SEO? Let’s talk about it because the answer might surprise you.

What Do Tools like Clearscope and MarketMuse Do?

Clearscope, MarketMuse, Surfer SEO, and a handful of similar tools are all effectively the same thing, though they have different sets of secondary functions, algorithms, and features.

The task they perform is an analysis of your content. Through the use of Natural Language Processing (and now, with modern tools, Large Language Model processing), these tools can analyze a piece of text. They can figure out what that text is about, and use their built-in rules and understanding of both language and SEO to recommend changes to make.

If you’ve ever used Grammarly, it’s a bit like that, except entirely different. Where Grammarly processes your writing against the rules about grammar and spelling, Clearscope and the like process your writing against the rules about SEO and keyword usage.

There’s a lot that goes into how these tools work. I have a deeper dive into it over in this post if you’re interested.

On a practical level, the way the tools work is that you plug in your content, and they analyze it. Then, they recommend places where you can insert keywords, either your primary keyword or some secondary keywords that are related, and could help you rank for the topic across different keywords.

Since Google has a lot of language analysis built into their algorithm, the idea is that by optimizing your content to be more clearly about your topic, you can cover all of your bases, and Google will naturally recommend you more.

Using them in practice is pretty easy. It’s basically like having a Google Docs window with a sidebar that shows you tips on where you could put keywords and keyword phrases, an estimate of how often you should probably have those keywords in your piece, and where you are according to those best practices.

Clearscope, MarketMuse, Surfer SEO, and other similar platforms all work in more or less the same way, though the specific keywords they pick to recommend, the specific frequencies, and the locations in your piece they would suggest adding them can all vary. Similarly, all the secondary features – readability analysis, research and outlining tools, generative AI nonsense, project management, and all that stuff varies as well.

Do These Tools Work?

Before getting into whether or not the tools can hurt your SEO, it’s worth stepping back and asking: do they even work in the first place?

I can say that, when used properly, they work quite well. With my three categories in the intro, I would put them in the double-edged sword category, for reasons I’ll get into later, though.

I’ve personally tried out all of these platforms and have had some decent results with all of them. Adding more keywords can help your content rank for those keywords, and in some cases, they’ve helped me add keywords where I otherwise didn’t think to mention them, even though it was relevant to do so.

Now and then, they even recommend a secondary keyword I didn’t think about, but one that has enough search volume to be worth adding and using.

Can SEO Tools Like Clearscope Hurt Your SEO?

The answer here is yes, for a couple of reasons. Let’s go through them individually.

Reason #1: You Risk Keyword Stuffing

The first is that they give you guidelines, but you have to know what to do with those guidelines. If you just blindly accept everything they recommend, you’re going to go above and beyond any reasonable keyword density.

If you’re familiar with basic SEO rules, you may have heard of keyword stuffing. In the past, keyword stuffing was something you would hide on a page, like adding 200 keywords to a footer way beyond where anyone would ever scroll down to. Some people even went another step further and would hide the keywords behind images, using text colors that matched background colors, or setting it to size 1 font so it looked like a line.

Keyword stuffing was a way to exploit a much, much simpler version of Google’s search algorithms long before they had thought of the idea of natural language processing. It was a very obvious way to try to gain an advantage over people who didn’t know how the system worked, and it’s no surprise that Google eventually started penalizing and deindexing sites that did it.

Then came the concept of ideal keyword density, where SEO pros decided there was some ideal magical number of times you had to mention a keyword for it to be picked up properly and earn you your ranking. I’ve always been a little skeptical about whether or not keyword density did anything or if it was just a matter of being clear about your subject as opposed to not.

I’m honestly still amazed plugins like Yoast and Rank Math include keyword density metrics when Google confirmed that it’s a myth. 

Even things like keyword density were basically in-text keyword stuffing, where keywords would be awkwardly shoved into paragraphs or sentences where they didn’t really belong. It stood out like a sore thumb and sucked from a reader’s perspective.

What the ideal keyword density was, of course, was a moving target. Specific numbers never held up for long, whether it was different people doing different case studies showing different numbers, Google’s algorithm updates changing the game, or whatever you want. The point being, it was never very meaningful.

And, of course, that brings us to today, where we have advance language analysis, NLP, and LLM data centers examining how words relate to one another, providing a much more comprehensive picture of it all, and offering more nuanced suggestions, all with the same end goal in mind: to rank better, because our robots know what their robots want you to want.

So, wait, how is all of that a reason why these tools could hurt your SEO? Well, just adding more keywords without really paying attention to how they work in content or context can lead to bad keyword usage, keyword stuffing, and other problems.

And, since many of these suggestions are fueled by AI these days, it can also end up getting your content to trip AI detectors. While that’s not a negative for SEO yet, it might be in the future, and you always want to try to future-proof your content when you can.

Reason #2: Google Changes the Game

All of this brings me to the second reason why these tools can hurt you, which is that Google can tell when you’re probably using them, and they can freely change the rules to make it worse to use them.

Google has, for years now, been pushing their core goal as “create content for users, not for the search engines.” The majority of their SEO rules come down to penalizing things that sacrifice user experience or content quality in favor of playing up some element of the search algorithms.

When you write a good piece of content with an audience in mind, that’s great. When you then take that piece of content and run it through a tool that, by definition, changes what you wrote – changes your voice, changes your language choice, changes your use of keywords – what is the goal? The goal is to reach more people, yes, but the real goal is to get the search robots to think your content is better for reaching those people.

In other words, those are changes made for the robots, not for the people reading your content.

That’s why you have to be very careful with using tools like these. You have to use them tactfully, injecting only the keywords that are most useful and most relevant, and ignoring suggestions when you don’t think they’re meaningful or useful to your audience and their understanding of the content.

To an extent, tools like MarketMuse and Clearscope try to help you with this. That’s why they give you acceptable ranges for the keywords they recommend and rank keywords by how useful they are according to various search metrics.

That might help you, but does it help everyone? The thing about Google is that they can see not just what you’re doing but what millions of people are doing across millions of websites. What you might view as a tactful, subtle use of enhanced keywords, Google sees hundreds of thousands of people doing in the exact same way. There’s even a chance that they choose to try out the services themselves, to reverse-engineer them and see what they’re recommending, and judge whether or not it’s actually valuable or just another attempt to exploit their algorithms.

This isn’t really a hypothetical from me, either.

I’ve made use of these tools. I’ve seen firsthand how a post that ranked alright, when edited to have more useful keywords injected into them, suddenly rose in the rankings with no other real changes.

I’ve also seen firsthand how recent Google updates, targeting behaviors aimed at the search engines and the abuse of AI tools for SEO, have stripped some of that ranking and traffic right out of those posts. It’s been a rough last six months, let me tell you!

Do I think that Google is actively targeting these services and the recommendations they give you? Not really, no. Do I think they’re tightening their rules on keyword injection and abuse, AI tools, and prioritizing the algorithms over the people? Yes – why wouldn’t they?

The Secret Third Reason

The secret third reason why these tools can hurt your SEO is one I’m unfortunately starting to see more and more, and is one that comes up with a lot of tools, both in and out of SEO. In SEO, it’s especially prevalent with AI.

See if you’ve heard this one before:

“If you don’t know how to do it yourself, you’ll never know if your tool is doing it wrong.”

Until you know how keywords should be used, can you trust what the app tells you? Maybe, maybe not; you have no way of knowing. It’s just like generative AI; you can’t fact-check something you have no experience in.

Sure, people have used this kind of criticism against everything. “You won’t have a calculator everywhere you go,” they said in grade school, never anticipating that all of us would carry a calculator every day built into our phones.

The point is that until you know how to create good content and what good content looks like, using a tool to do it for you just provides something, and you don’t know if it’s good or not. And, if it’s penalized later, you won’t know why.

Should You Use SEO Tools or Not?

With this in mind, is it safe to use these tools? Should you avoid them? If you want to use them, how do you do it safely?

I think they’re a little risky, but so are a lot of other SEO tools out there. Overstuffing image alt text can cause problems, getting the wrong backlinks can cause problems, there are tons of ways you can shoot yourself in the foot with an otherwise valuable tool.

Don’t avoid them because there’s a risk. If you want to avoid them, do it because they can be expensive, and there are probably a dozen other things you could spend that money on for a larger impact.

If you’re a beginner, and all you know is that SEO pros swear by these tools, let me be the first to say that we do that about everything. Just because pros use it doesn’t mean it’s good for beginners. Learn your way around content production first, figure out what keyword usage should be like, and then consider using a tool to help optimize it later.

If you know what you’re doing, go ahead and use them. They can give you suggestions, and you can decide if they’re worth taking or not. The key is to know when to add that keyword and when it would be more beneficial for the clarity or purpose of your post to leave it out.

As long as you’re making a good-faith attempt at keeping your content focused on your audience, you’ll be fine. Maybe you lose a bit of value you would otherwise get from adding a couple of extra keywords, but on the other hand, you won’t risk losing value because you overdid it.

I personally would rather grow a little more slowly than have to overcome penalties every time Google wants to tighten the screws.

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