Morningscore Review

Do we need another new SEO tool?

New SEO tools are popping up a lot lately.

Most of them are unknown and will stay that way, since they serve very niche needs or target a specific country.

But Morningscore, founded in 2018 in Denmark, is starting to pop on the radar more and more.

Morningscore is a gamified SEO tool that helps anyone make sense of SEO, regardless of their level of expertise or experience in the field.

So we were curious and decided to have a look.

So what does Morningscore offer?

On their website they claim to make SEO simpler, while still providing all the needed tools to get success with SEO. It’s labelled as an all-in-one tool.

Sounds familiar, but there is an unexpected ingredient:

Morningscore is designed like a computer game. This gamification is supposed to motivate you to get SEO work done and get more results.

We will dive into this and see if it actually works.

But first, let’s have a look at the company.

The Morningscore team

It’s a small team from Odense, Denmark that built Morningscore. I count 10 employees. They got funded by angel investors in 2018. They claim 800 paying customers in +100 countries and have some pretty big brands on there. Mostly from Europe.

Looking at their website or Youtube channel, this company looks oddly different.

The team wears silver space suits in their content. Like all the time.

And they seem refreshingly reachable as a team. The CEO emailed me on signup and answered quickly.

And it’s not often you see something like this on the frontpage of an SEO tool:

So in conclusion: a fast growing company, a little weird, but original brand. And for sure an open and transparent team.

But who are their customers?

I reached out to the CEO, Karsten Madsen, and asked him who they target as customers.

He tells me quite openly that they originally targeted SEO beginners, which are still a big part of their 800 customers, but they changed direction in 2022 because they saw that it was too hard and expensive to train beginners and keep them motivated.

“We now go for what we call “intermediates”. People who need help to grow, but do understand SEO fundamentals. Beginners are still very welcome. And we are probably one of the best tools to get someone into SEO. But we just have so many pro tools, that it makes more sense to target intermediates and agencies.”

I had to ask: “But how are you then relevant in a crowded market of SEO tools?”

“One example: Agencies come to us because they need to train new hires or interns. And they say our tool is the perfect training machine. And maybe more importantly: They tell us their clients understand Morningscore and the reports we provide help them close more sales.”

It does make sense, but is there real value to be had here?

In the following chapters I will present my test results and give you my own verdict

Signing up

Morningscore offers a 14 day trial. It’s nice to see that they don’t ask for a credit card.

And the gamification elements kick in right away.

After a quick signup process you are asked to complete your first “onboarding missions”.

Essentially tasks that get you set up. Like adding keywords and competitors.

After completing those, I level up and unlock new parts of the tool – cool!

The Morningscore metric

One of the first things I noticed is this “Morningscore” value on the dashboard:

They explain it like this:

So it’s a calculation that shows what your free organic traffic is worth. How much you save in Google Ads per month.

In my case fatrank.com had a big spike in Morningscore value. And Morningscore had found +4000 keywords automatically in the US market – similar to how Ahrefs and Semrush does it.

You can click on the keywords to see the full list:

Your keywords are then presented in a table with search volume, the rank on Google, the CPC of the keyword and the Morningscore value measured in USD.

I cross checked and saw that the data is pretty solid. Pretty much the same as Semrush.

I did not expect such quality from an upcoming tool to be honest.

It’s not perfect, but it definitely is precise enough to give me an overview of progress.

You can see the same keyword data for competitors. So this is a great way to quickly find keywords that your competitors rank for, that you should also focus on.

Rank tracker

Morningscore also has a rank tracker. It works similarly to other tools with daily rank updates (or on demand if you click a button).

It’s very neat and simple. Nothing wild or new to see here though. So don’t buy Morningscore if you need an advanced rank tracker.

One thing that was cool though, was this quick filtering here:

This way you can quickly switch between different views. Organize keywords into folders. Or organize keywords by the landing pages they rank on. Very useful!

There are 2 more tools on the keywords section. I won’t deep dive here, but I tested the keyword research tool and saw the amount and quality of results was pretty good.

It’s a little slow though – like 5-10 seconds per new search.

Link tools

If you are looking for heavy link building tools then you might be disappointed: Morningscore is definitely more simple than for example Ahrefs when it comes to link data.

The data quality itself is not the problem: Morningscore is partnering with Moz, who are a solid player in this space.

But you won’t get that many filters and exports to play with.

What you do get however, is a super overview of your and competitors’ links.

The new / lost links section is probably also one of the best visual overviews I have seen. It’s just simple and intuitive.

When it comes to classic link building tactics like checking which links competitors have, that I don’t, it’s easy to get the job done in Morningscore.

You simply add your competitor and check their links under the “all links” tab, and if there is no “add to mission” icon next to the link, it means I already have that link.

When you click the “add to mission” button the link will be an active task. Once the link is built, it will show up as a completed mission and give you XP to level up.

More about that later.

Health (onsite tool)

The health tool is a lot like in other all-in-one SEO tools. And then also completely different.

The overview looks like this:

Quite standard.

But then when you give into the action you get unique benefits.

If you scroll down you will see this:

This is a list of all the issues found on a site and which landingpages they appear on. Divided in 3 tabs.

So if you open one of them by clicking the “view all issues” button, it looks like this:

And from here you can open a popup that shows you the exact problem, but also a neat guide on how to fix it.

The cool thing is you can always scan that exact URL with the scan button. The scan will take like 10-20 seconds.

And if the problem gets resolved, you will get a green checkmark. Simple and nice.

Compared to tools like Screaming Frog for example, there are less health checks though. I count around 30 in Morningscore. I am for example missing more checks on duplicate content. But the essentials and some, are here.

Missions tool

The missions part of the tool is what sets Morningscore apart. Other SEO tools are doing task lists, and help you with suggestions, but none of them make it so simple and fun as Morningscore. The missions are tied to XP, so as you complete them, you also level up.

The mission suggestions in Morningscore are semi intelligent. I would say a beginner could improve their relevant traffic and overall SEO just with the help of these. But the suggestions are not perfect and you still need to think critically about which keywords you want to optimise.

As you complete missions, they will appear here:

You can also add your own missions:

I imagine this being relevant for agencies doing work for clients, and they want to set up goals or tasks that the client can follow.

You could for example set up a mission to get a specific link:

Or set up a mission to increase the rank of a keyword:

For some companies out there, I think these features could be really useful.

User management (and subaccounts)

The user management features in Morningscore are simple, but honestly better than I expected from a young tool like this.

The thing that surprised me the most was that Morningscore not only allow account sharing, they even encourage it.

They have a user role called “subaccount” that basically creates an account inside your subscription for any user you invite by email.

So as an agency you could for example resell access to your clients.

Conclusion

There are a lot of small features that I did not get to touch upon in this review, but I have shown you the features I deem the most important.

My overall impression is that Morningscore is a solid tool – especially for those who know a little SEO but are not experts. The guides and missions get you going in a great way.

The data quality is good. The keyword database seems big. The tool is fast. And the team behind is cool and approachable.

The cons I could see are mostly related to the depth of features and filtering of that data. Something like the links section is not comparable to Ahrefs or Semrush for example. So if you are into heavy duty link building, Morningscore is probably not enough.

For the majority of users though this tool might just hit a sweet spot between simple user interface and deep actionable data.

This is why my recommendation will simply be to test it out yourself with the 14 days free trial. You might love it. Or you might think it’s not enough.

In any case it is a solid product worth your test.

James Dooley

Entrepreneur

James Dooley is a British entrepreneur, SEO, investor, and philanthropist. James has built a huge Search Engine Optimization team that focus on organic SEO endeavours, including affiliate marketing, lead generation, as well as SEO services.