Coyle built MarketMuse so that content teams without data scientists could use the same kind of topic analysis that search engines use to judge whether a page covers its subject.
Jeff Coyle is a co-founder of MarketMuse, an AI content strategy company that tells writers and SEO teams which topics a page needs to cover to be useful and to rank. He is an Atlanta, Georgia, search marketer with more than 25 years in the field, and he served as MarketMuse's chief strategy officer until Siteimprove acquired it in 2024.
Seven Years at TechTarget
He earned a bachelor's degree in computer science from the Georgia Institute of Technology, according to his MarketMuse speaker page. He then spent seven years leading the Traffic, Search and Engagement team at TechTarget, a B2B technology publisher that studies how technology buyers consume content, before working as a marketing and B2B software consultant in Atlanta.
Consulting Through the Shift Away from Keywords
As a consultant in 2013 he was "living and breathing these problems with my clients every single day," he wrote in a Siteimprove post. He could see Google moving away from keywords and backlinks toward AI that judged pages for depth, authority and intent, yet the useful AI tools were open only to teams with technical skills or big budgets. He co-founded MarketMuse in 2015 to close that gap, pairing data scientists and engineers with content strategists and SEO experts.
MarketMuse analyzes a site's content against search results and suggests topics a page is missing, so writers know what to cover before they start. In an interview with Stratabeat, he described its topic models as a way to get SEO, editorial and subject-matter experts to agree on what a good page covers.
Selling MarketMuse to Siteimprove in 2024
Coyle has said MarketMuse hit a ceiling as a standalone tool. Marketers often treated it as something bolted onto the end of content production, and his goal of SEO at every stage of the funnel needed more than his team could build: "we just didn't have the capacity to build that." Siteimprove acquired MarketMuse in November 2024, and Coyle moved over with it to combine SEO with Siteimprove's accessibility, analytics and content strategy tools.
Personal Life
Coyle is based in Atlanta, Georgia. On the side he owns a beer brewery in Brunswick, Georgia, whose beers have won medals at the World Beer Cup.
