40% Rise in Organic Traffic in Four Months

A 40% increase in traffic is a tall order for any marketing team. But the sales CRM tool Close met and exceeded that goal in four months with the help of Clearscope.

When Ryan Robinson joined Close as Head of Content in May 2022, his first task was turning the company's traffic around. The goal was a 40% increase in organic traffic by the end of November 2022. An ambitious goal for any company.

The immediate challenge for Ryan and the Close content team was to develop a system for pruning and refreshing their vast library of content. And to do it at scale.

With Clearscope's suite of SEO tools, Close exceeded its goal. They achieved a 40% rise in organic traffic in four months.

And this is how they did it.

Turning a vast, outdated content library into A++ content

In the past, the content team at Close prioritized creating new content and rarely updated articles. As a result, when Ryan joined Close's content team, many of the company's 1,200 blog articles were long overdue for an update.

Ryan and the team tackled Clearscope with a rewrite of an article on cold email templates. It was one of their highest-traffic posts on Close.com. And the article hadn't been updated in years because they didn’t want to lose 600 keywords.

After running a Clearscope Report, Ryan discovered the article had a C+ content grade score. Proof that the article was due for an update.

"The Clearscope Report helped us to not just rank higher for that main seed keyword," explains Ryan. "But also to pick up a huge amount of traffic from terms that we previously didn't even know we should even be ranking for.”

Ryan and his content team got the article up to an A++ score. Within a month of its update, it bounced between the top two positions for the main seed keyword. Not only did it move up from its sixth-ranked position, but it also picked up more keywords—ranking for up to 2,000 keywords instead of its previous 600.

The Clearscope report provides an easy-to-interpret letter grade based on content relevance and comprehensiveness. This grading feature has ensured that the team creates nothing but A++ content.

"We saw a shocking amount of C- content when we started updating," explains Ryan. "So now we aim to get an A++ on everything before we publish. Not only because we want to give it the best shot at ranking highly, but also so that hopefully we won't have to come back and update it for a couple more months."

Additionally, Clearscope's integration with Google Docs has created a collaborative environment that enables Close's writers and editors to collaborate to produce high-quality content.

In the past, articles that Ryan received from freelance writers would receive a B- or B+ score whenever he plugged them into Clearscope. He'd have to spend a lot of time afterward editing the articles to get them to an A++ score. To remove this roadblock, Ryan now connects the Clearscope Report to the Google Doc he shares with a freelance writer.

The writer drafts the article in the document and uses the built-in report as a guiding tool. By the time the article is delivered, it's already at an A++ score. This shaved hours off the editing process and prevented Ryan’s team from doing duplicate work.

Using the Content Inventory feature to keep content current

Another challenge with having a large library of content is the time and effort required to ensure articles remain up-to-date, relevant, and competitive. Clearscope's Content Inventory feature has solved this problem by helping the content team develop a process for staying on top of article updates.

This feature maintains an index of content they’ve published. Ryan and his team added the pages they’d like tracked with up to three search queries per page. Clearscope monitors the Content Grade scores for each page's queries and updates the score monthly.

"Honestly, the Content Inventory feature is the one I'm most pumped about. Without a system like this, I wouldn't have flagged an update for an article for three months," says Ryan. "But now, maybe a month after an update is published, if there's any decline in our score, we'll revisit the article to help it stay competitive."

Additionally, Ryan used the Clearscope Report to track specific articles and see if any adjustments were needed. For example, he's updated the cold email templates article several times over the past few months based on results from the report.

"I inject additional keyword phrases in the article when something new comes up in the report," he adds. "It's a pretty hands-on process, but based on how well the article has performed, man, it's so worth it."

Interested in Creating A++ Content with Clearscope?

Creating A++ content is driven by a careful balance between art and science. On the art side, you need the creative chops to develop content that hooks and engages people.

On the more technical science side, you need a powerful tool that helps boost your search engine results and increase organic traffic or your number of conversions.

Clearscope breaks down the complex science of content optimization to make it simple and user-friendly.

The tool fits seamlessly into your content management workflow with its shareable report links, Google Docs, and WordPress integrations.

Start creating A++ content with Clearscope by creating an account or requesting a demo.