Graphite Scales AEO + SEO Wins with Clearscope

Graphite is one of the world’s top boutique growth agencies. Focused on AEO and SEO content strategies, it builds scalable growth engines for consumer tech companies, including household names like OpenAI, Reddit, Robinhood, and Webflow.

Unlike many AEO + SEO agencies focused on quantity over quality, Graphite takes a human-centered approach to content. It prioritizes editorial SEO to fuel long-term growth, creating thoughtful and engaging written content with clients’ audiences in mind.

A key part of the team’s editorial process involves Clearscope. In fact, Graphite’s content experts are long-time Clearscope users. In an interview with business writer Lenny Rachitsky, founder and CEO Ethan Smith even named Clearscope as one of his essential AEO + SEO tools.

Keep reading to learn how and why Graphite relies on Clearscope to deliver more visibility.

What Graphite does—and how Clearscope helps it succeed

Ainoa Lander first joined Graphite in November 2020. At the time, the company had no more than 15 people, with just two people on the content team. Now Graphite’s Director of Editorial and Content Operations, she’s seen the agency grow to more than 130 people.

And ever since Ainoa can remember, Clearscope has always been a part of Graphite’s content workflow.

Graphite supports all of its clients by developing comprehensive SEO strategies, although for some, it also creates content on their behalf. In this way, its clientele can be divided into two categories: those who use its full-service offerings and those who use only its strategic expertise.

For its full-service clients, Graphite’s writing and editing team uses Clearscope to produce optimized content. Since they get a polished final product, full-service clients don’t see the behind-the-scenes work that involves Clearscope.

“What they see is quality articles coming their way that have been produced with the support of Clearscope,” Ainoa says.

For clients who prefer to keep their writing in-house, Graphite delivers comprehensive content briefs. The briefs include details like headline ideas, a suggested content outline, secondary topics, and a link to a Clearscope report.

“Since our end product to them is the content brief, it’s kind of unsettling because we don’t have control over the end product—the actual content,” Ainoa admits. “But Clearscope helps make sure that our clients have support during the writing process and gives us some verification that our strategy will be followed as best as possible.”

In other words, since the content briefs include Clearscope reports, even clients who don’t rely on Graphite for content creation can still take advantage of Clearscope’s optimization insights.

Client successes powered by Clearscope’s support

Graphite boasts an impressive track record of success for its clients. With all data sourced from Ahrefs, here are a few of the team’s most noteworthy achievements:

• Webflow: In just one year, from August 2022 to August 2023, Graphite helped increase Webflow's organic traffic by over 200,000 additional visitors per month.

• Masterclass: Graphite laid the groundwork for Masterclass's SEO strategy, growing it from zero to a staggering 570,000 visitors per month within two years.

• Betterup: Like Masterclass, Graphite also built BetterUp’s content strategy from the ground up. Thanks to Graphite, BetterUp’s organic traffic has grown to 4 million visitors per month in less than three years.

Clearscope has played an important role for each of these successes.

“Every single article that comes out of our writing agency, and every single article that comes out of our client’s content strategy is optimized with Clearscope,” Ainoa says.

In 2023 Q3, that amounted to roughly 740 articles and 2,500 content briefs for more than a dozen clients.

The Clearscope features Graphite’s content machine relies on

As Director of Editorial and Content Operations, Ainoa focuses on ensuring that Graphite’s content machine runs smoothly. She breaks it down into four key parts:

• First, Graphite’s strategists conduct SEO research and develop their clients’ overarching SEO strategies.

• The content team then brings those strategies to life, honing in on specific content topics for each client. They also create content briefs with guidelines tailored to a client’s brand and aligned with their respective strategy. Clients creating content in-house receive the briefs, complete with a Clearscope report link.

• For full-service clients, Graphite’s editorial team makes up the third leg of its content production process. Using the content briefs, writers and editors create optimized content with the support of Clearscope.

• Finally, the content makes its way over to Graphite’s content management team, who publishes it for full-service clients.

“Clearscope is so natural to us,” Ainoa says. “It's very embedded into our workflow and is just part of our overall training and processes.”

For example, one of Graphite’s editors, Anabelle Zaluski, shares how she regularly uses Clearscope’s “unused” tab and the “examples” feature to find out what extra detail could boost an article further.

Graphite content specialist Valeria Flores agrees, and adds that Clearscope’s word count, content grade, and research tab are also crucial. In charge of creating content briefs, Valeria explains that these features help shape the recommendations included in Graphite’s briefs.

As a seamless piece of Graphite’s workflow, it’s hard to say what the agency’s day-to-day operations would look like without Clearscope.

“If we didn't have Clearscope, I would imagine us missing big opportunities to either rank or cover all the ground we need to make an article successful,” Ainoa says. For her team, Clearscope provides helpful verification that a piece of content is fully optimized—crucial for team members who don’t have the same SEO background as their in-house specialists.

Clearscope helps agencies deliver premium-quality work

Since its inception, Graphite has relied on Clearscope to deliver top-tier SEO content and strategy—and for good reason. According to Ainoa, the tool is so intuitive and easy to use that you don't need to have a strong SEO background to reap its benefits.

“Clearscope gives our writers and editors that edge to overcome gaps in SEO or article-enhancing that they don't have,” she shares.

For content agencies like Graphite, finding the right tools is paramount to delivering meaningful long-term results and creating lasting client relationships. Poor SEO tools make for clunky workflows and hurt content quality, ultimately jeopardizing your bottom line.

That’s where Clearscope comes in. Clearscope can not only help scale your content production but also amplify your company’s online presence. Uncover valuable keyword opportunities, write SEO-optimized content, and track content health with Clearscope.

You can create an account today or request a personalized demo to learn more about Clearscope and how you can leverage our platform in your SEO strategies. We’re happy to show you around and answer your questions.