Customer Stories: Jessica Formicola of Savory Experiments

It’s no secret that we’re big fans of our Clariti users. We love catching up with them and getting a behind-the-scenes peek into how they organize and optimize their blog content — and use the data from Clariti to make clear decisions about their site. We thought you might be interested too, so we are sharing their stories right here on the blog.

Everyone…meet Jessica!

Jessica Formicola of Savory Experiments shows us how Clariti helps her make better business decisions faster—saving her time and money. Find out how Clariti can help you improve your blogging business like Jessica did!

Jessica, you’re a seasoned blogger who’s accomplished a lot. Please tell us about the site you have on Clariti. Do you have a specific niche?

I’m a former psychotherapist turned chef, cookbook author, and food blogger. Savory Experiments is about down-home comfort cooking—no frills or fancy ingredients, just easy-to-source items that create magic in the kitchen. We currently have over 2,000 posts on our site. 

What made you decide to try Clariti?

I was in a launch group for a similar tool that was supposed to be released but never came to fruition. So, I was already looking for a tool that would allow me to integrate all of my data. Clariti had a special promotion, so I decided to try it. I didn’t sign in and use it immediately, but once I started playing with it, I could immediately see how useful it was, and it’s only gotten better since then! They’ve added so many new features. It’s a really valuable tool! 

What was running your blog like before Clariti?

Before Clariti, keeping up with all of the data was impossible! 

I have thousands of posts, and the data changes every day…I couldn’t keep up with it. 

If you’re in Semrush, you can see that one day, you’re up 25%, and the next day, you’re down 15%. It would take two people working full-time to track the same amount of data in SEMRush that I can see at a glance with Clariti.

How does Clariti fit into your workflow and routine? What tasks do you focus on?

We use Clariti’s Labels to organize our posts by the month they were originally published. That’s how we divide all of the posts we have to work on throughout the year. 

Then, we run reports each month to see if we’ve lost or gained rankings — and to check for broken links or images with missing alt text. Lately, I’ve been checking Clariti several times a week to look at the data and update the blog posts that need it. 

How did you learn how to use Clariti?

I learned how to use Clariti through trial and error, just by spending time in it. Whenever a new feature comes out, I’m like, “Oh, what’s this?” and I experiment with it. I remember the day all the data popped up, and I was like, “Wow, look at that!”

How has using Clariti benefited your business? What does Clariti provide for you now that you didn’t have before?

Now that I don’t have to search for the data about how my posts are performing, I can make decisions much faster. 

Instead of having to click in and out of various apps or tabs in my browser, I can see everything at a glance and have tailored my Clariti searches to show me exactly what I’m looking for that day. 

If we see a post is getting fewer than 2,000 views a year, Clariti helps us decide whether there’s a better keyword for it, if we want to try updating it, or if we want to delete it.

I love how we can add events and notes to the analytics on the overview tab of the content details page. Every time something’s updated, we add a note so we can come back later and easily see if what we did directly impacted that post’s performance. 

Clariti has saved me the most money by allowing me to track the posts my SEO team worked on. I was spending between $25,000 and $30,000 a year on SEO services. However, with Clariti, I saw that the SEO team’s work wasn’t having a significant impact on performance results, so I was able to stop their services (and save a lot of money).

Clariti also helps me better manage my internal team’s resources. We can look at the posts we’ve updated and see how they performed. I like to look at who did the updating and who wrote it, and whether one person’s content performs better than another’s content. Then I ask myself, what’s the difference? How is it written differently? Is the POV different? I analyze several factors. Then we’re able to take what’s working and apply it to updates across our posts.

What’s your favorite Clariti feature? And how has that helped you the most?

The Labels feature is my favorite and the one I use the most. We use Labels to divide our work for the year and for special projects. 

Right now, we’re going through all our posts with low comments and applying a Label that says “Needs comments” on them. Then we know to focus our attention on marketing those posts and asking our readers to engage with them in a really specific way.

Once a post is updated or we’ve received the number of comments we’d like, we delete the Label to “reset” our list of to-dos. It’s a clear way to keep track of everything!

Would you recommend Clariti? If so, who would be a good fit to use it?

Yes! I definitely recommend Clariti. I’ve already been recommending it to members of my mastermind group. 

Clariti is a great tool to help content creators who struggle with organization to get organized. It’s also great for Type A content creators, like me, who love data and organization. If you want to take your blogging to the next level, Clariti is a great place to start!