Customer Stories: Jenna Arend of Pinch Of Yum

It’s no secret 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 their blog content. We thought you might be interested too, so we are sharing their stories right here on the blog.

Everyone… meet Jenna!

Jenna, please tell us about the site you have on Clariti. Do you have a specific niche?

I’m the Communications Manager at Pinch of Yum, a food and lifestyle blog where we share fresh, flavorful, (mostly) healthy recipes that we love to make and eat in our real, actual, everyday life. The goal is to inspire people with food that is both approachable AND exciting.

Pinch of Yum is part of the TinyBit family (which includes Pinch of Yum, Food Blogger Pro, Curbly, and Clariti).

What’s the number one way Clariti has helped you in your blog so far in its content management?

Clariti has helped us in our blog’s content management, optimization, and collaboration with our team. With Clariti, we can actively manage and improve our content, making our workflow more efficient and streamlined.

“Clariti has made us able to focus on what’s important — making our content fun, helpful, efficient, and simple for our readers. It does the work of organizing our content so that we can do the work of making it even better, whether that’s optimizing a post or making it more accessible.”

What is the primary way you use Clariti at Pinch of Yum?

So for us, we use Clariti for team collaboration and project management. It serves as our go-to tool for optimizing our content through quarterly projects — working on post updates in advance of each season.  It’s really important for us to have updated content our readers enjoy and that ranks on Google.

How do you approach doing quarterly content update projects? 

We take a proactive approach to our quarterly projects by looking ahead to the next season. For example, during February and March, we focus on optimizing our content for the upcoming summer. If we notice a decline in traffic or rankings, we have an exhaustive checklist of optimization tasks that we go through for each of those posts. We then track their performance over time to assess the impact of our optimizations.

By dividing tasks among team members, we make sure we get things done efficiently and stay organized.

What did your content management process look like before?

Before Clariti, our content updates were a lot more reactionary — we’d be updating content during the season we’re in, which isn’t great for actually capturing that traffic. Now we plan ahead!

Previously, we had created a “Post Log” on a Google Sheet and manually entered data about every single post we’ve ever made. Then we would create sub-spreadsheets or multiple columns on the Post Log to track all of the work that we wanted to accomplish.

Pinch of Yum has over 1600 blog posts, so it was a LOT to track.

Now with Clariti, we have a centralized platform that houses our content portfolio and streamlines our workflow for content updates. We can easily filter out posts that require attention and convert them into “projects” with to-do lists with steps that need to be completed to improve each post. This feature of Clariti saves us time and eliminates the need for multiple spreadsheets.

Why did you go looking for a different way to manage your blog content?

We were tired of manually tracking things in a spreadsheet — it was prone to error and mundane to keep updated. We wanted something that would automatically sync our site metadata and help us group together posts that we wanted to take action on.

We also wanted a way to quickly filter our content based on that metadata. For example, we wanted to quickly be able to see all our posts and pages that were missing alt text.

What are your favorite features of Clariti?

My favorite features of Clariti are the projects and the automated timeline. 

The projects feature allows me to effectively manage tasks and keep the team on track. Once we create a project — made up of individual to-dos — we can use this as a template and add more things to it as needed. We can apply the project to any group of posts, making it easy for us to take action on each blog post step-by-step (and not forgetting where we left off!).

Projects are something that you can create once, edit as needed, then duplicate (like we do each quarter) and apply to a new batch of posts. This means we’re not starting from scratch every time we do a round of updates!

The automated timeline eliminates the need for manual tracking and note-taking. 

I no longer need to manually make a note when we’ve updated or changed something in a post. Instead, Clariti’s automated timeline tracks our “finished’ date when project tasks are checked off, meaning when I come back to review a post’s performance, I know exactly what changes have been made and when.

How has Clariti changed the way you manage your blog content?

Clariti has transformed our content management process. 

It automates our content management and the need for cumbersome spreadsheets. It provides a clear overview of our content and categories, making tracking and optimizing our blog posts on Pinch of Yum much simpler.

Now, with Clariti, we save significant time and effort. We can easily filter and reference specific elements like what posts are missing alt text or performed well last season — and then we can just make a project and apply it to that group of posts and work our way through updating each post over time.

What is the core value that Clariti helps you achieve?

Clariti helps us achieve our core value of sharing content that is efficient, helpful, and interesting to our readers. 

By optimizing our posts based on user queries and frequently asked questions, we can provide valuable solutions that align with both Google’s search intent and our readers’ expectations. Clariti supports this goal by facilitating collaboration and organization, allowing us to create content that satisfies search intent while delivering a great user experience.

How did you learn to use Clariti?

I’ve spent time exploring the platform and experimenting with its capabilities. The ongoing support from the Clariti team has been invaluable in helping me fully utilize Clariti for our content management needs.

What are the key takeaways or insights you’ve learned about your content since using Clariti?

We can’t measure what we don’t track. 

Clariti has made us realize the importance of actively measuring and tracking our content’s performance over time. 

Previously, we would optimize a post and consider it done, but now we track changes in rankings and traffic at various intervals, such as 30 days, 60 days, and even a year later. This tracking helps us see the impact of our optimizations and make informed decisions. Clariti has shifted our focus from just doing the work (of making random updates) to actively measuring and improving our content.
Clariti has made it easier to track and optimize our blog posts, shifting our focus from reactive adjustments to proactive content management — which has resulted in more consistent improvements in traffic to the site and remaining competitive for certain keywords.