Customer Stories: Simone van den Berg of Simone’s Kitchen

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 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 Simone!

Simone, please tell us about the sites you have on Clariti

I currently have two sites on Clariti for my food blog, Simone’s Kitchen. My Dutch site simoneskitchen.nl has 2,526 posts on Clariti, and my English site insimoneskitchen.com has 912 posts on Clariti. 

You’ve been with Clariti since the early days. Why did you decide to start using Clariti?

I’ve been creating content for Simone’s Kitchen for 15+ years. When I started blogging in 2005, I didn’t even know what SEO was. In fact, I’m not sure it even existed back then! 

As a result, I spent the majority of those years without a structured system to manage or optimize my content. My website was gaining an enormous amount of posts, and I was losing track of what content existed on my site. I felt like I was lost in space. 

As I started learning more about SEO, I tried using Excel, Google Docs, and Google Analytics to organize my content, but they were all terrible systems. 

I heard about Clariti on the Food Blogger Pro Podcast in July 2021  (just a few months after they launched), and realized it was exactly what I needed.I was an early adopter using Clariti and it’s made a huge difference in my business

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

“Discovering Clariti changed everything for me.” 

Before using Clariti to manage my content, my websites were growing at a slow pace. The number of visitors per month was consistent, but not improving. I had a good grasp on which posts were performing best, but I had no clue which posts weren’t performing well or why.

Since using Clariti’s data to optimize my posts’ SEO, my website traffic has grown  400% in the past 12 months on my English site.

How did you first use Clariti to better optimize your content? 

I first focused my attention on posts that didn’t have any traffic in the last year. Aside from my recipe content, I was creating a lot of travel and photography content for my blog and I quickly realized that no one was reading this content, so I removed it.

This helped me focus on optimizing content that had the biggest potential to grow. 

First, I prioritized posts that had high traffic but hadn’t been updated in 5+ years. Then I shifted my attention to posts that had little traffic, but high keyword potential. 

For example, I had a post that celebrated my blog’s one year anniversary and featured a great lemon meringue recipe. I saw high keyword potential for lemon meringue, but it was barely mentioned in the content and wasn’t featured in the title. I updated the content to include lemon meringue as the target keyword, and now it’s one of my top-performing posts. 

What important insights have you gained about your content since using Clariti?

“80% of the posts I’ve optimized using Clariti have seen an increase in traffic.”

These traffic improvements made me realize how important it is to write with SEO in mind. I still have a lot of updating to do, but the results I’ve gotten with Clariti have been very motivating. 

What features of Clariti are your favorite? 

Search

I use the Search feature on the Explore Page the most. I like how I can type in a keyword like ‘ice cream’ and all my ice cream related posts come up. This helps me quickly find the posts I’m wanting to optimize and better organize my content. 

Labels

I also love using the Labels feature. 

Recently, I’ve added a Label for each month to simplify my to-do list. I use the Search feature to search for posts I want to update based on the upcoming season and label them according to the month I plan on updating them.  

I also use Labels to keep track of which updates I’ve made to older posts. For example, if I’ve updated the URL slug, I add a ‘republished’ label. Using Labels keeps my content organized and streamlines my workflow so I can focus on the most important tasks.

Keywords

I use the Keywords feature under the Performance Tab to see which keywords are ranking highest for each post. I can always tell it’s time to update a post when the keyword that comes up has nothing to do with what I’m trying to rank for (which is the case for a lot of my old content!).

This makes it easy to update the post and monitor to see if those updates improved the keyword ranking. It’s very satisfying to see the correlation between updated content and improved post performance. 

What results have you experienced since using Clariti? 

“Since using Clariti, my revenue has changed enormously. My RPM has gone from 6 dollars to above 20 dollars.”

I’ve doubled the revenue from my English site compared to the previous year. I attribute that to my website traffic growing 400% in the past 12 months, and I have Clariti to thank for that. 

What long-term goals are you hoping Clariti can help you achieve?

I want to increase the revenue I make with Simone’s Kitchen. I’m currently a food photographer by trade, and I’d like to spend less time doing that and more time focusing on my blog.

What does Clariti provide for you now that you didn’t have before?

Before using Clariti, my approach to managing content was completely random. I couldn’t track if the changes I was making were positively impacting my blog’s performance or not. Clariti gives me an overview of every post on my site so I understand which changes are effective, and which haven’t worked. 

Clariti took me from being in the dark about my blog post performance to having ‘clarity’ at every step of the process. I feel more focused creating, managing, and updating my content.

“I can’t imagine managing my blog now without Clariti.”

If you were to recommend Clariti to a fellow content creator, what would you say?

I’ve already recommended Clariti to other bloggers! Clariti makes life so much easier by combining the data you need to make better decisions for your blog.