SpareFoot Accelerates SEO Projects By Six Months With ClarityAutomate

When SpareFoot’s SEO team encountered roadblocks that prevented the execution of SEO tasks, they relied on ClarityAutomate to reach success at scale without developer support.

With so many performance growth opportunities, their SEO team operates with agility to increase revenue, but they are especially focused on activities that have known ROI or impact.

Each quarter, the roadmap and resources are predefined, so when new opportunities are identified, there is little room in the dev queue to prioritize them. 

SpareFoot’s SEO team must provide business justification to accommodate new projects - which is difficult to do when those ideas are hypotheses without validation.

The Biggest Roadblock to SEO Success: Resource and Technology Gap

“The biggest roadblock to the success of our SEO strategy is the ability to
quickly get UX and content optimizations implemented. Because of this,
it sometimes feels like we are implementing more reactive changes rather than
proactive optimizations to stay ahead of our competitors and industry.”
- Meredith Raico, SEO Director, Sparefoot

The SpareFoot SEO team, led by SEO Director Meredith Raico, was unable to act on new opportunities without advanced notice and testing, so it could take weeks or months to see her team’s work implemented on the site.

“As a marketplace team, we scope out priorities a year in advance,” Meredith said. “We already know generally what the priorities will be across each team for each quarter of the year.”

The projects that get prioritized in SpareFoot’s SEO roadmap have a clear ROI and tangible results, which often leads to hesitation to disrupt the dev queue.

“If I have something on the fly that I find as an opportunity or potentially something that we need to respond to, I'm looking at three-to-six months to actually get work implemented,” Meredith said.

“Even small updates in aggregate that could have a big impact still require proof of concept.”

So, when a Google algorithm update threatened performance, SpareFoot needed to act quickly to protect their organic search traffic, click-through rate, and ultimately their ROI without having to rely on their dev team—an option that could delay action for up to six months.

Solution: A Framework for Rapid Execution of SEO Changes

“ClarityAutomate allowed us to prove the value of (optimization) tasks
and implement them in a very short amount of time.”
- Meredith Raico, SEO Director, Sparefoot

As an SEO, Meredith knew that the ability to make changes that otherwise require developer resources is invaluable to any team’s success. Meredith and her team gained this ability through ClarityAutomate. 

The team started with a test and control group to update page title tags and H1s. They saw a quick improvement on click-through rate for the test group, so they took those results to the product team. 

“I explained, ‘I’ve got this super simple implementation that will probably take a day and improve CTR, so can we proceed with this?’ and I showed them the proof,” Meredith said. 

With ClarityAutomate, Meredith and her team could take immediate action on the tasks that have an impact on their site performance, metrics, and overall ROI for SpareFoot. 

Aside from testing and implementing these changes, ClarityAutomate provided SpareFoot the ability to: 

• Add relevant content across pages to increase relevance
• Fix site issues like canonicals, indexation, and hreflang tags with a few clicks
• Deploy internal links by adding contextually-relevant links to appropriate pages at scale

“The ability to quickly implement changes on a small number of pages to test the impact is the best way to support proposed work,” Meredith said.

“While we have the ability to run title tag and meta description tests, we didn’t have the right tools to update on-page content or internal links, but ClarityAutomate allowed us to prove the value of these tasks and implement them in no time.”

Results: Elimination of Hours of Work to Accomplish Important SEO Tasks 

“The changes only took a day of work, but without the ability to
test that data, none of it would have been prioritized.”
- Meredith Raico, SEO Director, SpareFoot

No longer stalled by lack of execution, ClarityAutomate enabled the SEO team to implement and test content updates in a matter of days, accelerating their SEO projects by 3-6 months.

“After collecting a month of data, the test proved successful, and we implemented live changes on our site,” Meredith said.

ClarityAutomate enabled the SpareFoot SEO team to prove the value of the updates, which required little effort and proved to have a positive impact across their site performance.

ClarityAutomate Eliminates Barriers to SEO Success 

“If you’re looking for a way to eliminate barriers to getting work done,
then ClarityAutomate is definitely worth it.”
- Meredith Raico, SEO Director, SpareFoot

With the ability to prove out the tests, Meredith not only saved time, she also saved tremendous amounts of resources by bypassing the dev queue.

This not only helped her build a business case, but also built confidence in what the SEO team accomplished day-to-day.

Enterprise SEOs experiencing similar challenges are encouraged to sign-up for a demo to see if ClarityAutomate is a good match for your enterprise needs.