Case Study: How Codeless Uses MarketMuse to Expand Client Relationships

Codeless manages a network of 55 writers that create more than 300 pieces of high-quality content per month across multiple industries. So they brought in MarketMuse to make their processes more efficient, freeing up senior editors and SEOs to focus on high-value tasks instead of checking every article for quality and optimization manually.

Problem: Finding Process Efficiencies at Scale and Publishing More Confidently

Codeless is a high-end remote content agency with a network of 55 writers that creates more than 300 pieces of content per month for clients across diverse industries. Recently, one of Codeless’s clients – monday.com – wanted to ramp up to publish 500 high-quality articles in just five months.

As a remote agency, Codeless has to be relentlessly process-driven to maintain high editorial and SEO standards for content production at this scale.

“We’re talking 1,000-2,000 words per article coming from writers with varying skillsets and subject matter expertise,” James Scherer, Director of Editorial at Codeless, said. “You have to find ways to help writers be more efficient and self-sufficient without losing quality or forcing senior team members to get stuck in the nitty gritty.”

For Codeless, creating quality content at such a high volume led to three core challenges:

• Confirming that writers had optimized their content for search before an editor saw it.
• Objectively proving content quality to clients.
• Using too much senior editors’ time trying to manually solve the first two challenges.

“We just had no way to confirm at scale that writers were optimizing their content,” James noted. “We could trust our most senior writers to be SEO savvy. But for more intermediate writers, even if they know the basics of SEO, they don’t always know exactly how to create high-quality content that is optimized to our standards.”

It’s tough to tell just by intuition if an article is optimized appropriately, let alone hundreds of articles every month. This meant that Codeless had to rely on subjective evaluations of optimization when clients asked about it.

Codeless needed a clear, quantifiable way to gauge content quality at scale, ensure writers stay on brief, and give their clients confidence that every article is fully optimized for search.

The Solution: MarketMuse Helps Codeless Write High-Quality Content At Scale

To ensure quality output without requiring lots of manual effort from senior editors and SEOs, the Codeless team turned to AI solutions.

“At our volume, you need AI to review content,” James said. “AI tools like Grammarly and MarketMuse can take our editors out of parts of the writing and optimization process. We don’t have to manually check if every piece of content is optimized for search.”

James and his team knew that AI could help, but struggled at first to find the right solution for content optimization. They tried Clearscope, but didn’t feel confident in the platform’s data.

That was when Codeless turned to MarketMuse. MarketMuse’s suite of applications helps Codeless’ writers hone in on the most important topics they should cover in an article, and gives them real-time feedback on how well their article stacks up to MarketMuse’s topic models.

“With MarketMuse as a guide, we can bring in more junior writers when we need to scale up production quickly. MarketMuse helps them write better content with a shorter ramp up time,” James said.

Results: AI-Enhanced Processes Lead to Client Successes, New Service Offerings

How soon did Codeless see their desired process improvements after partnering with MarketMuse?

“Immediately,” James said. “Every agency says they write optimized content, but we can now objectively show clients that we optimize their content. Having that kind of backup is important. They can publish more confidently.”

With AI and a strong process in place, Codeless and their client monday.com saw results like:

• 10 out of 100 posts on page 1 of Google for their focus topic
• On average, each keyword tracked improved rankings by an average of 25 positions
• Organic traffic from Google to the monday.com blog increased by 1,570 percent in 3 months.

Codeless was able to get similarly powerful results for another client that’s in the higher education space.

• One article is on page one of Google for a key phrase that gets 20,000 searches/month. Traffic to the article increased by 90 percent after optimizing it with MarketMuse.
• Another article moved up to page one for a key phrase that gets 17,000 searches/month. Traffic to the article increased by 274 percent after optimizing it with MarketMuse.
• A third article reached page one for a key phrase that gets 6,400 searches/month and saw traffic increases of 116 percent after optimization. The content also moved to page one for nine other keywords with at least 50 searches/month.

The process improvements that Codeless made with MarketMuse have already started to pay dividends beyond client results.

“Clients are able to confidently publish what we produce,” James said.

That level of client trust has not only helped Codeless retain its clients, it’s also helped them unlock new revenue streams. Using MarketMuse as a quantifiable way to prove content quality, Codeless started offering content optimization services in late 2020.

Since then, Codeless has seen client retention improve. Being able to confidently tie content optimization and new content efforts to ranking and traffic increases gives Codeless results that speak for themselves when it comes time to renew and expand client relationships.