Clearscope

To help its customers create better-performing, highly relevant content with less effort, Clearscope wanted to create a product that could automate the previously manual content optimization process.

Clearscope, owned by Mushi Labs, uses IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding software to automate analysis of top-performing pieces of content for keywords and provide actionable recommendations.

Mushi Labs, the parent company of Clearscope, began as a search engine optimization (SEO) consulting firm. Very quickly, Bernard Huang, the co-founder of Clearscope, and his colleagues saw that the real work of SEO optimization is not only identifying what its customers need to do to make their content highly relevant for potential readers, but also to make it easy to take those actions effectively. Content that ranks high in online searches does more than make a reader want to share, click, or read it. High-ranking content provides more specific information based on the reader’s search that engages the reader more than a competitor’s content and keeps the reader engaged for longer periods of time.

It can be time-consuming to manually evaluate individual pieces of content that rank higher than yours and then identify ways to improve your content experience. Clearscope sought to tackle this challenge. “We said okay, what if we could automate the content optimization process and give data to content marketers in near real-time to help them create higher quality, more relevant content?” says Huang. Mushi Labs wanted to create a product that could help automate the content optimization process. To do that, the business needed a robust natural language processing application.

Clearscope customers are achieving impressive results with the solution. Optimizely, a provider of an experience optimization platform based in San Francisco, achieved a 52 percent increase in organic traffic to content it optimized through Clearscope by following the tool's recommendations.

Denis O’Dwyer, the Chief Executive Officer of Wide Open Media, reports that his company has also seen drastic improvements to its organic traffic. “Clearscope has fundamentally changed how we optimize our content for search. Our sites less than 18 months old are seeing organic traffic double every two months, while our more established sites are seeing monthly organic growth of 15–30 percent,” says O’Dwyer.

With such a successful product, Clearscope has grown its business rapidly. “We're serving over 250 organizations in 30 different countries, generating half a million in annual revenue,” says Huang. “And we’re currently growing roughly 15 percent month over month.”

Clearscope (link resides outside ibm.com) was founded in 2016. Headquartered in San Francisco, California, the business has approximately 10 employees. Clearscope is a subsidiary of Mushi Labs LLC, an SEO consulting business that was founded in 2014 in San Francisco.