How Macaroni made us 20x more productive

Overview

Blink has long faced the same challenge as most other agencies: how to dramatically increase productivity while maintaining the high standards our clients and partners expect.

Our approach has always been based on the following principles:

1. SEO for eCommerce stores with lots of products is fundamentally different to any other kind of business
2. The things that make it different (the importance of taxonomy and scale, mainly) are data and not creative challenges
3. Shopify has a standardised structure and code base that lends itself to repeatable work

With this in mind, we set out to develop Macaroni in order to vastly accelerate the highest impact tasks in SEO and, most crucial of all, the rate at which we can implement the work itself.

This has been an enormous success. Our initial tests showed a massive 1866.67% increase in productivity - a figure that continues to grow as we improve the platform.

The Challenge

Macaroni's primary goal is to enhance efficiency in managing client websites, specifically in areas of content creation, internal linking, and keyword optimisation. Traditionally, these tasks were time-intensive:

• Content creation for category pages: 20 minutes per page
• Internal links: 5 minutes per page
• On-page keyword updates: 10 minutes per page

The entire process, from sourcing opportunities to implementing changes in Shopify and recording updates, was taking up valuable time that could be better spent on strategic work - the deep thinking that is just as important to any project as execution.

Macaroni in Action

In January 2024, we began a one month test project to assess Macaroni's capabilities. The aim was to reduce the time required for SEO tasks while maintaining high-quality output. By integrating Macaroni into our processes and recording results using the Change Log feature, we achieved several key milestones:

Content Creation

With Macaroni, the time taken to identify a page missing content, write the optimised copy, and upload it to Shopify was reduced from approximately 20 minutes to less than a minute per page. During the test phase, 177 pages were created in less than three hours. An example of this process can be seen below.

Enhanced Internal Linking

Internal linking updates were completed with remarkable speed. For instance, in February, 331 in-content internal link updates were made in under two hours—a process that would traditionally have taken 22 hours.

Rapid Keyword Optimisation

On-page keyword updates, which used to take around 10 minutes per page, were similarly streamlined to under a minute.

The Results

The results of these optimisations were profound, demonstrating the substantial impact of the Macaroni platform on our productivity.

Productivity Improvements

Overall, productivity increased by an incredible 1866.67%, thanks to the following efficiencies:

Total time savings: 4,814 minutes (or 80.2 hours), resulting in significant cost savings
Output: Overall, we delivered more than three months' worth of work in just three hours

• Content Creation: Saved 19 minutes per page on average
• Internal Linking: Saved 4 minutes per page on average
• Keyword Optimisation: Saved 9 minutes per page on average

These efficiencies translated into substantial savings, both in time and in financial terms, enabling us to provide exceptional value to our clients.

Conclusion

The introduction of Macaroni into our workflow has been nothing short of transformative. By automating and accelerating key SEO tasks, we've not only improved our productivity dramatically but also enhanced the quality and speed of service delivery.

Since the test phase, progress has continued to accelerate. We're confident that no other agency can match the speed and scale at which we execute.