Ecoflow.com

How did we achieve 61x ROI for EcoFlow resulting in $16.3 Million in revenue from organic traffic?

Keep reading this case study to find out.

The Client

We began working with EcoFlow, a global leader in the portable solar power and home backup battery niche, in 2022. 

With a market cap of over $1B, the client designs and manufactures award-winning solar panels, portable power stations, and smart devices sold by retailers, wholesalers, and installers in over 100 countries worldwide.

We were hired to manage the SEO for their main English-speaking territories:

• United States
• Canada
• United Kingdom
• Australia
• South Africa

Each geo came with different targets and KPIs, but the overall aim across all five geos was to grow traffic and sales for their direct-to-consumer eCommerce websites through organic search. 

Additionally, this client wanted to position themselves as a legitimate authority on consumer solar and off-grid battery solutions. Not just as an “authority site” only from an SEO standpoint.

Tall order?

We were ready for the challenge. 

2023 Google Algo Updates & Challenges 

Before we get into the nitty gritty, we must address the elephant in the room — 2023’s incessant algo updates. 

Graph highlighting main algo updates from Jan – Dec 2023

Much to the dismay of almost every SEO on the planet, Google released nine confirmed algo updates throughout the year with varying levels of volatility.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the updates that impacted EcoFlow’s sites:

Core Updates

• March 2023 (15th—18th): Designed to improve the overall quality of search results by surfacing the most useful content, this update was less volatile than previous core updates. Despite coinciding with the February reviews update, we saw consistent growth throughout these months.

• August 2023 (22nd—7th): Although widely regarded as one of the less volatile core updates during the year, we saw a noticeable drop-off in clicks and impressions for informational queries.

• October 2023 (5th—19th): The overlap with the October spam update significantly disrupted the SERPs. We experienced a brief surge in clicks and impressions followed by a dip back to mid-September levels. 

• November 2023 (2nd—19th): Overlapped with the November reviews update, resulting in the most volatile core update of 2023 and yet more SERP disruption. We witnessed a slow but steady decline through November, but product seasonality also played a role, so it’s difficult to assess these factors independently.

Helpful Content Updates

• September 2023 (14th—28th): Still talked about to this day among SEOs, the September helpful content update rocked the SERPs like no other. By targeting sites “primarily created for ranking well in search engines” and rewarding those providing helpful and informative content, Google struck a tremendous blow to many sites across the web. Thankfully, our bullet-proof content strategy carried us through this period with minimal impact on clicks and impressions. In fact, we saw a nice uptick in early October after the update had finished rolling out.

As you can see from everything above, Google was hell-bent on radically “improving” its search results throughout most of 2023, leaving us SEOs just a few short windows to catch our breath.

Overall Strategy

As with any SEO campaign, we had to maintain all geo’s current rankings and reach the client’s ambitious traffic goals. 

For example, from January 2023 to May 2023, the goal was to almost double the US site’s traffic (90.2% increase) and carry that momentum through to the end of the year. 

Meticulous keyword research would be paramount to the campaign’s success and to achieve the client’s targets. Overall, our SEO team was looking to do the following:

• Curate a keyword list covering every topic related to our client to build topical authority. This is our bread-and-butter for establishing a growth strategy, especially for cases where clients want to grow aggressively.

• Discover keyword ideas for our client’s new product lines throughout the year. This will ensure the client attracts the right audience, potentially turning them into buyers.

We also set out to transform every geo’s website, improving and optimizing each with SEO basics (meta titles, meta descriptions, schema markup, etc.) to ensure each was at its best. Once every website was at its best, we felt confident that our link-building and content publication efforts wouldn’t be in vain. 

We knew we didn’t have time to waste. Continue reading to learn about the specifics and how we approached each component. 

On-Page Highlights

Below are the most critical tasks we carried out during 2023.

If we included everything we’ve done, this case study would be 20,000 words long, and no one wants to read that. 

Set Up hreflang Tags

Managing five websites for five different geos can quickly become a mess if we don’t set up hreflang tags properly, especially when the published content on each geo is so similar.

You can set hreflang up manually with a developer’s help. But, we found using a plugin/app the easiest solution. Not only is it easy, but you can change everything in the future without a developer.

We use two separate plugins/apps, one for WordPress and one for Shopify (we’re not affiliated with them).

For Shopify: GenovaWebArt hreflang manager 

For WordPress: DAEXT hreflang manager

Monitor and Fix Broken Links

Broken links (both 3xx and 4xx) not only slow down the site and potentially affect crawlability, but also create a bad user experience.

Broken links can come from many sources, such as a missing forward slash, an incorrect relative URL, an additional character in a URL, or simply a page that’s no longer accessible to the general public.

With that in mind, we routinely crawl the site to identify and fix any new broken links. This will help keep the site in check crawlability-wise, and we can identify any new issues coming up via the crawl and prevent future problems.

Optimize Key Landing Pages

With both the on-page optimization and link building, we put a lot of effort into ranking and maintaining the top position for key landing pages. 

Not only are key landing pages one of the most important KPIs, but these pages directly impact our client’s bottom line, so it was imperative to get right. 

Other than the usual suspects (optimizing meta titles, H1s, meta descriptions, heading structure, etc), we had to do a lot of research and analysis to:

• Identify the search intent and help the client come up with a suitable page layout (collection page for collection-filled SERP, etc.)
• Find potential link-building prospects (sites that link to competitors but not yet our client)

Build Topical Authority

Using the effort from our keyword research, we started pumping out engaging and relevant blog articles as fast as we could.

We also worked closely with the client to determine what topics to feature in which geo and/or what must be changed to fit a particular region. For example, Australia and the US have different summer seasons, so we must plan and localize the content accordingly.

Writing and editing around 40-50k words every month is a tall task we couldn’t achieve without a seamless process with the help of our wonderful writers and editors. More on that later. 

Add Internal Links

Building topical authority will never be completed without internal linking, so our content and SEO teams make it a top priority.

We aggressively add internal links to relevant blog articles and point them to suitable landing pages, mainly using exact match and partial match anchor texts (can get up to 80% for some landing pages) with a mix of misc anchor text here and there.

Unlike external linking, internal linking is a strong signal, but we can get much more leeway when it comes to anchor text, so we made sure we utilize this strategy to the fullest.

However, if you want to stay conservative, you can use a 50-60% exact and partial match anchor.

We also add internal links between relevant blog articles to make the juice flow through all parts of the site.

Prune Non-Performing Content & Redundant Pages

Unfortunately, not all content will perform at its best. 

We have a detailed process for reviewing content and deciding what to do with it. 

If an article is no longer deemed fit to be on the site and there’s nothing we can do to improve it, we’ll delete & merge it with related articles and then set up 301 redirects accordingly.

We also regularly check all accessible landing pages to ensure no redundant pages are crawlable and indexable. Sometimes, the client’s marketing team creates event or promotional landing pages (Black Friday, Christmas, etc.) but forgets to delete them or set them to no index.

Pro Tip: This is why monitoring broken links is crucial. It’s an absolute must for big clients because there are always too many things to do, making us forget about the smaller tasks.

Content Creation

Creating content for this client was arguably one of the most significant undertakings of the campaign. 

There were many points to contend with, both at the start of the campaign and throughout. 

Geo Specifics

Every geo has different KPIs, so the weight given to certain locations varies. Further, every country has different laws and regulations around solar energy, which impact what products are offered. 

Speaking of product offerings, we also had to be conscious that not every geo offered the same products, and certain geos had different priorities regarding what products we needed to create content for. 

Finally, the terminology was massive, not just from an English point of view. Writing in American versus British English is one thing, but ensuring specific concepts translated across oceans was also essential when scoping content. 

Writer & Editor Training

Finding competent writers to create authoritative, research-based content was challenging. 

We needed writers with backgrounds in science and math who understood SEO basics and were familiar with the client’s brand, products, and beyond. We spent many hours recruiting and training the right people for the job. 

Overview of the number of articles written and deployed in 2023

Volume and Priority

We also created between 25-30 articles (around 40k to 50k words) per month for the client. 

The client had ambitious goals and knew large-scale content production was pivotal in achieving their targets.

Total amount of words and articles deployed and written across all five geos

Localization

Some content was written one time and would go live in all five geos. Topics like this were often science-based topics where the facts were the same, no matter where you were in the world or general enough to be relevant everywhere. Here are some examples:

What Is mAh for Batteries?
What Is Solar Energy & How is it Used?
How To Install Solar Panels on an RV

We would also write content that only goes live in one, two, three, or four geos. For example, the US and Canadian markets are quite similar, which meant we’d often write and publish content only for these sites. We’d often write specifically for the South African and Australian markets since their terminologies, seasons, and product offerings were so different from the others. 

Link Campaign

We built over 350 links throughout 2023, prioritizing all five geos according to EcoFlow’s targets. We primarily focused on the locations EcoFlow wanted to promote, helping us get closer to achieving those ambitious KPIs. 

Breakdown of the number of links built for specific geos for 2023

We achieved these results by conducting custom outreach. The client set strict parameters for what websites were suitable partners. We analysed competitor backlink profiles to manually curate niche-specific domain lists that met the client’s requirements. 

From there, we’d manually review each site to determine what was a good fit and find the best possible contact email to begin building rapport. Once our outreach software verified the contact email address, we’d create a custom pitch to try to kickstart a collaboration. 

We also worked with our myriad of established relationships with other websites that were a brilliant fit for EcoFlow by contributing helpful content their users would want to read and engage with.

We’re still actively running tests on different outreach methods to source relevant links and hit our goals.

Site Performance for 2023

2023 was a massive year of gains for EcoFlow. 

We’ve compiled some of the year’s most significant metrics to showcase our work and achievements. 

Without further ado… 

SEO ROI 

Ahrefs Traffic Value

This data may not be the best gauge of actual value added from an SEO perspective, but it’s undeniably a useful indicator of the progress made.

Organic Traffic KPIs

Organic Search Conversion Rate

We met our target of an average organic search conversion rate across all five geos of 0.45%
(This is an average conversion rate which includes all blog and store traffic).

Keyword Performance (number of keywords ranked in the top 10 SERP positions):

Final Thoughts

Working with EcoFlow is awesome. At the start of 2024, we were given ambitious KPIs, and we’re happy to report we’re crushing our targets. Stay tuned in 2025 for a breakdown of what we’re currently achieving for this client in 2024. 

Are you searching for an SEO provider that can handle the demands of running multi-geo, international campaigns? Your search ends with us. 

We’re confident we have the infrastructure and experience to exceed your brand’s target search KPIs. Let’s discuss what we can do to help your enterprise business reach the next level. 

Book a call with our founder, Jonathan, today.