Following its successful Kickstarter in 2014, Blue Robotics has revolutionized ocean exploration by designing and developing high-quality, affordable and open-sourced products and components. Today, its products are used by maritime hobbyists, marine researchers and other robotics companies around the world.
Already successful, the company sought to provide an incremental lift in conversion rate and revenue, and support organic search, which is critical in a market dominated by established corporations. To reach those goals, Blue Robotics turned to Echo-Factory to not only refresh the look and feel of the website but also to improve the user experience to result in higher conversion rates for the privately held company.
“Set Depth to Three Zero Zero Feet”
We dove in the water feet first. Following our kickoff with the Blue Robotics team to document its goals, we mined Google Analytics for data. We explored how its existing users flowed through the website by channel, examined top landing pages and identified areas of high bounce rate. We also explored Google Search Console data for more granular data regarding keyword queries by the device.
With data in hand, next we explored the marketplace for inspiration and positioning. We examined competing sites of tethered remotely operated vehicles (ROV) as well as the worldwide leader in aerial drones, DJI. Finally, we visited user websites and social media to learn how customers, partners and underwater robotics leagues use products like the BlueROV2 and talk about the Blue Robotics brand.
The Echo-Factory creative team took these insights and turned them first into wireframes and then designs that appealed to both mobile and desktop users.
“Our Sensors and Sonar Detected Threatening Activity”
As we began converting the new website design to working templates, the Blue Robotics website experienced a denial of service attack from a city in Ukraine. At the time, the site had implemented essential safeguards from such attacks, yet as a brand trying to make underwater robotics more accessible to the world, mitigating cybersecurity threats hadn’t been a top priority at Blue Robotics before now.
Midstream in the redesign, Echo-Factory first blocked the denial of service attack and then moved the existing e-commerce website to a managed hosting provider built on the Google Cloud Platform that provides daily backups, staging and 24/7/365 support. Additionally, relying on the new managed hosting provider freed up time that Blue Robotics team members spent on updating and maintaining the technology that supported their website.
In the end, the denial of service attack was mitigated without significant downtime or any breach of customer data.
“Permission to Cross the Conn”
Once the development work on the redesign was complete, we launched the website and handed the site over to the Blue Robotics team. The website conversion rate increased by 14.91%, and transactions increased by 18%. Traffic from organic search grew by 6.73%.
Website KPIs
- 14.91% increase in conversion rate
- 18.02% increase in e-commerce transactions
- 6.73% increase in organic search
We have to admit that even we were impressed with the improvements in conversion rate, transactions and revenue from this project. We don’t go into most projects promising an 18% improvement in e-commerce transactions. Still, it’s a great illustration of the power of a user-focused website redesign combined with targeted SEO and other enhancements to move the needle in terms of the overall revenue.
We were also able to see concrete results from a modest organic SEO campaign that we implemented along with the website updates. Before the redesign, the website was ranking on the first page for its brand name, but was at least five pages deep for the bulk of relevant non-branded keywords.
As part of our campaign, we were able to move them to the first page for several of these keywords with more than 11,000 organic searches per month. During the organic search campaign, we also found that searches for brand queries increased by 20.83%. The organic rankings from these keywords are saving Blue Robotics over $1,000 per month in equivalent digital advertising costs.
Elisa, Marketing Manager at Blue Robotics, had this to say about working with Echo-Factory:
“You guys are good at communicating, especially on complex issues, and listening to our ideas. We learned a lot. We LOVED working with your entire team!”
Are You Ready to Move All Ahead One-Third?
If your company has reached its 12-mile limit, contact Echo-Factory for assistance as a Los Angeles brand marketing agency. We operate as an extension of your internal marketing team and make terrible puns about our customer’s marketplaces.
