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Gadget Flow: +198% on Organic Growth with a Knowledge Graph

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The logo of Gadget Flow

Gadget Flow is the original product discovery platform for staying up to date with the latest tech, gear, and most incredible crowdfunding campaigns. The iOS and Android apps are now reaching over 30 million people per month, and they support AR and VR for next-level product exploration. 

We created Gadget Flow to help people discover great new products daily either for personal use or gifts.” Evan Varsamis, one of the co-founders of the platform, tells us about the original aim of Gadget Flow and explains its development and growth path. “Along the way, we noticed that a good percentage of our audience uses Gadget Flow to stay up to date with the latest tech releases and announcements, as we tend to feature new products within minutes from the moment they are released. The features that we’ve built over the years, such as the ‘Notify Me’, public or private wish lists, and more, help us deliver a more personalized approach towards product discovery.

Gadget Flow was founded in 2012 by three friends:  Evan Varsamis, Cassie Ousta, and Mike Chliounakis. Through eight years, the platform has grown fast, reaching hundreds of thousands of users, and the company has achieved tens of awards and ranked 200 among the top 360 Entrepreneurial companies in the United States. 

Gadget Flow — The product Discovery Platform

When it comes to SEO, Evan Varsamis and his team are black-belt ninjas, having betted a lot on organic traffic since the very beginning of their venture. Why did they hire WordLift in the first place?

Because every black-belt ninja needs a master/sensei. We consider WordLift a hidden gem in the industry.” Evan smiles. “When I first chatted with the CEO of WordLift, he blew my mind with the amount of knowledge and information he passed me within a 30-minute call.

The Challenge

In 2019, when they first contacted WordLift to be their partners for SEO operations, Gadget Flow already had hundreds of thousands of users. It was widely recognized as a reliable and curated source for design inspiration. Nevertheless, they wanted to boost their organic traffic and their visibility on search engines tackling structured data, content modelling, and forward-thinking SEO. 

Google, Bing, and all the major search engines are trying to deliver quality content while the majority of the industry is trying to rank irrelevant content so they can monetize it. It’s been like that since the first few years of Google. So, the way I see it, you can easily say it’s a war between content creators/publications/bloggers and Google.” Evan says while explaining why innovation in SEO is crucial to the editorial industry. “Video is definitely important these days, but what’s most important is the technical aspect of SEO that has changed rapidly over the last few years. For example, using JSON-LD or WordLift’s technology can’t compete with plugins, manual actions, and just following the best practices.

The Solution

In one year of VIP consultancy, WordLift helped Gadget Flow build an enterprise knowledge graph to enhance SEO and implement a sophisticated entity-based content model. We have used the most advanced features of our product, such as WordLift mappings, all entity types support, VideoObject markup and automatic text summarization. Adding structured data to Products, Reviews, Blog Posts, Categories, and Videos is at the core of the growth strategy plan for this advanced product discovery platform. 

Gadget Flow also experimented with innovative approaches such as the implementation of automatically generated web stories. Both of our teams continuously tested new ideas that help keep users engaged and steady organic traffic growth.

The Results

Nowadays, WordLift is an essential part of Gadget Flow’s growth strategy and we consider it one of our best SEO case studies.

In the last three months, organic traffic to news articles grew by 198% year over year. At the same time, Gadget Flow experienced similar growth in organic traffic on video content, which grew by 185% in terms of clicks, and on Reviews which gained 100% more clicks (source: Google Search Console). The user engagement also improved. In fact, the average time spent on the page went up by 27% in the last three months compared to the same period the previous year (source: Google Analytics). 

In the next months, they plan to benefit from WordLift’s technology to further improve the navigation system on category pages to let the users drill down products and articles using entities.