Overview
ClearEdge Power is one of the only manufacturers of residential and commercial fuel cells that turn natural gas into power and heat. Looking to up their lead generation efforts, they turned to Decoder to increase their visibility in organic search.
After just three months, traffic and leads from the channel more than tripled; after six months, they more than quintupled. Coupled with conversion optimization, Decoder was able to help them acquire more than 5,000 additional leads per year.
ClearEdge has since been acquired by South Korean conglomerate Doosan Group for $32.4m.
Industry
Technology
Services
Search engine optimization, conversion optimization, market research
Location
Hillsboro, OR
Background
ClearEdge Power designs and manufactures fuel cells that transform natural gas into electricity, heat and water — running at up to 90% efficiency. The financial and environmental benefits are obvious, but require a significant upfront investment, making lead generation and nurturing a high priority for the sales team.

Strategy
Rising public awareness of fuel cell technology made search engine marketing a viable channel. Identifying keywords with the optimal combination of high search volume, low competition and proven conversion history was the key to this campaign.
Optimizing the site, creating new content and building off-site authority via bloggers and PR helped move the needle month-after-month. On top of SEO, targeted landing page optimization increased lead generation rates and extracted even better ROI from SEO, PPC and PR efforts alike.

Results
ClearEdge Power ascended from obscurity in organic search to ranking in the top 3 for over 60 targeted keywords (up from just 6). Traffic and leads from non-branded organic search more than tripled in the first three months.
In the long term, the SEO campaign achieved a continuous and cumulative lift for the client ultimately resulting in a 440% increase in traffic and 473% increase in leads from non-branded organic search year-over-year. Traffic from SEO generated an additional 1,500 leads per year.
Conversion optimization decreased cost per acquisition via paid search by 25% and increased lead generation through whitepaper downloads by 78%. The end result was an additional 5,256 leads per year from all online sources combined, supplying plenty of leads to keep the sales team busy.
