Revenue-driving content: How Epic Gardening doubled traffic and revenue by acquiring a blog
Epic Gardening is a niche business that has a very strong YouTube following.
Their YouTube channel features 614 videos and 3.22M subscribers, generating millions of views.
Little did I know that they also heavily invest in SEO. But in hindsight, it makes a lot of sense.
So when I first read about their performance on Shitty SEO Advice, I had to dig deeper.
Steep traffic growth for epicgardening.com
After a period of strong growth, the organic traffic of epicgardening.com reached an all-time high in May 2024.
The website now gets almost three times the organic traffic it did one and a half years ago.
But why exactly? I started digging into Ahrefs.
My goal: Finding out which pages and keywords did well and why – so I could use some of these learnings for my own projects.
Let’s have a look at the top pages by traffic:
One big traffic driver seem to be listicles that cover different types of flowers.
These are set up in almost a “programmatic” way, meaning they follow a specific template structure that can easily be replicated.
The best performing listicles are the ones focusing on color: “white flowers”, “purple flowers”, “blue flowers”… you get it.
But also “hawaiian flowers”, “small flowers”, “winter blooming flowers” etc. are pages that rake up thousands of clicks each month.
Having a closer look at these flower pages, we can see that all this content appears to have been recently published. And was added in one big launch in October 2023 that immediately resulted in a surge of organic traffic.
From the graph above, we can tell that roughly 60 pages were published in one day.
So I immediately wondered if they used AI to create that much content in such a short amount of time.
The acquisition play
While researching, I found this LinkedIn post by the founder, Kevin Espiritu:
That explains the sudden jump in thousands of pages.
And nope. It wasn’t AI content.
Espiritu adds: “[Jason Wilson] built a gardening blog to an impressive scale in a short period of time, and most importantly to me - he did it the right way.”
My interpretation of the right way: It’s sustainable traffic that also converts.
Espiritu confirms this by stating that doubling their blog traffic also led to double the revenue from that site section. This clearly demonstrates that integrating SEO and content can significantly boost revenue.
Follow me, as I break down their strategy and how you can apply it to your own business:
How would I replicate this?
Let’s say you don’t have the budget to acquire a new website, and need to start from scratch.
How would you go about it?
You can set up yourself for success by:
Picking the right keywords
Covering the right search intent
Creating helpful content
Building a bridge to your product
1. Picking the right keywords
What Epic Gardening does well:
They speak the language of their customers.
People are looking to buy flower seeds for their garden, but are unsure which strain to pick.
And since most of them probably don’t know the names of the flowers they like, they just search by attribute like color, size, etc.
Here we see keywords, monthly search volumes, cost per click and difficulties for PPC and SEO respectively:
In short: Your customers might search in ways for your product that don’t align with how you talk about it internally. But it’s your job to uncover this.
2. Covering the right search intent
Epic gardening not only went for the right keywords.
They also nailed the search intent, meaning they understood what information people typing in “blue flowers” were looking for, namely pictures of flowers and basic information around how to grow these. And they choose the right content format accordingly.
Since Google tracks how people click and interact with content, only websites that do a good job at satisfying that search intent will effectively be able to rank.
Sounds complicated?
The good news is, getting this right is as simple as googling what ranks and identifying what people want.
In this case, it’s fairly easy. All the best ranking posts are listicles with pictures and information about each plant variety.
And the more flowers you can list, the more likely people are to click and the longer they engage with your content, which are important signals to Google.
But more is not necessarily always better.
3. Creating helpful content
When it comes to the content, I actually believe the Epic Gardening website could be improved:
Once landing on the listicle, the experience of scrolling through these flowers is not ideal. It might take a long time to find your best match.
This is because they are no clear evaluation or comparison criteria apart from what the flowers look like. While visual appearance might be one of the most important criteria, when deciding which flowers to grow, I would propose to add the functionality to sort flowers by climate, level of gardening experience, purchasing price etc. for better browsing and finding the desired flower quicker.
I called this step “creating helpful content” rather than “writing helpful content” to put an emphasis on the fact that content design is just as important as the final wording.
(Also, the amount of banner ads that are shown in between the content is shocking, deferring from the main content. Here I would try to reduce the amount and/or placement of these ads.)
4. Building a bridge to your product
What Epic Gardening is also excellent at, is moving potential customers along in their customer journey.
Whenever someone has found the flower they like, Epic Gardening links directly to a “How to” page that provides all information about how to grow this specific strain of flower.
However, I still see some potential for further content optimization when it comes to boosting conversions.
Because, while the shop is easily accessible through the main navigation when reading editorial content, there are no links pointing to specific products that could help me with my first attempt at growing balloon flowers.
For example, to seedling trays: They mention seedling trays in the how-to-article and also offer them in their shop. But there is no link from the editorial article to the shop and readers need to search for these products by themselves, should they decide they want to buy some.
This is unfortunate, as first-time growers might feel overwhelmed when choosing the right products.
And while I am unaware of how much product sales (versus banner ads) contribute to Epic Gardening’s bottom line, the fact that the founder himself stated that “Epic Gardening is primarily a product company” leads me to think that tying content and products together even more closely, might generate even more revenue for them.