Case Study: 3M captures $300,000 a year in organic value with BrightEdge

3M Captures $300,000 a Year in Organic Value

3M, a global manufacturer operating five major businesses across 60 divisions in 100 countries with roughly 6,000 websites, faced a 2010 challenge: how to manage SEO at scale when 45% of its traffic was organic. The problem was compounded by inconsistent country sites, content trapped in PDFs and a fast-evolving product set (35%/year), so simply copying U.S. strategies internationally wouldn’t work.

Craig Berdie, 3M’s Global Search Marketing Manager, formed a cross‑functional SEO council and used landing-page testing plus BrightEdge to identify high-value keywords, build optimized pages, track ranking improvements, and stitch organic traffic to conversion data to calculate per-click value. The effort produced 20% organic traffic growth year-over-year for three years, roughly $25,000/month in incremental value for a single business unit/topic, and an annual organic value capture of about $300,000.

3M

Craig Berdie

3M