Like taking candy from a baby

Being an entrepreneur in the eCommerce space is business on hard mode.

There are so many complexities and as the industry rapidly changes every single day, it’s hard to win.

That’s why most eCommerce brands and agencies fail.

But every now and again, your DTC competitors will unknowingly give you a free handout.

Here’s how:

All of the fastest-growing brands in the world spend a shit ton of money on Meta, as they should. If your brand can’t crack the code on Meta, you will find it extremely difficult to scale — it’s one of the best vehicles for growth, up to a point.

Now, let’s say you are 1 of the top 10 competitors in your category, whatever that may be.

But more specifically, you’re the smallest of the 10. You’re ranked #10.

The other 9 competitors continue to scale their ad spend on Meta, driving the entire category forwards. You may not be a category mover, but you’re still in the conversation — that’s right where you want to be to make this next move.

Let's say that the top 9 brands spent a collective $500k on Meta in March, and as a result, 10,000 people went to Google and searched for the product(s) in the ad that they saw.

You might be thinking: “Why would they search for it on Google?” Because many people don’t click on ads, they prefer to go find the products themselves on Google.

I can’t explain why this happens, but it’s common consumer behavior.

Back to the story.

The category continues to grow, and ad spend doubles to $1m/mo in October, right before it balloons for Black Friday/Cyber Monday.

Though it'd likely not be a proportional increase, let's assume it is for easy math, so now 20,000 people will head to Google to search for the product(s) they saw an ad for.

It’ll likely be far more than 20,000 people, but these are conservative numbers so that we can do some easy math.

Though some people will search for the brand name itself on Google, many people will just search for the product category/type of product.

If the top 9 competitors continue to ramp up ad spend without doing any SEO, the bulk of their organic search traffic will be branded, meaning they'll miss out on the keyword-specific traffic, which is growing by the month thanks to their ever-increasing Meta spend.

Now, your brand only spent $10k on Meta last month, and you're not growing quite as fast. BUT you actively invest in SEO, and because of this, you know exactly which keywords customers are searching for.

So you optimize your product & collection pages, write relevant blog content, and build a few backlinks each month. You dominate the entire category, ranking #1 for the keywords that relate to the product category/type of product.

Assuming this was the case in March, your competitors paid for 10,000 people to head to Google and search for the product category, where you positioned yourself in the #1 spot, ready to collect on their handout.

To reiterate, they wrapped up and put a bow on 10,000 of their customers and hand-delivered them to you on Google. You spent a few thousand dollars (if that) to rank #1 and they literally pushed their customer base to you.

You should send them a thank you card.

But I’m telling you, it gets even better.

Fast forward to pre-BFCM, when the category has doubled their Meta spend to $1m/month.

Again, assuming it’s proportional for easy math, now 20,000 people will search for the product on Google.

And guess what? You’re still there in the #1 spot just absolutely printing free money.

Also assuming that your conversion rate isn’t egregious, and your competitors haven’t outranked you, you will have theoretically DOUBLED your monthly organic search revenue.

Doubled is probably on the low end, truthfully.

And all you had to do was let your competitors continue to outspend you and devote a small amount of attention to ranking in the #1 spot on Google.

Easy money.

Catch y’all on Friday.