[00:00:00] Introduction: Competing with E-commerce Giants 

[00:00:00] Austin Becker: try to get people to your website with bypassing Google.

Get people via social and email to come to your site.

'Because if you wait for Google to send you the traffic, like that traffic is funneled through Google's ad bidding system where everybody else gets a chance to show an ad. And you're just one of many.

So you can bypass Google by getting people to your site in other ways. I mean, that's a great strategy. 

[00:00:22] Crystal Waddell: ​Welcome to the Simple and Smart SEO show podcast, where we talk all things brand building SEO.

Helping you connect with your audience, elevate your visibility and grow your business. 

I'm your host, Crystal Waddell, here to bridge the gap between SEO strategy and real world business success. By bringing you insights, stories, and conversations from the SEO community and beyond. 

Whether you're an entrepreneur, marketer, or SEO enthusiast, this is your place to learn, share, and build a brand that stands out. 

So grab a coffee or your favorite tea. And let's dive into Smarter 

[00:00:53] ‌

[00:00:53] Crystal Waddell: SEO for your business.​​

 you mentioned having those certain elements on the page that help us compete with Amazon.

And that [00:01:00] was my next question: how can smaller e-commerce sites compete with larger platforms in the search rankings?

How do you take on Amazon? How do you take on Etsy?

How do you take on Walmart?

Is there even a possibility for smaller e-commerce stores to be competitive in search? 

[00:01:16] Challenges of Competing with Amazon

[00:01:16] Austin Becker: it's really hard 'cause people want to sell on their Shopify site to own the customer relationship.

But customers often just prefer to go to Amazon. For the one click purchase. With two day shipping.

It's one day shipping in a lot of places.

I have family down in Atlanta and they can order something, get it same day, like reliably. Which is. Just unbelievable.

But yeah.

If you're growing your business just to be big.

Then you should be on Amazon. Walmart.

Target's a great retailer that you can participate in their three p or third party seller program.

But that's if you just need to sell a lot of product. If you wanna be big.

If you want to have like a boutique business where you're in control of the customers and the relationship.

Then yeah, your Shopify site or BigCommerce or whatever [00:02:00] store, whatever platform you're on, you're competing with Amazon.

And, like I said, for the product pages, you just have to somehow be better.

But then, gosh. In the search ranking, like on Google.

There's not much you can do, especially around Amazon's Prime day sales.

I just did a deep dive on search impression share for one of the companies we worked with last week.

Where you see, here's your search impression share, and here's Amazon's search impression share.

And Amazon's goes way up. Went, went way up last year in 2024 from October through November.

And so like my client, his search impression share went way down. And that's just 'cause Amazon was spending a phenomenal amount of money on Google ads.

And so, in a way you can't compete there. Like you can still show ads, you'll get, you'll get your impression share, but only what you pay for.

And if go, if Amazon's paying more, you're just not gonna get as much. 

[00:02:48] Strategies for Smaller E-commerce Sites

[00:02:48] Austin Becker: And so the answer would be to sell on Amazon.

Or, and this is my favorite method.

Is just try to get people to your website, bypassing Google. Like get people via social and email [00:03:00] to come to your site.

'Because if you wait for Google to send you the traffic, like that traffic is funneled through Google's ad bidding system. Where everybody else gets a chance to show an ad and you're just one of many.

So you can bypass Google by getting people to your site in other ways.

I mean, that's a great strategy. 

[00:03:16] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. That's really smart. I'm glad that you explained it that way. 

[00:03:19] Understanding Search Impression Share

[00:03:20] Crystal Waddell: And when you were talking about getting the search impression share.

Is that a kind of software that you got that information?

Or is there a way that we can look that up for ourselves?

For our own business to see what that search impression share is?

[00:03:33] Austin Becker: Yeah. Yeah. So it's, it's in the Auction Insights report in Google Ads.

And search Impression share is a mouthful. I feel like I should explain it.

I'm sure you know, but maybe some of your listeners won't.

But, so like if there's. If there's like a, let's say you're selling pants. And there's a hundred searches for pants every day.

And your ad shows up for 10 out of a hundred of those 100 searches, then you have 10% impression share.

You might not get 10 clicks, like every time your ad shows, you might not get a [00:04:00] click.

But at least your ad rendered on the search results page 10 out of a hundred times.

And so that data is available in Google Ads for free.

I mean, you're paying for the ads. But that's one of the tools you get is the auction insights report.

And in that report you can see impression share of your company versus other competing companies.

It won't line you up against people that you're not competing with.

But Amazon sells everything, basically. So if you're selling anything on Shopify or BigCommerce.

You're probably gonna see in your Google ads, Amazon competing with you.

[00:04:31] Crystal Waddell: Okay. That is super helpful. 

[00:04:33] Ad Budgeting and Profit Margins

[00:04:33] Crystal Waddell: one of the, the biggest problems that I run into when I'm talking with entrepreneurs.

It really kind of goes back to their pricing model.

And, understanding their, not just their revenue, but their profit margins and like the percentage that they can actually spend on advertising to make it make sense.

And so I wondered if you had some tips on that.

Because if you sell something on Amazon and then [00:05:00] they return it, it's been my personal experience that I'm like losing money. In so many different ways.

Because I've paid for the shipping, you know?

Yeah.

Whether I do it through FBA. Or seller fulfilled.

And then I either lose the product completely, which has happened multiple times. It's like they refund the money to the customer. No product is returned. And so I'm out product, I'm out shipping.

And best case scenario, I have to pay for the return shipping.

Back to me or to the warehouse .

Taking into account all of those extenuating circumstances.

How can you set up an ad budget that will make sense so that you'll actually stay profitable and be able to scale? 

[00:05:42] Austin Becker: Yeah. I've worked with so many businesses over the years.

I've been doing this for seven to eight years now. Maybe it's eight years now. But yeah, I have a lot of people have that I've worked with, have had good businesses.

But they haven't done well because they've just spent too much.

And like margins are thin. And some of them just called it quits and gave up. And that's too bad.

But the reason for that is they [00:06:00] weren't taking a profit for themselves.

So I, I think if you have a return on ad spend, target in mind, like say you, every time you sell a unit of your product, you net, like 15%. After shipping and cost of goods sold.

And everything else. Like you net 15%,

I mean, you don't want to give Google, I wouldn't think, more than 5%.

So taking 15%.

Five of that, of those percentage points go to Google for ad spend. Then you get 10% to keep for yourself. Like it's still not that much.

But a lot of people spend way more than that on Google ads. 5%. To put it in like ACOS, like 5% ACOS. That's pretty great. That's a really good ACOS to put it in roas.

That would be a 20 x return.

If I did the math right. And that's pretty phenomenal too.

But that's usually not what happens.

People spend a lot more than, so they don't have a 5% ACOS.

They have like 10 or 20 or 30.

So, whatever your plan is, ask for a better ACOS. Or ask for a better ROAS.

Because you want to keep extra money. To cover losses from, [00:07:00] returns.

Or even like maybe a bad hire. You hire somebody and they don't work out.

Like that money's out the door 'cause you paid them. Like you just have to keep extra money all the time. Just always think about keeping extra money. 

[00:07:09] Crystal Waddell: And the, that acronym ACOS. Can you tell us what that stands for? 

[00:07:14] Austin Becker: Oh yeah. It's advertising cost of sale.

It's kind of confusing. It was confusing the first time I encountered it.

So if you sell a product for a hundred dollars, like that's the sale price to the customer, a hundred dollars.

And you spend 15 of those dollars paying for ads.

Like pay-per-click ads on Amazon.

Then 15 out of a hundred, that's 15%.

So you have 15% ACOS.

And then the opposite of that is ROAS. So I gotta use a calculator. ROAS is like, I spent $15.

What's the multiple of that? $15 to get me to a hundred?

[00:07:46] Crystal Waddell: Oh, I never knew that they had an inverse relationship.

[00:07:49] Austin Becker: Lemme just a simpler number. Like 10% ACOS.

You spent $10 out of a hundred. So that's 10% ACOS. But the inverse would be it's 10 x.

So ROAS would be, I spend 10. [00:08:00] And I got 100 in revenue. And so like I 10 XD my ad spend.

So yeah, if you take one and divide it by one. Then you get the other.

I think ACOS is superior because business owners always think about like, what percentage of my revenue am I giving away to like staffing? Or office rent? And Amazon's ACOS lines up with that.

You can just take ACOS. That's like a chunk out of my revenue. 

[00:08:22] Crystal Waddell: I appreciate that so much because I've always felt like ROAS didn't tell the part of the story that I needed, 

[00:08:28] Both: you know? No, it doesn't. 

[00:08:29] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. So that's fantastic. 

[00:08:31] The Importance of Pricing and Profitability

[00:08:31] Crystal Waddell: I wanna tell a story. I sell giant photo props. Here's an example.

So for like senior years, yeah. I'm already making 28s.

But in 2018, I had the best sales year.

I think sales on Etsy had gone up like 30 or 40% over the previous year.

It was insane. 

And I was like, this is incredible. And so I'm thinking, okay, I wanna scale.

I wanna sell even more. I've got a product that people want. But I knew something was [00:09:00] off.

Because I was like. If I pay for advertising, then I'm not gonna make any money.

Because my margins were so slim.

I never knew about the actual profit margin you need.

Even though I'm embarrassed, I know a lot of business owners have went through this.

Where you think about your expenses.

But part of your expenses that you forget about sometimes is actually paying yourself. Or paying someone to do the job that you do, if you weren't able to do it.

So it's like, oh, I'll just take what's left over.

But what's left over still has to pay all of these other bills that you've mentioned before.

And all these extra fees that we may not have thought about.

There's so much advice out there about ads.

But you really have to understand the price of your product.

This acronym, this ACOS. When it comes to advertising. And just all of the different costs that are associated with selling that product.

Because otherwise, all the numbers can look good, you know?

It's like, Ooh, I got a 10 x roas!

But it's like I'm still losing money. [00:10:00] Why is that?

Well, it's because those other things haven't been considered or calculated. 

[00:10:05] Austin Becker: Yeah, I agree totally. And it happens.

I don't sell products.

But like for our business. Last two months we had a net negative. Because we paid out a lot for software and staff.

And revenue was a little bit down 'cause we didn't get some incentive bonuses that we get from certain clients.

And so, previous months everything was great.

And then last two months, like we all got paid our salaries. But there was nothing left over to save up in the bank. So I do the same thing too. It it's really hard

[00:10:30] Seasonal Sales Strategies

[00:10:30] Crystal Waddell: and it's tough because things fluctuate. You know, like e-commerce sellers and service providers all over the world are like probably shaking their heads right now because it's like feast or famine sometimes.

And it's really nice If you could get some sort of like consistent thing going on all the time.

And sometimes that happens. But I know for my business it's seasonal.

For my father's business, he's a service provider. Lawn service. That's obviously seasonal.

And so there's just lots of business management stuff that [00:11:00] has to happen.

Here's another example that I just learned recently.

When I made my plan for the year, it's like, okay.

My biggest month of the year is like March. And then also maybe prime day, you know, in the summer.

If those are my biggest sales times. Rather than try to force the issue in those other months, what can I do to sell more during those times? When more people are already buying?

And that was like a mindset shift that I hadn't really thought about.

Because I was always looking at like, how can I keep it even, you know, throughout the year more consistent and that type of thing.

Yeah. 

[00:11:34] Both: But for 

[00:11:35] Crystal Waddell: the first time I thought, how could I actually sell more during the times when people are actually buying more?

That was ridiculous to say out loud. But I just had that epiphany. 

[00:11:43] Austin Becker: I think that's really good strategy. I've never heard anybody say it like that. But the way you put it was perfect. Because yeah, you can't control the demand in the market, necessarily.

To some extent with advertising.

You can. Or just having a really great product that people talk about to their friends and their friends buy.

So you can impact the [00:12:00] demand. But like nothing you can do compares even in a small way to. Just the huge surge in sales that, always happens around, black Friday, cyber Monday, Christmas.

There's nothing you can do to make that kind of surge in demand happen outside of that period.

Unless like you're going outta business and you have a liquidation sale and you mark everything down. And you're basically giving it away.

But like otherwise, you can't affect that type of surge in demand.

[00:12:24] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. The annual going outta business sale. 

[00:12:26] Austin Becker: Yeah. I hate it. I hate when I see stores that put that sign up 'cause it's not true. They're gonna stay in business. 

[00:12:31] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. That's so crazy. I never even thought about that as a strategy.

And to go back to my earlier point about how I couldn't scale.

I doubled my prices in one day.

I took a pricing course and realized, oh my gosh, my products are.

Way underpriced for me to be able to make a profit, pay myself or pay someone else.

So then I doubled my prices overnight.

And I was like, look.

If I don't sell another thing, I'll make more money than I did with my best sales year ever.

Which is just so terrible.[00:13:00] 

But, now that I'm in a better place financially.

And I know that every sale is profitable and there's room in there.

[00:13:06] Future Trends in E-commerce[00:13:06] ‌

[00:13:06] Crystal Waddell: What do you think are some trends that are coming out in the future for e-commerce?

That, business owners should be aware of and maybe try to ride the wave? 

[00:13:15] Austin Becker: Boy. I won't even talk about AI. Just other than to mention it. 'Cause that's probably gonna happen. But I don't know enough to share right now.

Other things I would look for would be, adding alternative channels.

If you're on Shopify, an alternative channel would be Amazon or Target or Walmart.

I would look into those.

Walmart can be good for some categories like sports and outdoors. I don't personally have experience in that.

But I've, I understand from others that sports and outdoors is a good category to sell on walmart.com.

Baby products do really well on target. Target just sells to a lot of young mothers. Or soon to be mothers.

So if you're selling like baby apparel, that could be a good channel to add.

And then if you're not on Amazon, I would try it. But the overall theme is just adding new channels.

I focus on [00:14:00] Google, but Google's growth in the market might, may have flatlined and it might not recover.

Unless their AI results experience gets way better and brings people back.

From Amazon, from these AI chatbots. But, if you're thinking about Google as a growth channel, think more on YouTube.

' cause YouTube is where you can introduce your product to new people. But like classic Google. Go to google.com and get search results.

That's not the place to grow. It's really where existing demand in the market will funnel down into the Google search results page. Like people will go there to find what they already have learned about. That they wanna purchase.

And so yeah, just to reiterate.

Trends going forward. Try new channels. And don't rely on Google and Shopify alone. Like add, add other channels to sell your product. 

[00:14:42] Crystal Waddell: That's such a good point.

That people are gonna hear about your brand or your product somewhere.

And then they're gonna Google it. That is like the change, the major shift in search behavior in terms of capturing brand traffic.

That's a great explanation. 

[00:14:57] Selling on Target: Opportunities and Challenges

[00:14:58] Crystal Waddell: And then you mentioned selling at Target, is that [00:15:00] something that small businesses everywhere have the opportunity to do?

Because I've heard of brands, oh, I wanna get in Target!

And then they have a collaboration or whatever.

I always thought that was just for like, a special group of people. 

Is there an opportunity for the average e-commerce seller to sell via target.com. 

[00:15:18] Austin Becker: Oh boy, I wish I knew for Target specifically.

Walmart and eBay, it's just a free for all. You can put stuff on Walmart if you want. Amazon too, of course.

I wish I knew for Target. My assumption is that there's some minimum threshold of revenue you have to show.

Or like, they call it, uh, what is it, GMV, gross Merchandise Volume, something like that. Like how much are you selling?

That might be a requirement for Target. I wish I could tell you. 

[00:15:41] Crystal Waddell: And that's fine. I was just thinking for, myself personally.

Brand wise, I would rather show up in Target. Than on Walmart. 

[00:15:49] Both: Yeah. 

[00:15:49] Crystal Waddell: I definitely would prefer that because of the brand association.

[00:15:53] Austin Becker: Yeah. And they're, they won't all be winners for every brand.

Like I mentioned, Target's really great for certain [00:16:00] verticals.

And Walmart's good for other ones. 

[00:16:01] Advertising on Major Platforms: Google, Amazon, and More

[00:16:01] Austin Becker: But one of the really cool things about these platforms.

Is like I was talking about Amazon's search impression share earlier.

They're buying a ton of ads on Google.

So is Target, so is Walmart. So is eBay.

So if you put your products out there. On those other platforms as a third party seller.

they're actually gonna pay for you to show up on Google ads, which is really cool. They're paying for that.

If you're selling on Amazon. Or Target.

And you wanna show up in Amazon or Target search results, you have to pay for that.

But they pay for you to show up on Google. In Google and Bing search results. 

[00:16:33] Etsy's Ads Program: How It Works

[00:16:33] Crystal Waddell: I'm familiar with that via Etsy.

Because Etsy has an ads program.

You can pay within Etsy to show up more in the Google ads.

But, say you sell $20,000 or more a year on Etsy.

You're automatically enrolled in their ads program.

So they will automatically put you in front of Google Searchers. For your keywords. 

[00:16:56] Austin Becker: Oh, that's cool. I didn't know, I didn't realize that's how it worked. [00:17:00] 

[00:17:00] Both: Mm-hmm. 

[00:17:00] Austin Becker: Yeah. So it seems like Amazon does not have that threshold. But I could be wrong. I don't know. 

[00:17:05] Crystal Waddell: Yeah, I've never been forced, I guess, to pay for ads on Amazon.

Whereas Etsy, it's not even a choice, you know?

Like you will pay for that whether you want to or not.

As long as you meet that revenue threshold.

[00:17:18] Austin Becker: Oh, so they, they add that fee to your, your Etsy bill.

Oh, that's so interesting. I didn't know that. 

[00:17:23] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. So what about other opportunities on the search engine results pages?

Do you feel like those new features Google has, is an opportunity for e-commerce sellers?

Do you see any hidden gems there? 

[00:17:37] Leveraging Video for Better SEO

[00:17:37] Austin Becker: Yeah, and this idea might be time limited, like it might not be working as well in 2026 and 2027.

But right now, if you put, if product videos or just videos on your website, videos on your product page. Like embed a YouTube video.

On the SEO side of that, you can put the video markup around the video.

You, add like a little, meta description of the video, meta title of [00:18:00] the video.

And then you can show in Google search results with a little video thumbnail.

And the video thumbnail's bigger and more interesting to look at than a pure text ad.

And so if you have videos, I would put them on your website.

Like put the videos on YouTube, but then, embed them in the website and put the, uh, meta description that's appropriate for videos in there.

'Cause you can sh you can get much better search results coverage with video thumbnails.

And it'll take them to your website and not to YouTube currently.

[00:18:30] Crystal Waddell: That is super cool.

[00:18:31] Optimizing Collections Pages[00:18:31] Best Practices for E-commerce Sites

[00:18:31] Crystal Waddell: you talked about, some of those fundamental best practices of following the Amazon product pages.

Are there any other best practices you think e-commerce sites should be following? 

[00:18:42] Austin Becker: Yeah, when we spoke earlier, you had mentioned some comments around collections pages would be useful.

So I, I wrote down some ideas for collections pages.

As far as optimizing those pages, they just need to be navigable. 

[00:18:57] Optimizing Collection Pages for Better Navigation

[00:18:57] Austin Becker: Navigable in that.

Let's say you're [00:19:00] selling socks on your website and someone shows up on the socks collection page.

They're probably in their mind, they're thinking, I want ankle socks.

Or I want socks that go up halfway up my calf.

So they're coming to your store with an idea of what they want.

And if you have a collections page that directs them, like down to finer, what's the word? Finer levels of granularity.

It'll help them make a purchase. A website that does a really good job at this is bonobos.com. 

I don't know if that's how you pronounce it.

They sell jeans and chinos for men. And women too.

But like, if you go to the men's pants section, the collection page has a little button to go to chinos or jeans or slacks or shorts.

And so as soon as you get to the pants collection page, it's really clear where to go next. And then you click on the Chinos page and that's another collection.

And all the Chinos pants styles are listed in a product grid.

But it was really easy to get there for a shopper.

Because they knew they wanted not just pants, they wanted chinos so they could go pants chinos, like within three clicks they're there.

So there's no [00:20:00] wasted time. 

[00:20:00] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. That's very cool. What was that website again? 

[00:20:04] Austin Becker: Um, it's B-O-N-O-B-O-S. Bonobos? No. 

[00:20:08] Crystal Waddell: Okay.

It's like a 

[00:20:08] Austin Becker: Bonobos Monkey. They sell, it's like a hip apparel retailer. 

[00:20:12] Crystal Waddell: Ooh, okay. Yeah, I'm not very hip, so I don't dunno anybody 

[00:20:16] Austin Becker: more than I'm, I've got the 

[00:20:17] Crystal Waddell: same clothes for like 10 years ago. I'm not even kidding.