Intellectual Capital vs Financial Capital by Ashley Pearce

Listen to how Ashley Pearce discusses Intellectual Capital vs. Financial Capital and how he approached the eCommerce platforms.
What have you been up to Ashley, since you were last on the Podcast?
On eCommerce side:

Set sights on 7 figures, on track for that.
Existing SKUs have grown in revenue a little
But revenue is on track for 40-50% growth, mostly fuelled by launching new SKUs and staying in stock on existing SKUs.

Organic Traffic for eCommerce via Future State Media - an agency offering 

Multiple businesses as well eCommerce side
Like to “implement at the speed of thought”: Team has been experimenting and testing.
Lots of organic traffic strategies  - grew Google traffic to own eCommerce site by 1600%

Google Traffic to Ashley’s own eCommerce site

In Jan 2019 about 500 visitors per month from Google
By the end of 2019, in excess of 8000 a month
This was after a Google update in November - came back better than before in Jan

Google strategies

Invested in content
Focus on long-tail keywords
Site structure
Deep research of competition
Influencer marketing - more for Getting “good SEO juice” than for traffic

Free SEO guide
What brought you to Google?

Started with Amazon advertising - and ended up pretty much breaking even.
You don’t have the possibility of remarketing as an Amazon seller, either.
The increasing cost of Amazon advertising

Ashley looked at adjacent industries to eCommerce for high ROI traffic. 
High ROI is important - it’s not so much just low cost when considering Intellectual Capital vs Financial Capital.

Amazon Affiliates make a meagre commission - maybe 5% - so don’t have a lot of money to play with and they went after Google SEO. But a lot of them have profitable businesses. So they have had to get very effective at Google SEO.
Insight into action
This insight pushed Ashley over to external traffic especially Google SEO.

But Ashley’s eCommerce company had the possibility of getting a higher margin, as a private Label business, than the Amazon affiliates had been getting.

Ashley invested in 2 team members to explore that strategy as he explored Intellectual Capital vs Financial Capital.
Cost of Google SEO

Content is the tip of the iceberg.  So the cost is not just hiring a writer.
Keyword research is key - including related keywords.
There must be a predetermined keyword structure in place before you write the article.
Then you need to do internal linking and site structure work afterward.

For 2019 the cost of the overall project was around $8,000-10,000 to establish the strategy. That involves Research and Development.

If they had spent $8-10K in ads, they would have had more immediate feedback; but a lot less ROI.
Free SEO guide
Future value
This $10K investment should yield over 150,000 site visitors this year from that content even in 2021 - budget based on a 3-year lifespan - have some good benchmarks. But some could be over 5 years.

So ROI is good over the long term.
How long does it take the content to rank in Google?
This comes back to the “Google sandbox”. Your website is put in that when you first launch. Google is still assessing whether you give Google the right signals in that period, as  Amazon does with your product listing.

Google will not give you a great ranking for 6-12 months.

However after that, FSM has requested indexing and within a day, found content showing in SERPs (Search results).

And after a month, ranking much higher. So once you’re out of the sandbox, you can rank articles quite swiftly.
Free SEO guide
How to choose long-tail keywords
Some people have their own Woocommerce or Shopify stores and are looking for alternatives to paid advertising.
2 approaches to eCommerce SEO
Approach 1: “How do I rank my chess set at the top of Google?”
That’s highly competitive and you’ll have to constantly stay ahead of the competition with expensive SEO.