Episode Summary
In this episode of Seven Figures and Beyond, Greg Shuey tackles one of the most common and difficult challenges for D2C brands generating between $1M – $5M in annual revenue: how to prioritize limited marketing budgets across SEO, Google Ads, and AI optimization. Greg shares a proven, phased framework tailored for resource-strapped businesses to stack growth channels based on ROI timeline, effort, and cost. He emphasizes starting with Google Ads for fast feedback and revenue, then layering in SEO for compounding long-term profitability, followed by AI search optimization to future-proof visibility in emerging search experiences like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews. Backed by a real-world fashion brand case study, Greg highlights how this approach generated nearly 50% lift in revenue in under seven months. He closes with candid insights on common marketing mistakes and the importance of building margin and reinvesting profits for scalable, stress-free growth.
Key Takeaways
- Stack Channels Strategically – Start with Google Ads for immediate feedback and ROI, then layer in SEO for long-term compounding growth, and finally add AI/LLM optimization once foundational pieces are in place.
- Google Ads = Fast Learnings, Fast Revenue – With the right budget and oversight, Google Ads can deliver results in 2–4 weeks. It also provides valuable keyword data to inform SEO strategy.
- SEO is a Long-Term Profit Engine – While slower to ramp, SEO reduces customer acquisition costs over time and becomes a brand’s most profitable channel when consistently executed.
- AI Search Optimization is Emerging but Crucial – Optimizing content for ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and similar platforms helps future-proof your brand’s visibility. Though early-stage, it already delivers measurable impact and will likely grow in importance.
- Avoid Common Pitfalls – Brands often wait too long to invest in SEO, rely too heavily on paid ads, try to do everything at once, or underestimate the influence of AI-driven search. Focus and sequencing matter more than volume.
Questions To Ask Yourself
- Where are we currently investing our marketing dollars, and are we seeing fast enough feedback to guide future decisions?
- Are we leveraging insights from Google Ads to inform our SEO strategy and content roadmap?
- Have we built SEO into our product pages and blog content from day one, or are we trying to revise it too late?
- Is our brand showing up in AI Overviews, ChatGPT responses, and People Also Ask sections, and what’s our plan to increase that visibility?
- Are we trying to do too many marketing initiatives at once, rather than focusing on doing one or two things really well before scaling?
Episode Links
Greg Shuey LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/greg-shuey/
Episode Transcript
Greg Shuey (00:02.648)
Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond eCommerce Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Greg Shuey. I created this podcast to help D2C business owners and marketers who are stuck and are trying to find a way to grow their businesses. Today, we are going to talk about how to prioritize your marketing channels. If your brand is doing less than a few million a year in revenue, and by a few, I probably mean
you know, somewhere in the ballpark of about two to five million. If you’re doing less than that, you probably can’t afford to throw money into more than a few channels at once. Now there are definitely some exceptions to this, especially for highly profitable, high margin brands. But if you’re not one of those, it can get really tough, really fast. So the question is, what do you invest in first?
Do you go into SEO and content marketing? Do you jump into Google Ads? Do you jump into meta ads? Is it AI optimization? So here’s what I really want to dig into and what I want to cover today. I want to show you my simple but powerful way to prioritize your growth channels based on where you are at and where you want to go. I want to walk through the most common questions I get from brand owners, my exact recommendation framework.
what to invest in now versus later, and then common mistakes and real world examples. So if you’re ready, I’m ready. Let’s jump in. When talking to and pitching potential clients, which I do quite a bit every single month, the most common question that I get or pushback that I get is we can’t do everything. So what should we prioritize now and focus on first?
This usually comes up because once a brand, once they get through the early traction phase, meaning they’ve, they’ve, you know, gotten to about a million dollars in year in revenue, they’ve grinded it out typically on their own, maybe a couple of contractors, the stakes typically get higher and believe it or not, resources get a lot tighter. Like they just do, you’ve got more cash invested in inventory, product development.
Greg Shuey (02:27.586)
maybe having a new warehouse where you’re starting to ship from cash and resources get tighter. Most direct to consumer brands that are doing between one and five million a year in revenue, they typically don’t have teams, marketing teams. They maybe have a part-time marketer or maybe they have a small agency, but they don’t have these teams of five to 10 marketers. They don’t have unlimited marketing budgets. They’re at this.
really weird stage where every dollar and every hour you invest in something matters a lot. Whether that something is marketing, whether that something is operations, whether that something is customer service, it matters so much to the business. And if you put those hours and dollars somewhere foolish into different channels or different things that you’re doing for your business, it could end up hurting you.
The founder or the marketing lead of these types of businesses are typically asking, you know, if I bet wrong on where I should put these dollars, what is the opportunity cost? What might I miss that could help us generate a more positive ROI? They’re also overwhelmed by all of the different options out there and what their potential outcomes might be. What about TikTok? I’ve heard a lot about TikTok shop. Should I be putting my money there?
What about SEO? What about Google ads? What about LLMs? What about affiliate marketing? How about influencers? What about email, SMS, organic social, conversion rate optimization? The list can go on and on and on. There’s so many different things that you can do for a business. And that is why this question is the question, where do I need to put my resources? So at Stride, our area of genius is really dominating Google.
and dominating the LLMs like ChatGPT, Google Gemini, any of the AI platforms, right? We used to offer meta ads and email marketing to brand new clients. We still do it. We still have our team and we do it for our current clients. We do it really well. But Google and the LLMs is like really where we’re crushing it right now. And we’re putting a lot of our focus and attention on these things. So let’s…
Greg Shuey (04:45.176)
take some time to really break this down for you so you can have a better understanding of the channels that you should be potentially investing in, the budget, the required effort, and the ROI timelines so you can start to be thinking through this and really mapping this out for your business. And again,
These budgets are probably gonna be most accurate for low seven figure brands. Think like maybe one to $2 million a year up to about $5 million a year in revenue. Once you’re in that sweet spot of about $5 to $10 million a year in revenue, you’ve got a little bit more cash. If you’ve done your marketing right, you are a little bit more profitable and you can invest in other marketing channels or put more money into these channels that we’re gonna be talking about. So let’s jump in to…
these channels. So anytime I’m talking to a brand, typically what I recommend is that they start with Google ads. Google ads is typically going to be the most expensive channel because you are buying your visibility. You’re feeding this engine every single day. You’re paying for clicks, you’re paying for eyeballs and it gets really expensive. Someone on your team,
If you have someone on your team is typically managing this. If you’ve got an agency, they’re managing that they need to be managing this on a day to day basis. That’s definitely not something that you can set it and forget it. Even though a lot of people think that, you know, Google’s building machine learning into their platform, they’re building AI into their platform. It should self manage. It doesn’t. And if you allow it to do so, it’s going to run away on you really fast and you’re going to spend a lot of unnecessary money. So.
Making sure you’ve got someone in there managing that day to day is absolutely critical. If it can’t be day to day, at the very least it should be every few days. So the effort to be able to manage this channel is relatively high. Let’s talk about ROI. If done correctly, you should start to see return on your investment probably coming around weeks two to three to four, as long as you’re spending enough.
Greg Shuey (06:57.39)
And as long as you’re getting enough conversion data through the account to properly optimize this channel, it’s also a great channel. If you’re looking to test and get feedback really, really, really fast about what works and what doesn’t work. So you can optimize and you can scale from there. And then in terms of cost, I would say that the average brand should probably be spending about six to $10,000 a month on ads. If you’re spending less than that.
It can take a lot longer to get results and a lot longer to get positive ROI because you’re just not getting enough data through the platform for it to learn fast enough. And then you’re probably, you if you’ve got someone in house, you know how incredibly expensive that could be. But if you’re working with an agency, you’re probably spending around another three to $4,000 a month to have that agency manage it for you. Okay. So let’s talk about SEO next.
SEO from a budget standpoint can be a little tricky because it really depends on your industry. It depends on your competitors and how hardcore they are. And then it also depends on how much content you need to produce to move the needle. So SEO, I kind of lump SEO and content marketing together because content marketing, in my opinion, serves SEO and it helps you rank in the search engines. It helps you also rank in
you know, chat GPT and show up for answers to those different prompts. And so it can sometimes be a really heavy lift. The great thing about SEO, however, is even though it’s a long-term play, it has an insanely compounding effect over time. So once you start to get some traction, that grows really, really, really fast as long as you continue to do your SEO. A lot of brands,
If they do SEO correctly, they can get some quick wins in the first three to four weeks. They can see some pretty good keyword growth in the first three to four weeks. But really where the magic starts to happen is somewhere around the six to seven month mark. That is when you’re going to start to see super fast hockey stick growth in keyword rankings and impressions in Google search console, in addition to traffic as well as conversions.
Greg Shuey (09:22.154)
So over time, SEO will also help you drive highly profitable sales. This is something that I absolutely love about SEO is because of that compounding effect over time, you’re going to start to see your cost per acquisition just take a nose dive. It’s going to get so insanely profitable for you. And then you can start to also dial back on your Google ads as well.
And so it helps you get more profitable. It helps you protect your margin. And it’s just an all around great channel. In terms of the average cost, I would say that most brands that I talked to, as well as most brands that are working with us here at Stride, are probably spending around $4,000 to $5,000 a month on their search engine optimization efforts.
So finally, let’s talk about AI search, LLM optimization, GEO, whatever the heck you want to call it these days. When we look at this from a budget perspective, remember when I said SEO is a little tricky? This is even trickier, mostly because we’re still early in the game and things change so fast. I put up a LinkedIn post earlier this week that was like, you know, we’re still early in the game. People don’t have a proven playbook anymore.
We’ve had a pretty proven playbook from an SEO perspective for the last eight to 10 years. Not a lot changes very much unless Google roles in a humongous algorithm update that changes the game. But for the most part, the fundamentals stay the same. We’re trying to figure that out with AI search. It just changes so fast. so pricing could fluctuate or change from month to month, depending on
what you’re trying to do, again, how competitive it is, and again, what you’re trying to accomplish. So for those who haven’t listened in the past or aren’t familiar with what AI search or LLM optimization or GEO is, in short, it is the art of developing and optimizing content so that AI engines recommend your brand in the answers to people’s prompts.
Greg Shuey (11:37.026)
So these show up in platforms like ChatGPT. It also shows up in Google in the form of like AI overviews. People also asked, et cetera. Because these platforms need content, that’s gonna be your biggest cost from an AI search and an LLM optimization standpoint is content production. Some of this is gonna be covered in your SEO. Some of this is gonna be covered in your content marketing strategy.
but some of it is not going to be covered. You’re gonna need certain pieces that influence these platforms. You’ll also need to spend time developing citations and co-citations on blogs and other third party publications because that is what these platforms look like. They wanna see where you’re referenced. They don’t necessarily look at links yet, although that may be coming in the future, but they’re looking for brand mentions and then brand mentions alongside industry mentions or alongside comp…
and those types of things. And so it’s very similar. If you’ve done SEO for a long time, it’s very similar in the way that you’ve got to go out and you’ve got to start building the narrative and telling your story across these different platforms. Like SEO, this channel probably takes somewhere around two to three months to start seeing some good growth. And then probably, you know, another one to two months to start seeing some pretty awesome growth. That’s typically what we’re seeing right now with our clients.
And then most brands can plan on spending somewhere around $2,000 $4,000 a month on their AI search optimization efforts. Could be a little less depending on if you’ve already have a robust library of content that just needs some updating and some restructuring. But if you’re starting from scratch, which a lot of brands are that we’re talking to, it’s going to get kind of expensive a little bit quick. so.
Just kind of keep that in mind as you’re starting to go down that.
Greg Shuey (13:39.224)
So now that we’ve talked about kind of budget effort that needs to go into this and kind of what results are gonna look like for each of these channels, let’s talk about my framework. And I’m not naive. I know that my framework is my framework and that there are other ways to go about this, but this is what that I’ve seen have worked really well for brands.
especially cash strap brands that are growing and they’re really trying to push the limits while also being able to maintain some cash to be able to fund other initiatives inside of their business. The first thing that I recommend, like I mentioned before, is starting with Google ads. Some brands, it may be better to start with meta ads, Pinterest ads, et cetera. But in my world, like I mentioned, we really love Google. And so I always recommend starting with Google.
So let’s talk about why Google is going to get you immediate wins. You should plan on doing this for probably somewhere around two to four months as a standalone marketing channel. Once you get that channel really dialed in, I then recommend that you layer in your search engine optimization. The really cool thing about doing Google ads first and then layering in your SEO is that you can take a lot of your learnings from your paid search campaigns.
and use it to identify and attack the keywords and the categories that are crushing it for you. So in essence, you’re getting a more refined keyword list. If you’re running search campaigns, you’re getting a refined keyword list that you have shown will drive traffic and will drive revenue for specific keywords and keyword themes and clusters. You’ll also be able to identify if there are certain categories, certain products that
are absolutely killing it in search. And that will start to give you a head start and a roadmap of where you need to focus your search engine optimization efforts. So once you’ve really dug in and done that for a few more months, probably like one to two months of really getting your SEO built out, optimizing your website, starting to build out your content plan and executing your content to support your SEO.
Greg Shuey (16:01.362)
I then recommend starting to work in your LLM optimization, your AI search optimization. Some of that’s already gonna be handled with your search engine optimization. But I would allocate some time and some budget for this specific initiative. And again, that’s probably coming somewhere around month five, month six of launching a full blown digital marketing effort. The biggest advantage of doing it this way,
is that you can start to build scale without spending a small fortune or having to take on a loan or call mom and dad and ask them for some money or relying on credit cards to float yourself. I see with a lot of businesses is that sometimes, you know, they’re putting a lot of this on their credit card and hopes that it’s going to pay off in the long run. At this stage of the business, let’s be honest, like you’ve got a lot of cash tied up in inventory.
You’re potentially doing new product development and every single dollar counts. You don’t need credit card debt. You don’t need that stress right now. So as you drive more sales, you know, as you get in with your Google ads and you start to drive some sales, start to drive some more profit for the business, you can then take that profit and you can start to reinvest it in other channels. It may take a little bit longer for you to get to where you want to be, but at end of the day, you are going to be so much better off.
you’re gonna be so much less stressed about trying to grow your business and stay profitable and having the cash to do so. That is why I recommend that you do it this way. Now again, recommendation, I’ve only been doing this. I’ve been doing digital marketing for like 20 years now. I’ve in e-commerce for about 13 years. Like I’ve been doing this a long time and I’ve seen a lot of brands struggle and fight through pain. And I’ve also seen a lot of brands do it the right way.
and are happier and less stressed and life is a lot better, which I would assume that that’s what you want as a business owner. So let’s take a few minutes and let’s talk about a real example of what this looks like. So earlier this year, I talked with a women’s fashion business. They were doing about 2.5 million in revenue annually. It’s kind of, you know, our sweet spot here at Stride. They’ve
Greg Shuey (18:27.448)
proven the concept, they’ve proven the model, they’ve been able to go out and acquire customers. And so now it’s time to like really get this dialed in. Most of their traffic and sales were coming from Metta, which surprise, surprise fashion business Metta, a match made in heaven, but they wanted to really start diversifying and layering in some additional more reliable acquisition channels, which is smart.
Right? You can build a brand on Metta, but it gets really expensive over time and it gets more expensive over time. I’m actually having this conversation a lot right now, especially as, as brands are gearing up for Black Friday. They’re like, Ooh, you know, maybe we need some additional acquisition channels. We would like to have a lower cost per acquisition going into Black Friday, Sire Monday, which is what a lot of companies are saying.
So after taking some time to dig into their data, it’s one of the things that we do when we talk to new potential customers and prospects is we spend some time really digging into their data. I wanna make sure that what we do and what we recommend, and I wanna make sure that they’re gonna be a good fit for us, right? The last thing I wanna do is take on a client and not be able to get them results. And so dig into their data. And then after we started to put together this roadmap,
I like to put together like a proposed strategy. You know, this is what this looked like. Step one, we picked their top three performing categories and we identified their highest leverage keywords that would bring in clicks and conversions out. It’s the very first thing that we did. Okay. It took us getting in and looking at some SEO data. They were running just a little bit of paid search. It was mostly meta ads and we were able to jump in and look at some of those things. Second,
we rebuilt their Google ads account and we launched a Google ads campaign specifically focusing on these three categories. As a result, about two months later, three months later, it’s like 90 days ish. We were able to get them about a 25 % lift in sales in that first 90 days. So after those first 90 days, what we did is we took those same keywords.
Greg Shuey (20:46.35)
and we turned them into a highly focused search engine optimization campaign where we optimize their pages. You know, your title tags, meta descriptions, heading tags, copy layered and frequently asked questions, those types of things really revamp the product page and category page content. And then we built and executed a link building and a citation building campaign. This gave them about another 18 % lift in four months.
And then the very last month, we layered in AI search optimization. And this has just come in the last kind of six weeks for them. And that definitely grew their visibility. And again, this is all based on third party tools for AI search. There’s not a lot of great tools out there to be able to help us kind of analyze this, but we grew their visibility on these platforms about 23%.
That 23 % gave them a 5 % lift in traffic and revenue. The tough part about AI search optimization and really optimizing for chat GPT and Google AI overviews is these people are searching for answers. They may not yet be ready to make a purchase. And so even though you grow your visibility by 20, 30, 40, 50 % across these platforms,
they may come back in three or four months and actually make their purchase. And so from when we measured this, right, it gave them about a 5 % lift in traffic and revenue. That’s gonna compound over time as you build brand awareness and as you bring people back over time, that’s definitely gonna compound. So all in all, like we’re pushing almost 50 % lift across the business in about a six, seven month period of time is pretty crazy, right? Pretty incredible.
what a real digital marketing strategy that’s built with purpose, that’s built with the end result of being able to actually help people scale profit profitably will do for a brand. So as we start to wrap things up, like let’s let’s talk about just a couple of things that I’ve noticed over the last few years when talking to brands about their marketing. And these things really dovetail.
Greg Shuey (23:04.288)
nicely back into what we’ve been talking about today. So the first is that these brands, they are upset with themselves for waiting way too long to start their SEO. In my opinion, and other people have opinions that are different, is that SEO should be built into everything that you do from day one. There’s no reason it shouldn’t be built into everything you do.
If you’re doing the website optimizations, the keyword research, the title tags, the meta descriptions, the copy, the FAQs on your landing pages, that should all be done as you’re launching products and as you’re building out your initial website, right? And then building out supporting blog content that should just be done naturally over time as well. If you’re doing this as well as doing other good digital marketing, you’re gonna have a huge headstart and…
it’s going to benefit you and compound over time that it is going to be one of your top driving channels for your business. Even if you’re significantly investing in paid, if you do this from day one, it’s going to be your highest performing channel. So the second one is, is that they believe their ad channels are gonna scale forever. Doesn’t matter if it’s Google, doesn’t matter if it’s Metta, you’re going to get to the point where you plateau and you start to see your acquisition costs
grow and eat into your margins. And that’s why it’s absolutely critical to layer and other acquisition channels as soon as you can so that you can start to offset some of that. The third is they’re trying to do too much out of the gate. Like they come to us, you know, I want everything. That’s not good, right? It’s not good at all. They’re stretched too thin. Their money stretched too thin. Their man hours are stretched too thin and they end up doing nothing very well.
It’s better to do one thing amazing than trying to do four or five things and not do very good at any of those four or five things, right? And then the last thing, which I haven’t been hearing for years by any means, is that they’re ignoring the LLMs. They’re ignoring chat GPT. A lot of them believe it’s a fad and that they aren’t going to get you any traction or that it’s gonna take you too long to get traction.
Greg Shuey (25:25.844)
If that’s where your audience is, and for some brands it’s not, right? ChatGPT is not growing as a channel for some e-commerce brands. But if it is, that’s where you need to be. Otherwise your competitors, they are going to be there and they are going to take market share from you. Right? In my opinion, that’s marketing 101. Figure out where your customers are, figure out how to engage them, figure out how to nurture them.
and then turn them into a paying customer. if they’re on the LLMs, you have to be on the LLMs as well. It’s really as simple as that. At the end of the day, when you think about it, like profitable growth isn’t just about chasing channels. It’s about stacking the right ones in the right order at the right time based on where your brand is today and where you want to be in the next 12 to 18 months. Running a $2 million brand,
And marketing a $2 million brand is so much more different than marketing a six to eight to $10 million brand. It is. And so making sure you’re stacking those in the right order, that you’re reinvesting the profit you generate from your marketing campaigns into expanding and growing your marketing. That’s really the key there. So start with revenue, build margin, build profit, and then scale. That’s how you win in this economy. That’s how you win in any economy. And that’s how you win
in any circumstances that are happening in the world, right? That’s how you do that. Build the margin, build the profit and scale. I hope that this episode was helpful and insightful and that you were able to find two to three golden nuggets that you can take and start implementing today. Thank you so much for sharing a few minutes of your day with me and I hope that you tune in again next time. Take care.
Greg is the founder and CEO of Stryde and a seasoned digital marketer who has worked with thousands of businesses, large and small, to generate more revenue via online marketing strategy and execution. Greg has written hundreds of blog posts as well as spoken at many events about online marketing strategy. You can follow Greg on Twitter and connect with him on LinkedIn.