I had a call recently with a founder whose entire Amazon business is running on
By ted-gibson · September 17, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I had a call recently with a founder whose entire Amazon business is running on about forty brand name searches a week, and he asked me something I could not have answered properly a year ago, which was what it would actually cost to rank for the terms he wants.
We used to do this by feel. I could tell you we would probably get there and roughly how long it would take, but not what the bill would be at the end of it.
Now you can work backwards from a search term to a number. You take the search volume, apply the proportion of those searches that click on ads, apply the cost per click, and work out how many units a day have to move through that term to push you up the organic ranking and hold you there.
What comes out is something like a hundred units a day for three months, at roughly this much in ad spend, with roughly this much coming back in revenue on the way up.
Forty branded searches a week is a real number and it pays some bills, but it is capped at demand that already exists. One generic term doing a few hundred searches a week is a step change on that, and the core category terms doing five figures a month are the actual prize, three to nine months out.
It also doubles as a fundraising narrative. Here is what page one cost us on a term we could afford, and here is the priced gap to the term we actually want.