How Chewy Beat Amazon with Customer Service and SEO

This company beat Amazon in e-commerce, despite [music] higher prices and slower shipping. They did it by combining two things most brands treat completely separately. Customer service and SEO. That company is Chewy, an online pet store selling the same dog food you can buy anywhere else. Yet, customers are obsessively loyal. Today, we're breaking down how that growth loop works and giving you three [music] takeaways every e-commerce brand should steal. And it all starts with an scalable move.

Chewy was founded by Michael Day and Ryan Cohen. [music] Now, originally, they were planning to start a jewelry business, but 1 week before their website was planned to go live, Ryan was at a local pet store buying food for his poodle Tylee. And in that moment, he realized he didn't care about the jewelry in his safe. He cared about his dog. And he thought, "Other people feel the same emotional connection to their pets as I do."

So, they emptied the safe, sold the gems, and bought dog food. They bet everything on the idea that they could deliver a personalized neighborhood pet store experience, but online and at massive scale. So, from day one, they obsessed over customer service. If you called them at 3:00 a.m. because your dog had a hot spot, a human expert answers. And it goes beyond that. Chewy randomly sends out portraits of customers' pets completely free, or flowers when [music]

they find out one has passed away. So, what does all of this get you? It's loyalty. And that loyalty is actually a measurable number. In early 2022, Chewy reported that they retained 99.7% of their active customers. That means for every thousand people who shop at Chewy, only three of them leave. If you look at the lifetime value of a customer, a dog or a cat owner might spend five to fifteen thousand dollars on food over their

lifetime. So, if Chewy is spending fifty dollars on flowers or a painting that secures them 15K in revenue, that's just good business. Loyalty made people stay, but they still needed a way to find new customers and at scale. And that brings us to takeaway two, own the long tail. Most e-commerce websites have a very narrow focus. They spend most of their time and resources trying to rank for >> [music] >> money keywords, stuff like buy dog

food or cheap cat litter. And don't get me wrong, Chewy spends money on these keywords, too. But, they also decide to back up and meet customers earlier in their journey. They realized that pet owners search when they have a problem or a question. To capture these people, they built a massive library called Chewy Education, formerly [music] BeChewy. For example, let's look at the search can chickens eat tomatoes? It sounds like a random question, but thousands of

people search this every single [music] month. Chewy has a dedicated article that gives you the answer. It explains that ripe red tomatoes are safe, but green tomatoes and their leaves are actually toxic for your chickens. And while that might sound completely unrelated to their business, they're doing something called product led content marketing. While you're reading about what's safe for your birds, the article suggests a healthy alternative to tomatoes. [music] Like Manna Pro Harvest Delight Chicken Treats.

And it gives you a button to add it to your cart right then and there. You went from a safety concern to a purchase in about 30 seconds. This works for big topics, too. Take the keyword Cane Corso. Almost a million people search for that every [music] single month. Chewy ranks number three in the US for that term. That article explains that because these are massive dogs, they grow very quickly and need a specific nutrients to

protect their joints. [music] So, right next to that advice, they link you to a supplement, Zesty Paws Hip and Joint Mobility Bites. That food is designed to solve that exact problem. By providing the expert advice first, [music] Chewy establishes trust. By the time you're ready to buy that bag of food or the heat lamp for your tortoise, you aren't going back to Google [music] to find a competitor. You're going with Chewy. Okay. So, their education handles

the practical questions like can chickens eat tomatoes? But, Chewy took this a step further and bought one of their biggest search rivals, PetMD. They then integrated it into their own ecosystem, >> [music] >> essentially creating a search monopoly. If you look at the data in Ahrefs, PetMD pulls in over 10 million visits per month. That is more organic search traffic than many of the world's biggest retail brands on their own. By owning them, Chewy bought even

more topical authority. They have a team of actual veterinarian writing and reviewing every single one of their articles under their vet verified program and use the same product strategy as Chewy Education, typically nudging you towards a product at the end [music] of the article. So, whereas Chewy Education covers lifestyle like how to potty train a puppy, PetMD covers clinical like is my puppy sick? So, because they have so much authority in their niche, they can actually

occupy most of the spots on a single results page. Chewy has the third sponsored post on this. PetMD is the second organic ranked spot. So, right away, out of this initial search, we have two where they're ranking somewhat high. I mean, they're they're actively in the conversation. It's hard [music] to do any type of animal related search and not have Chewy or PetMD show up. Let's try best heat lamps for reptiles. Chewy has half of the

top products, one, two three four. Which is pretty good. Let's see another one. How to fix my dog's bad breath. So, before I even scroll and I'm looking at the AI overview, I can see that PetMD is one of the top cited sources. >> [music] >> I would say that's touchpoint one. Then, next to that, there's a bigger link to that source of PetMD. Below that, I have the sponsored results and that's to Chewy as the

top sponsored result that's encouraging me to try and fix my pet's bad breath directly. And then, if I look to the side, there's two products actually through Chewy, as well. So, they absolutely dominate the search in this case. Chewy's SEO brings in customers and their customer [music] care keeps them coming back. So, when they work together, the growth compounds. But, there's one [music] more piece of advice that brings this to the next level. And that brings

us to takeaway three, the viral backlink machine. In the world of SEO, link building is a grind. Everyone [music] knows it. You spend countless hours sending cold emails to strangers hoping that they link back to your new guide on catnip. It's tedious, expensive, and most people just hit spam. But, Chewy found a way to get the biggest media sites to talk about them without even doing outreach. Take the story of Anna Brose. In 2022, her dog

Gus passed away suddenly. She reached out to Chewy to return a bag of unopened dog food. The agent didn't just give her a refund. They told her to donate that food to a local shelter, gave her a bouquet of flowers, and a handwritten card. That single post racked in 605,000 likes. That story went viral and was picked up by the Washington Post, Inc. Magazine, [music] and today.com. Now, these are high-quality backlinks, which are some of the

most important ranking factor signals for Google. This might sound like a one-off lucky moment, and in some ways it was, but the important part wasn't unique. If you look across Reddit, Facebook, and X, you'll find thousands of people sharing similar experiences about how Chewy's doing something unexpectedly generous. Not because it was a campaign, but because support agents are empowered to do the right thing. And these stories compound. People start talking about them, press covers it, and

links are accumulated. If you check Ahrefs, you can see the data. Chewy has over 35,000 unique websites linking to them. And this customer care continues to create a steady drumbeat of new organic mentions across the web. And in the world of AI overviews, that's important. So, Chewy didn't win by gaming Google or outspending competitors. They won by earning trust at scale and letting SEO carry that trust everywhere. And when you combine all of that, it creates

an unbeatable growth loop.