When a new D2C brand launches, the instinct is understandable: build a website, hire an SEO agency, pick some keywords, and wait for Google to send customers. In my conversation with Amit Tiwari on Dilse Omni Talks, he challenged that instinct directly.
Amit is an SEO strategist, educator, and founder of AmitTiwari.net. He is known for making SEO practical rather than mysterious, helping businesses and marketers build durable organic growth through data-led thinking. His central point was simple, but it has major implications for founders: search cannot be the first proof that your brand matters. Demand has to come first.
We explored this through a hypothetical home-furnishing D2C brand. It is a useful scenario because it represents the real challenge many founders face. You may have a beautiful website, solid products, and great ambition, but none of that automatically creates visibility.
Table of Contents
A Website Without Visitors Is Like an Empty Store
The Demand Before Search Framework
Why Brand Audience Matters More Than the Brand Label
SEO Is Not Optional for Startups, But It Is Not Magic Either
The Ads-Only Trap for Funded Startups
What Rock-Solid D2C Brands Do Differently
The Real SEO Strategy Is Building Something Worth Finding
A Website Without Visitors Is Like an Empty Store
Amit gave an analogy that stayed with me. Imagine opening a completely new store on a road where no one walks in. Or imagine seeing a fully stocked product shelf in a mall at the end of the day, with no sign that anyone has bought from it. People often take cues from other people. If something appears unwanted, they become less inclined to choose it.
The same broad principle applies to a new website. Search engines need signals that people find a destination useful. A brand cannot simply appear online and expect rankings to materialise because it has published product pages.
“Don’t make search your first medium of getting traffic.”
This does not mean ignoring SEO. It means putting SEO in the right sequence. First, make the website ready for search. Then create reasons for real people to arrive, explore, and return. Search can amplify genuine demand much more effectively than it can manufacture demand from zero.
The Demand Before Search Framework
I would summarise Amit’s approach as a simple four-stage growth loop for early-stage D2C brands:
1. Attract: Bring people to the brand
Use the channels available to you to create initial awareness and visits. Amit’s point was not that every founder must use every medium. The point is that the brand should actively create its own momentum rather than outsourcing its entire future to search rankings.
Social media content and community participation
Paid ads where they make economic sense
PR and relevant creator or media visibility
Offline activations such as posters, billboards, and local marketing
Referrals and word of mouth
High-recall platforms or moments that make people remember the brand
Amit even used the example of appearing on Shark Tank. The larger lesson is not about one show. It is about recall. If people encounter your brand somewhere meaningful, remember it, and later seek it out, that creates a much stronger foundation than hoping a generic keyword will suddenly do all the work.
2. Engage: Give visitors a reason to stay
Traffic alone is not the finish line. Once people land on a D2C website, the experience needs to earn their attention. Are they browsing several pages? Reading helpful content? Looking through product details? Zooming in on images? Understanding why the product deserves consideration?
Amit highlighted the importance of those deeper interactions. A website that encourages genuine exploration gives stronger evidence that it is relevant for its audience than a website where people arrive and immediately leave.
“Make your website ready for search and then bring in your own traffic.”
For a home-furnishing brand, that could mean more than a simple product catalogue. Product imagery should support inspection. Details such as material, size, use case, styling, and care should be easy to find. The site should help a person move naturally from inspiration to confidence to purchase.
3. Learn: Treat organic visits as product feedback
This is where Amit’s perspective becomes particularly valuable for founders. Organic traffic is not merely a reporting metric. It can become a signal of product-market fit.
His recommendation is to work on SEO early and give it enough time, roughly six months, to learn from real user behaviour. When people find a brand organically, explore its products, and buy, they are telling the business something meaningful. The offering is connecting with a market without the brand having to force every visit through advertising spend.
That makes the early period less about chasing vanity rankings and more about answering critical questions:
Which product categories attract interest?
What language are people using when they search?
Which pages help people evaluate the product?
Do visitors go beyond the landing page?
Are organic visits converting into sales?
4. Amplify: Invest harder in what has demonstrated demand
Once a brand sees good sales and genuine engagement from organic traffic, it has a more credible basis to increase investment. The product is no longer just an internal belief. The market has begun to validate it.
At that point, ads can help accelerate growth. SEO can compound. Content can become more targeted. Landing pages can become sharper. But the spend is now supporting a business that has evidence of demand, rather than trying to cover up the absence of it.
Why Brand Audience Matters More Than the Brand Label
One of the misconceptions Amit unpacked is the belief that established brands automatically get more Google traffic simply because they are brands. His view is more grounded: they get more traffic because they have a dedicated audience.
That distinction matters. A logo, a funded launch, or a polished visual identity does not itself create search momentum. What matters is whether people know the business, seek it out, engage with it, and find value when they arrive.
For founders, this shifts the question from, “How do we rank?” to, “How do we become worth looking for?” Search visibility is stronger when it rests on that foundation.
“Brands don’t get more traffic from Google because they are brands. They get more traffic because there is a dedicated audience.”
This is also why omnichannel thinking matters. Social, offline, referrals, PR, content, paid media, and the website should not operate as isolated boxes. Each channel can create awareness or intent that the website then needs to convert into a useful experience. SEO becomes part of that connected system, not a separate technical project sitting in a corner.
SEO Is Not Optional for Startups, But It Is Not Magic Either
Another dangerous misconception, as Amit put it, is that startups should not do SEO. That conclusion is often drawn because SEO takes time while startups feel pressure to grow fast. But ignoring SEO entirely can make growth increasingly expensive.
Ads may be faster, but they are also costly. A founder who relies only on performance marketing can become trapped in a cycle where every sale requires another payment to Meta, Google, or another platform. SEO, by contrast, can create an owned, compounding acquisition channel over time.
The important nuance is that Amit did not present SEO as an immediate substitute for all other channels. He framed it as an early investment in learning and sustainable demand.
For the first few months, the goal is to establish the foundations:
Create useful, discoverable product and category pages.
Make the site easy to navigate and genuinely useful for prospective customers.
Bring traffic through multiple channels rather than waiting passively for rankings.
Measure whether visitors engage, return, and buy.
Use the learning to improve the product, messaging, content, and customer journey.
This requires patience. It also requires constant improvement. SEO is not a one-time agency handoff where a founder pays a fee, waits for traffic, then changes agencies when instant results do not arrive. That cycle avoids the real work of building a useful brand experience.
The Ads-Only Trap for Funded Startups
Amit made an important distinction between heavily funded startups and businesses built with more constrained resources. Funded companies often shift aggressively into paid advertising because they are pursuing hypergrowth in a short window. There can be a valid commercial reason for that.
But there is a trade-off. When growth becomes overly dependent on ads, a business can lose the discipline that comes from carefully understanding its customer, product economics, website experience, and organic demand.
Founders who build with their own money, Amit observed, tend to optimise rigorously. When you are personally putting a credit card into Google Ads or Meta Ads, you notice every leak in the funnel. You learn what brings the right customer, what messaging works, where people drop off, and whether the product is actually earning a repeatable demand.
That discipline becomes a competitive advantage. It forces a brand to build better fundamentals instead of using budget as a temporary substitute for them.
What Rock-Solid D2C Brands Do Differently
Amit referenced brands such as Gynoveda, Urban Monkey, and Itsy Pregnancy as examples of businesses that began small, built steadily, and developed strong audiences. His broader point was not to copy another brand’s exact category or campaign. It was to recognise the power of patience and continuous improvement.
These businesses are built around an audience, not just an acquisition channel. That is why their growth can be more durable. They have an owned relationship with customers, a clearer understanding of what those customers value, and a stronger base from which SEO can perform.
The practical takeaway for any D2C founder is straightforward:
Do SEO from the beginning, because it creates a lower-cost channel and produces market learning.
Do not depend on SEO alone, because a new brand needs to create its own awareness and initial visits.
Build a website people want to explore, not merely a website designed to contain keywords.
Use organic sales as evidence, then invest more confidently in scaling what works.
Build an audience deliberately, because audience strength is what makes search visibility more durable.
The Real SEO Strategy Is Building Something Worth Finding
The biggest lesson I took away from Amit is that SEO is not a shortcut around brand building. It is one of the strongest ways to compound brand building once there is real value, real engagement, and a real audience behind it.
For a D2C company in home furnishing or any other category, the goal is not to sit back and demand traffic from Google. Create demand across channels. Give that demand a website experience worth spending time with. Listen to what customers do. Then let search expand the reach of what is already proving valuable.
That may feel slower than chasing a quick ranking or buying every possible click. But it creates the type of business Amit describes as rock solid: one with an audience of its own and an engine for long-term organic growth.
I am Saurabh Agrawal and we come with a new episode on Dilse omni talks every fortnight and cover different aspect of omnichannel with amazing speakers.
