Every single day people across the US go to Google and type in USPS flat rate shipping or USPS zones. The people typing these searches into Google are typically individuals looking to ship something throughout the US. It could be something they sold on eBay. It could be a gift for a family member. Or it could be an inventory of 10,000 products that they’ll need to ship to customers from coast to coast…
Let me start this email with a caveat.
Yup, you heard me say email. And yes, I’m aware this is a blog, but this piece was written, rather filmed, for our exclusive set of newsletter subscribers. If you haven’t yet, you should sign up for Foundation Lab’s newsletter for direct and early access to weekly content like this.
Back to the caveat: I’m Canadian.
So I don’t have DEEP feelings about USPS. But I do know that when I went to Google to find out the proper descriptor for sharing what USPS was… The pre-filled responses weren’t so great:
Ouch. That’s a brand issue.
The United States Postal Service (aka USPS) is an independent agency of the executive branch of the United States federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States.
But that’s not what I’m here to talk about today.
Today, I want to talk about ShipBob (congrats to their team) who just raised $200M at a valuation of over $1B. ShipBob is a global logistics platform that fulfills ecommerce orders for DTC brands. The org ships all over the world and manages fulfillment for everything from startups to major brands.
One thing ShipBob has done really well is succeed where USPS has not… In particular, they have succeeded at ranking for content that USPS should be ranking for but isn’t. As an example, if you go to Google and type in USPS Flat Rate Shipping — The link at the top of the SERP is a piece created by ShipBob. This piece generates more than 25,000 visits every single month and has 119 backlinks.
I want to reverse engineer for you why this piece works so well…
But unlike most of my Tuesday essays. I’m going to be sharing this one over video.
Yup. I’m going to talk you through why I think this is a brilliant play and how ShipBob is using search to unlock amazing arbitrage on the back of content just like this.
