When Greg Camper founded Easy Jose Coffee in 2018, he had a compelling story to tell. His company sources coffee from indigenous communities in the Peruvian Amazon, where farmers grow beans beneath the natural rainforest canopy preserving biodiversity while creating sustainable livelihoods. It's arguably one of the most sustainable coffee projects in the world.
But having a great product and an inspiring mission wasn't enough. Like many small business owners, Greg faced a frustrating reality: being found online is just as important as what you're selling.
The AdWords Money Pit
"We've spent years getting into AdWords and trying to spend, and we have spent an awful lot of money on AdWords," Greg admits candidly. As product-focused coffee people passionate about their craft, the technical side of digital marketing felt like foreign territory.
The results were disheartening. Greg would analyze campaigns only to discover they were paying for clicks on their own brand name searches where they already ranked number one organically. "There's like 10 clicks on that, and so it's cost you 50 quid, you're just chucking money away," he explains.
This experience will resonate with countless small business owners who've watched marketing budgets evaporate with little to show for it. The mystery surrounding paid advertising made it nearly impossible to know whether the traffic was even valuable.
The Agency Dilemma
When paid ads proved inconsistent, Greg looked for alternatives. He quickly discovered that professional SEO services came with a different problem.
"We've gone down multiple roads with consultants, agencies, and that is a scary road for a lot of small businesses to go down," Greg shares. "The numbers that come back are thousands and thousands of pounds and, you know, is this gonna work? It may work, it might not work. And that's always a worry."
For a growing business operating on tight margins, especially one that pays indigenous communities 20% over market value for their coffee, gambling thousands of pounds on uncertain outcomes simply wasn't viable.
The Missing Foundation
Through trial and error, Greg realized something crucial: there's a baseline SEO position that you've got to get right first. Without that foundation, everything else paid ads, social media, even word-of-mouth becomes less effective.
The problem? Traditional SEO is typically done once and then becomes outdated. "We've done SEO once, three years ago. And the game then changes and the search terms change. And so you actually find yourself more and more irrelevant. You're not being found in the same way."
Search behavior evolves. Consumer interests shift. Seasonal trends emerge. Static SEO from years ago can't keep pace with these changes, leaving businesses increasingly invisible in search results.
Enter AI-Powered SEO
When Greg discovered Hike, he found something different: an AI Expert that works continuously in the background, adapting to trends and keeping his website optimized without requiring constant manual effort.
"It's been so refreshing, to be honest with you, so easy to use," Greg says. "The thing that I found most helpful for me is that it's always there and it's reminding me I've gotta do this, I've gotta update that, I've gotta change this. It's fluid in its nature, it's picking up trends and allowing me to put information onto my website that then makes it very findable."
The impact wasn't immediate but after a few months of optimising. "You can almost tell when that happened because the inquiries started coming through again, bam, bam, bam, again and again and again," Greg recalls.
The Christmas Rush: When Being Found Matters Most
For Easy Jose Coffee, the stakes get particularly high during the holiday season. Subscription gifting represents one of their biggest revenue streams, and the Christmas window "is everything" for the business.
"That probably starts ramping up at the end of October, November, if we aren't findable, if people can't find that ethical subscription coffee for their mom, their dad, their aunt, their uncle, their brother or sister, we're just not gonna see it," Greg explains.
With major competitors wielding much larger marketing budgets, Easy Jose needed every possible advantage. Hike's ability to flag what competitors are doing and enable Greg to understand emerging trends and automatically optimize for them proved invaluable. "It's changing things automatically for us on our website, which is really helpful, but to be able to flag a trend and allow us to capitalize on that is brilliant."
Greg, like most small business owners, has limited bandwidth. "I don't have an enormous amount of time, I couldn't possibly spend the amount of time, if I was to try and do this manually, I wouldn't have that time to do it."
During peak season, Greg himself bags coffee alongside his team to meet demand. Having "this little SEO agent running in the background" means one less critical task competing for his attention.
The Competitive Edge
One of Hike's most valuable features is its intelligent keyword research. The platform analyzes your website, learns about your company, and recommends relevant keywords complete with traffic data and relevance scores.
"That was very, very helpful, because all of a sudden, it's taking a lot of that guesswork, that mystery out of it for you," Greg says. "Where you would have to normally go and work over two or three different tools to actually qualify whether that search term is actually relevant for you."
The platform also empowers Greg to respond to market opportunities. When he notices customers refreshing their coffee equipment or showing interest in private label coffee, he can ask Hike to create SEO-optimized blog content addressing those topics. "It'll write a whole blog piece that's SEO relevant, looking at what's happening in the market."
This agility gives Easy Jose an advantage over larger competitors who may lack the same real-time market insight. "I would imagine our competitors don't necessarily have that on the day to day, they're probably having to pay someone quite a lot of money to take care of that for them, and that person doesn't necessarily know what's happening in the coffee business. For me, that's my competitive advantage, because I can see what's happening."
Breaking Through the Noise
The coffee industry is crowded with competitors making sustainability claims shade-grown coffee, bird-friendly coffee that don't always reflect what's truly happening on the ground. Easy Jose's genuine commitment to indigenous communities and rainforest preservation deserved to be heard.
"This has really helped us just to cut through a lot of that noise, be very present, much higher in the rankings, again, for specific things, and yeah, we turn up now," Greg notes. "The inquiries that come through are really regular, and it keeps my team busy."
That consistent inquiry flow has translated directly into business growth. After a challenging start to the previous year, Easy Jose's second half was "stellar." The company came dangerously close to selling out of their indigenous community coffee entirely, with no overlap between seasons for the first time.
The Cost Equation
Perhaps most compelling is economics. Greg describes Hike as costing "less than a good cup of coffee a day."
Compare that to:
- Hundreds of pounds per month on AdWords that may or may not generate qualified traffic
- Thousands of pounds for large agencies, with no guarantee of results
- The opportunity cost of a founder's time trying to manually manage SEO
"You're not having to continuously pay higher and higher amounts competing with the big boys that have much bigger budgets," Greg emphasizes. "And that's enormously helpful."
A Lesson in Foundations
Greg's biggest regret? Not prioritizing SEO sooner. "If we're honest, hand on heart, did we do enough through the end of last year? No, I think we could have done more."
When January and February brought a significant dip in wholesale business, it served as a wake-up call. "It really kicked us up a bum, and so we got ourselves together very, very quickly."
The experience reinforced a fundamental truth: in business, you just don't know when the tough times are coming, so you've got to be ahead of it. Getting your small business SEO sorted is fundamental to success.
The Bottom Line
Greg's advice to other small business owners is unequivocal: "My recommendation would be to just start today. Get your SEO lined up."
He's emphatic about SEO being foundational rather than optional: "I see that as an absolute foundational thing every business owner must and needs to have something like this running for them, because if they don't have it, your business is not gonna be found, full stop. You're living in a digital age."
His metaphor is vivid: "If you haven't got your SEO tied down, you're playing the game without any boots on, and that's no good."
For businesses considering whether to invest in AI-powered SEO, Greg offers this perspective: "If you started today, you'd probably kick in around December time, which is great. So you'll catch the tail end of the Christmas season, but next year, you're on a platform that is just gonna help you go north."
The Bigger Picture
Easy Jose Coffee's story illustrates a broader shift in how small businesses can compete online. You don't need a massive marketing budget or a dedicated SEO team. What you need is smart automation that works continuously, adapts to changing search behavior, and frees you to focus on what you do best whether that's roasting exceptional coffee, providing outstanding service, or any other core business activity.
As Greg puts it simply: "It's like having another member of the team there with you."
In a digital marketplace where visibility equals viability, that extra team member might just be the difference between struggling to be found and consistently attracting the customers who are already looking for exactly what you offer.
About the author
Andy Allen
Co-Founder
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