So you have listed your products on Amazon and are expecting some sales to happen? That’s most likely not going to happen unless you do Amazon SEO or Amazon PPC or both to help sell your products.
While Amazon PPC can cost you every time someone clicks on your listing, getting your products ranked organically with Amazon SEO can be a game-changer for your business on Amazon.
As more and more sellers join this largest global e-commerce marketplace, the chances of your products getting found by customers on Amazon is decreasing fast. Therefore, Amazon SEO is critical for every seller and their product listings. Just listing your products on Amazon is no longer enough.
What Is Amazon SEO?
Amazon SEO is the process of optimizing your product listings such that they are both relevant and popular for search queries of your target customers on Amazon.
There are several elements of your product listings that can be optimized for SEO, including Product Title, Description, Images, Reviews and Ratings and more.
How Does Amazon SEO Work?
Amazon SEO works pretty much the same way Google SEO works. Like Google, Amazon also has a search algorithm known as A9 which basically dictates how product listings are ranked for every search query by customers.
However, you must take into account that Amazon cares about the customers and therefore works really hard to provide a simple, easy to use interface for them to make purchases. Customers are the reason both Amazon and the sellers are in business. Therefore, going overboard with optimization can be costly as well.
How To Do Amazon SEO?
Amazon SEO is not rocket science. All you have to do is think like your customers, organize your product listings accordingly and make it easy for them to understand your products and provide them with enough reasons to buy.
Let’s look at two identical products from different sellers, where:
- Version A: Product that doesn’t rank organically and needs Amazon SEO Optimization
- Version B: Fairly optimized for Amazon SEO and ranks top for most search queries
Step By Step Guide To Amazon SEO
Step 1: Research Your Target Keywords
Since the goal is rank on Amazon organically, we will start by identifying target keywords on Amazon itself, by searching like a customer. In the product examples above the primary target keyword is “Exogenous Ketones”. When you start typing this query in Amazon search box, it shows a bunch of keyword suggestions:
Note down the keywords that make sense for your products. For the example products above, all of the suggested keywords appear relevant.
Repeat this step for secondary or related keywords that you might want to target. Looking at our example products, we would ideally like to rank for the following as well:
-
- Exogenous Ketone
- Ketones Supplement
- Ketogenic Diet
- Ketosis
- Hydroxybutyrate
- Beta-Hydroxybutyrate
- Hydroxybutyrate Supplement
Step 2: Optimize Product Title
Product title is the most important element that builds relevance for the target keywords. In our example products, let’s see how the keywords are placed in the product title:
As you can notice above, Product A target only 4 keywords, whereas the Product B targets double the number of keywords and yet reads as natural. By targeting 2x more keywords, Product B has increased its chances of showing up twice as many keyword searches.
Therefore, to optimize product listing titles, focus on:
- Incorporate as many keywords as possible in the product title
- Make sure the product title doesn’t cross the ideal limit of 114-154 characters else the words will hide and it wouldn’t read as natural.
- Try to use the main target keyword and important related keywords as early as possible in the product title.
- Ensure that the product title reads natural and provides sufficient information about the product itself. That being said, you should not try to include irrelevant keywords that may have high search volume but do not define the product.
Step 3: Optimize Product Description
The product description is the next most important area where you can incorporate your target keywords and improve relevance. Let’s look at how the description of our example products is optimized:
Notice how none of the target keywords are used in the description of Product A. Whereas, product B has incorporated 5 of the target keywords in the product description.
Therefore, to optimize product description, focus on:
- Incorporate as many target keywords as possible
- Ensure the target keywords used in product title are also used in the product description, as this emphasizes the relevance
- Try to incorporate keywords earlier in the description to improve relevance
- At the same make, the product description is comprehensive and provides a compelling and accurate product description
- Also, the product description should read natural and users should be able to scan through it to see the highlights (use bullet points and use proper spacing to make it read better).
Step 4: Explain Why Your Product Is Better Than Others
While ranking your products organically on top is one goal achieved, you still have to convince your target customers to buy your products.
Therefore the focus should be to highlight:
- Highlight and explain clearly the value it offers to customers.
- Key differentiators of your product that makes it better than the competition.
- Trust elements, especially if your brand/product range is new, e.g. Guarantees? Better Customer Service? Easy Returns?
- Incentives for customers to switch from your competitors, e.g. Free Shipping? Discount? Lower Price? More Quantity?
Step 5: Use High-Quality Images
Your product images play a key role in converting customers. The focus should be to provide:
- High-quality images of your products, preferably on a clear background (following Amazon’s guidelines).
- Provide more images that show/highlight all aspects of the product, use brand images/logos to add trust and descriptive images that explain the product features to add clarity.
Step 6: Get More Sales
Amazon’s A9 algorithm tends to favor products with more number of sales and rewards them with higher rankings. This naturally makes sense as well. If a greater number of customers have bought the product that clearly tells Amazon that the product is good and therefore Amazon decides to rank it higher. After all, Amazon is trying to sell more products on its platform right?
If you are just starting out on Amazon, it would definitely help to do some targeted Amazon PPC Ads to increase your sales. We actually recommend running Amazon PPC Ads as long as your ACoS is profitable because Amazon PPC and Amazon SEO actually complement each other as sales increases.
New to Amazon PPC Advertising? Feel free to ask for a Free Proposal and our Amazon PPC specialists would be glad take a look at your products and provide you an Amazon PPC Proposal with customized plan and strategies to win on both PPC and Organic fronts.
Step 7: Get More Ratings and Reviews
Positive Ratings and Reviews also contribute to organic rankings. Think of these as backlinks. More positive ratings and reviews mean the product is more popular/better than the other sellers and therefore should be ranked higher.
These 7 steps to Amazon SEO can greatly help improve the organic rankings of your products. All of these are white hat Amazon SEO techniques that focus on improving the relevance and popularity of your product listings.
Time to optimize your Amazon Product listings for top rankings and increase your sales with Amazon PPC Advertising: Download our Free Amazon PPC Guide
