Amazon SEO Tips: 5 Lessons Sellers Can Take From Great On-Page SEO

By Erik Matthes

Marketplace selling is a dog eat dog world – you have to win the Buy Box, and competition to get there can be tough. Shoppers are looking for fast and cheap deals, and won’t spend too long agonizing over which seller to buy from.

So, how to succeed?

Amazon SEO best practices and tactics can be used by ambitious sellers in order to maximize product listings. Thankfully, we’ve got some Amazon SEO tips to help your products rank better.

First things first: Optimize within your platform in 2017

As we all settle down after the hype of Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s time for merchants and sellers to regroup and get ready for another year of trading in 2017.

Before we launch into these five SEO strategies, it’s important to emphasize that Amazon sellers should be optimizing primarily within the Amazon platform itself. (Nathan Grimm’s awesome blog on Moz from 2014 covers Amazon’s search ranking factors).

If you treat optimizing your Amazon listings EXACTLY like optimizing your website in search engines, you are going to struggle. You have to know the difference – these tactics are transferable, but you should never lose sight of the end goal – more Amazon sales.

With that said, let’s launch into our Amazon SEO tips:

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1. Longtail keywords in product names

Longtail keywords are big in SEO right now and they are useful for Amazon sellers, too.

Shoppers are on a mission and they know what they want – longtail keywords help customers identify your products more accurately. Give your products the best possible chance of ranking and converting by using longtail keywords in your product titles.

• Use accurate and specific keywords in your title – listing product features like colors and sizes will help improve your conversion rates. Amazon is always looking for more conversions because conversions lead to more sales on its platform. By giving Amazon what they want (more sales), you are getting what you want, too (more revenue).

• Put brand names in product titles to help you rank for branded search terms. Be specific.

• Use an Amazon keyword research tool to help you identify keyword opportunities.

2. Unique content

Unlike search engines, Amazon doesn’t penalize duplicate content – but having boring manufacturer content isn’t going to help conversions. 

To stand out:

• Differentiate yourself from competitors by providing more product data. Don’t make people hesitate because they aren’t sure about key product features – always give the user as much as information as you can.

• Provide content that will satisfy both the shopper who wants to make a purchase fast, as well as the browser who is doing market research and will come back later.

Just make sure to avoid huge walls of texts above the fold and use concise language. And, take advantage of formatting features like bullet points and bold text to better sell your words.

3. Competitor analysis

The key to Amazon SEO success is holistic competitive analysis. Don’t just focus on the obvious facts in front of you, delve deeper into the customer experience to get real insights on how to beat your competitors. Ranking within the seller marketplace takes strategic research.

Competitor analysis should be keyword focused. Answer these questions when doing your research:

• What words are your competitors ranking for?

• What keywords are popular?

• How have your competitors approached product titles?

Look outside Amazon to get inspiration, but bring it back to the platform for implementation.

Price is another factor to analyze. While you shouldn’t always compete on price, it can definitely help.

Competitor pricing is a super important factor for making it into the Buy Box – you can use software that will strategically change your prices so that you can win it. Sometimes a cent can make all the difference and it can be worth it – just be careful about selling too low and undercutting profits in the long-term.

Product filtering (colors, sizes) can also make a big difference to conversions – look at how your competitors have approached filtering. Try to offer more flexible options.

Finally, make sure that your products are nearly 100% available – Amazon doesn’t like to rank unreliable sellers.

4. Product imagery & accurate product data

Complete product data and imagery will help increase your conversions. Just like good on-page SEO, Amazon SEO is all about giving users as much information as possible and helping them make the right decisions by being accurate and informative.

Understand that:

• People like to zoom in on images – include high-quality product images on your product pages. Try to offer as many angles as you can.

• Product dimensions must be perfectly clear – returns and negative reviews often come from people thinking the products was a different size.

Don’t let negative reviews and returns impact your seller ranking and always be upfront about a product’s size. A great way to visually communicate product dimensions is to include another item next to your product for comparison.

5. Customer review acquisition

Social proof is increasingly important for B2C and B2B sellers, both online and on Amazon.

• Customer reviews lead to more sales – encourage people to leave feedback by including a review prompt in the parcel, or in your emails. Don’t be too pushy and try to offer an incentive if you can.

• You ideally want to receive both reviews for your products as well as ratings for you as a seller. Customers look at both, and each metric can impact their purchase decision in either direction.

• Don’t be afraid of the occasional negative review or seller feedback. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a 100% positive seller rating might not always increase conversions; people often find that a figure in the 90s is more realistic and truthful. (After all, no one is perfect 100% of the time).

• Bad Amazon reviews are legendary – a really funny, outrageous, or unfair negative review may actually galvanize other customers into “retaliating” with positive reviews.

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There will always be things that keep Amazon sellers up at night, but by following these optimization strategies you can win the Buy Box and succeed as an Amazon seller.

What Amazon SEO tips are you going to be trying out in 2017?

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5 Little-Known Facts About Keywords & Amazon Product Listings That Could Hinder Your Success

By Karon Thackston

Lately I feel like a broken record. It seems the more people I talk with, the more times I hear, “I didn’t know that” when it comes to keyword-related facts about Amazon product listings. Most people are making this way harder than it has to be. In fact, many are seriously wasting space by not following what Amazon clearly lays out in the Seller Central Help section. Let’s take a few minutes to go over some specifics from Amazon so you can start benefiting from the right way to use keywords.

Not using keywords correctly in your product listing copy and not having them formatted the right way in your keyword fields can cost you both traffic and sales.

1. Amazon (Basically) Counts The Title As A Keyword Field

Many people believe that they must put the keywords in the keyword fields and also in their product name/title. Not true. According to Amazon:

In essence, Amazon’s internal search engine works by exactly matching individual words (not phrases) that the customer types into the search box with the individual keywords you put into your product title and keyword fields.

2. The Title And The Keyword Fields Hold Equal Weight

I think the belief that the title holds more weight than the keyword fields comes from people who are flooded with information about ranking well on Google. Title tags hold more weight with Google so, therefore, most people assume the same is true about Amazon. Incorrect.

Amazon specifically tells us not to “waste space” by repeating words across certain fields because they are all included when a shopper conducts a search.

3. You Should Not Enter Entire Keyphrases Into The Keyword Fields

Amazon’s search engine works by combining individual words, not by looking to match entire phrases. There is no need to waste valuable keyword space by entering:

USB computer speaker, USB Bluetooth speaker, USB iPhone speaker, etc.

Instead, remove the repeated words and put them into a logical order.

You end up with a much more compact list of terms that allows more space for relevant search words. Here’s what you end up with after removing the repetitive words:

USB computer speaker Bluetooth iPhone

So, instead of using 63 characters with the original list, now you’ve only used 37, leaving you a lot more room for additional keywords.

4. Amazon Accounts For Stemming, Plurals & Commas

Another common debate is whether you should use commas and plurals in your keyword fields. Seller Central outlines this clearly as well.

Stemming is taking a root word and adding various endings to it. For example:

• diet
• diets
• dieting
• dietary
• dietitian
• etc.

As you see below, Amazon can handle “basic” stemming. I have not found a definition of “basic” but my interpretation is plurals and common other endings such as “ing.” Anything beyond that I would consider adding as another search term.

No commas are needed in your keyword fields. In fact, as stated in the next screen capture, you don’t need any type of punctuation. Amazon’s system ignores commas … all you need is a space between the terms.

5. You Should Not Add Competitor Brands To Your Keyword Fields

There is a common practice of putting other brands into your keyword fields. The assumption is that this is a good way to get more traffic to your page. Actually, putting irrelevant keywords into your fields (including brand names that aren’t yours) is a good way to have your listing removed. Amazon classifies this as keyword bombing and makes it known that your product listing could be deleted from the category it is in if you’re found guilty of using irrelevant keywords to drive traffic.

Having the correct keywords in place and having your keyword fields set up the way Amazon suggests will play a big role in boosting the visibility of your products to qualified customers who are ready to purchase. It isn’t hard to do once you understand the way Amazon works best.

In my ebook, “Amazon Advantage: Product Listing Strategies to Boost Your Sales,” I go through the exact step-by-step process my team and I use when creating product listing copy for clients. After having written Amazon descriptions for years, the Marketing Words team has become experts in what Amazon will and will not allow, and how to develop listings that rank well and convert shoppers into buyers.

You can also download a free cheat sheet with 5 product listing secrets for Amazon sellers.

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HOW AMAZON SEO WORKS

HOW AMAZON SEO WORKS

Though you may think of Google when you think of search engines, when it comes to shopping search engines, Amazon is King.

As stated in The New York Times:

“In 2009, nearly a quarter of shoppers started research for an online purchase on a search engine like Google and 18 percent started on Amazon, according to a Forrester Research study. By last year, almost a third started on Amazon and just 13 percent on a search engine. Product searches on Amazon have grown 73 percent over the last year while searches on Google Shopping have been flat, according to comScore.”

And that was in 2009…

Google and Amazon SEO (search engine optimization) are similar but have some differences. One way that they are similar is that they are both keyword based. This means that both search engines are primarily based off of keywords and your ranking for each specific keyword.

Where Amazon and Google differ is that Google’s SEO bases their ranking of a combination of shares and backlinks while Amazon bases their rankings off of which product has the best conversion rate. In my opinion, Amazon’s ranking system make more sense than Google. Google’s can be mislead fairly easily by having poor quality back links while Amazon’s can be more difficult to hack consistently.

The way you get ranked high in Amazon is through sales… Period. Yes, it can help to target certain keywords, but only if you have the sales. In my experience Amazon will rank your product based on sales first, conversion rate second, and targeted keywords last. Amazon wants to put the best selling products at the top of each search page because they assume that the products that have sold the most and have the most positive reviews have the most satisfied customers. This translate into monetary benefits for Amazon as well; the more sales Amazon can promote, the more fees Amazon collects!

Besides the basics, I have also heard driving outside traffic driven to your listing can increase your Amazon SEO ranking but that is not proven.  Using companies like Zonblast  or giving out a large amount (over 20) samples can increase your ranking in the short term, but if your product does not keep those high sales numbers it will de-rank rapidly. Don’t try to hack the system. You give yourself the best chance of succeeding if you sell the best product at the best price.

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- Awesome! Have you mastered SEO with Amazon yet?