SEO is a crucial part of the equation when it comes to positioning anything that can be found via any type of online search. Like Google or any other search engine, Amazon is the kind of platform that makes or breaks your listings position based on SEO.
Keywords are the name of the game, and finding the right keywords makes all the difference in your success. If you are successful in finding the right keywords that people are searching for, and find creative and appropriate ways to include them in your listing copy, that can have an enormous impact on your sales.
How SEO works on Amazon
The logic behind the way Amazon SEO functions is rather simple.
If you have a number of keywords that are included in your listing and are relevant to your product, people can find them when they type a search term into the Amazon search bar. If your listing is a part of the search for any particular search term, that means that it will be indexed with that term.
You cannot get indexed on search terms that are not relevant to your product or your category. Relevance is the main driving force behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm. The idea is that you want to be indexed on as many relevant keywords as possible.
This means that you need to have a high number of “roads” on Amazon that lead to your listing.
Listing copywriting
In order to understand how to best optimize your Amazon listing for maximum exposure, we need to first go over which parts of the listing are subject to SEO effects.
There are 4 sections of the listing that will allow you to customize the text, giving you the option of including relevant keywords that can be indexed for a ranking.
Some segments of the listing have more of an impact than others and the keywords you gather in your research should be distributed accordingly
You must find a balance between writing compelling copy that is going to showcase the most important aspects of your product, along with an ethical SEO strategy that includes the keywords that will satisfy the algorithm’s standards.
Having all of these factors in mind, here is a listing of the listing elements, starting from the most impactful to the least impactful in terms of SEO.
Product Title – The titles are usually between 80 and 200 characters. This is a high impact SEO element.
Try to include your most relevant keywords here and use as many you can. However, do your best to put the keywords in as professional an order you can manage.
Bullet points – You have 5 bullet points with up to 500 characters each. Here is where you can balance the quality of your copywriting along with space of the bullet points.
You should try and include as many keywords as you can without compromising the way you present your product.
Try to avoid using all of the space, since customers probably won’t bother to read all of it.
Product description – This is considered to be the listing element that has the least amount of bearing on SEO, even though it does have a slight impact.
You have 1500 characters for your product description, however, you need to write that using HTML code. Using HTML allows you to have options such as bold letters and paragraphs.
With your description, you want to focus primarily on putting relevant information about the product and focus less on putting in keywords. If you’re having trouble working out a good description from a customer perspective, you can use an Amazon scraper to find similar products that are drawing in customers for inspiration.
The backend – The backend is a section of your listing which is invisible to shoppers. It’s only there for the sake of the algorithm. You have exactly 250 characters and you can simply enter as many keywords as you wish without having to worry about how the text looks.
Keyword research
Finding the right keywords is essential. Of course, you can simply add the listing copy that makes sense and you will naturally include a decent amount of keywords that will be relevant to your product.
However, the keywords that come to your mind when you think about a product might not be what others think of. In fact, it’s almost guaranteed that there will be keywords needed that you can’t think of on your own.
This is why any experienced seller uses Amazon keyword research tools such as the ones that AMZScout developed.
One of the best sources for keyword research are keywords that other similar products are indexed and ranked on. You can use a tool like the AMZScout Reverse Asin Lookup Tool and simply put in the ASIN of a competitive product and see all of the keywords it’s ranking on and their monthly search volumes.
If you want to do an even deeper dive, you can use a tool like the Amazon Keyword Search and enter any short-tailed keyword and receive all of the long-tailed keywords that include it along with their monthly search volumes.
SEO and organic ranking
As we mentioned earlier, you need to have a keyword included in your listing copy in order to be indexed on it. In other words, your item has to include a specific keyword to show in a search that contains that keyword. However, being indexed rarely means that you are at the top of any search result listing.
You get to the top through getting sales. The more people type in a certain keyword and find your product as the result of that search and purchase it, the higher in the search you will rank.
The best way to raise your organic ranking would be to use PPC on the very same keywords you are using in your listing. The idea is that you need to raise your rankings over time so that you receive more and more organic sales.
Keeping track of your organic ranking is actually crucial and extremely helpful in order to adjust your PPC strategy. A really helpful tool in this regard is the Keyword Tracker that lets you track your ranking over time.
Some helpful tips
Now that you understand the basics of Amazon SEO, here are 2 easy tricks that you can use to even further boost the effects of your listing optimization, and be indexed and ranked on even more keywords.
Use misspelling and foreign language keywords in your backend – As we mentioned before, the backend of the listing is not visible to the customer. This is why it’s the perfect place to include some keywords that would simply be out of place or not make sense in the visible textual elements of the listing.
Remember, you can get ranked and indexed on anything people type into the Amazon search bar. People often make mistakes spelling or typing in their native language.
Use short-tailed keywords in your listing and long-tailed keywords in your PPC.
Considering the fact that most well-established listings on Amazon are indexed on thousands upon thousands of keywords, it should come as no surprise that they do not contain all of them in their listing. You can use the short high scratch volume keywords in the listing and then create PPC campaigns for the longer phrases that contain them.
This way you can rank on all of the keywords from your PPC simply due to the fact that the short-tailed ones are in your listing.
In conclusion, the idea behind properly using SEO is to do proper keyword research and create as many opportunities as you can for your product to become a part of as many search results as possible. The way to do this is not totally obvious and it does require some finesse. This is why you need to be diligent and find every piece of information that you can to give your product the greatest chance of flourishing online.
This post was written by AMZScout Amazon Expert Team. AMZScout is one of the top Amazon research tools for online sellers and has been in the field for more than four years now. We love to share our expertise and identified trends to guide sellers to success.
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