Amazon gave everyone, from major brands to stay-at-home parents, the opportunity to earn a lucrative income from selling goods online. The ability for anyone to just decide to start selling a product using Amazon’s user base of over 300 million shoppers and excellent infrastructure has made eCommerce accessible for millions of users.
The opportunity has lured in sellers from all walks of life, and competition to show up in the first pages of Amazon organic listings has become increasingly more crowded.
In order to stand out from the crowd of similar products in your industry, it means you’ve got to bring your best game if you want to win.
1. Amazon’s Search Engine
Known as A9, Amazon’s search engine has a user-friendly interface that allows sellers to populate all the information about their products. This makes it easy to optimize pages, but A9 has its annoyances as well. A9 is run by a maturing algorithm that is infamous for its unpredictable and frequent updates.
This is why it’s important to stay on top of the latest update and be ready to move quickly when the next one rolls around.
2. The Golden Rule: Focus on Conversion Rates
You may be familiar with the theoretical concept of search engine optimization, but traditional SEO knowledge mainly uses Google as the primary example. This doesn’t mean that traditional SEO tactics won’t work on Amazon; it just means we want to focus on different criteria.
In this case, we want to emphasize the intricacies of Amazon’s search engine. Google built its search engine to take advantage of massive quantities of traffic to sell ads to. Amazon, on the other hand, built their search engine to sell products.
Success for Google means a user found what they were looking for quickly and will have more faith in their search engine to use it again and potentially click on ads. Success for Amazon means a user found a product at a price they wanted and bought it, building credibility in Amazon as an eCommerce platform so that the user will return to buy more products.
Amazon’s search success metrics revolve around revenue and gross margin per search, with optimization goals focusing on improving conversion rates. This means that not only do you want to rank highly on Amazon’s search results page, but you also want the traffic to convert into paying customers. Your pages would then be rewarded, as each conversion makes more money for Amazon.
3. Ranking Factors
Amazon customers primarily use search to find the products they are looking for. They search for a specific keyword that is matched with the search terms for your product. Long-tail keywords could help your product rank better more specific searches, as opposed to a keyword like “shirt.”
The additional ranking factors include price, selection, availability, and sales history. The more a product is selling, the more it tends to show up higher on the results list. This gives you some room to utilize strategies outside of on-page Amazon product optimization to sell more of your products, which will effectively help your product placement.
Everything from social media to email lists can be used to push visitors to your product pages with the aim of improving those five ranking factors.
4. Search Relevant Factors
Since search is the primary method of customers finding your product pages, you need to make sure your product is relevant to their searching needs. You could have exactly what they are looking for, but, if their search for “vintage tortoise Ray-Bans” doesn’t bring them to yours, you will never have the opportunity.
Title
Your product titles are the most important place to include keywords. Not only does a title with relevant keywords help interested traffic find you, it tends to convert at a much higher rate than more ambiguous titles.
Amazon’s suggestion for product title attributes include:
- Material or key ingredient
- Color
- Quantity
- Size
- Brand and description
- Product line
Focus on including the attributes that matter most for your products to avoid keyword stuffing. For example, “Vintage Tortoise Ray-Bans” is descriptive enough (product line, color, brand) for a search instead of “Vintage Plastic Medium Tortoise Ray-Bans.”
Since you want to focus on conversion, an overly descriptive title could send traffic that would otherwise convert elsewhere.
Brand
Customers are very likely to enter a brand name if they have one in mind for their product, so be sure to include your product’s brand name. The brand field pops up on the product page and usually links to other products from the same brand.
Bullets
Bullets provide a quick and easy way for a visitor to speed read through your product’s attributes and make a decision if the purchase is right for them. Include relevant details, as well as targeted keywords, in your bulleted descriptions to get better performance from your Amazon organic listings.
Search terms
These search terms are the five different fields that accept 50 characters each. Head to Amazon’s Search and Browse help page to get an idea of the type of search terms that are most likely to pop up (you need a Seller Central Account for access).
Traditional SEO advice could steer you wrong on this part. You don’t have to repeat words, commas will be ignored, quotation marks are unnecessary keyword limitations, and you don’t have to include common misspellings.
Learn how to rank higher on Amazon.
5. Performance Ranking Factors
Amazon essentially determines its organic listing placements by which products will make them the most money. These factors all revolve around the product’s conversion rate. To see your conversion data in Seller Central, go to Reporters, then Business Reports, then Detail Page Sales and Traffic. The better your conversion rate looks, the more likely you will rank higher in organic listings. Reviews are also a phenomenal way to increase your conversion rate.
Images
Images are also incredibly important to showcase the product. The image requirements page encourages sellers to use images larger than 1000×1000 pixels. Better images can increase customer confidence in your product, and the more purchases you have, the better.
Price
Price is one of the most distinguishing factors of a product for clients. Since Amazon’s rankings are determined by conversion rates, and less expensive products consistently outperform their higher-priced competitors, the tops of the rankings pages are usually occupied by best-selling cheaper options.
Price your goods according to the search results page, but be sure you are still making a profit and that it is worth it for you to stay in business. Consider using an automated repricer like Repricer.com to keep your prices competitive 24/7 and win more Buy Boxes!
