The title of a product on Amazon carries a lot of weight when it comes to organic rank and click-through rates, and if your listing isn’t in step with the official style requirements, the upcoming Amazon policy enforcement should motivate you to make some changes.
Amazon recently announced that on July 22 it will be “suppressing ASINs from Amazon Search that violate Amazon’s title guidelines.” According to the announcement, the reason behind this new enforcement is that titles that don’t comply with Amazon’s guidelines “result in a poor customer experience.”
As shown in the news release above, the announcement mentions some specific requirements:
No promotional language can be used, such as “free shipping” or “100% quality guaranteed.”
Other examples would be “Best Seller” or “Hot Item.”
No non-readable characters can be used, such as HTML code.
The length of a title can’t exceed 200 characters. Titles must include “product identifying information,” which describes what the product is, such as a garlic press or first aid kit.
Although not mentioned in the announcement, the Amazon Style Guide also contains a number of further requirements, such as prohibiting the use of all caps or special characters (such as ! or $.)
No one wants their business disrupted, so it’s important to understand the effect of what this new level of Amazon policy enforcement may have on your brand, and then take some practical steps to ensure you can maintain your visibility and sales.
What This Means for Amazon Sellers
The most important element of a product listing is its title, and having it optimized for organic search is a vital part of gaining visibility under any conditions.
The “suppression from search” for those who violate the title guidelines is open to interpretation, but the announcement indicates that this suppression would actually be a removal from search entirely.
Amazon mentions that if a product title is penalized, “[o]nce the issue is fixed, we will remove the search suppression and the ASIN will appear back on Amazon search.”
From this statement, the penalization wouldn’t be a matter of your product taking a drop in organic ranking and be languishing many pages deep in a search. It would be an outright elimination from organic search, and the effect on your product’s visibility and sales would bring your business to a halt.
Considering the amount of products that exist in Amazon’s marketplace, how quickly they will be able to roll out this tighter enforcement is uncertain. It likely won’t happen immediately, yet ensuring your title is compliant with the style guide so that your product remains searchable should be your current top priority.
Getting Your Listing Ready for Compliance
To avoid losing visibility, ranking, and sales, we’ve provided a list of crucial steps for becoming compliant with the title guidelines.
In case you aren’t clear on the guidelines or need access to them, we’ve created a downloadable spreadsheet, Amazon Style Guides by Category. It breaks down what the title counts have previously been for each category and provides links to the style guides for each category. The announcement states title character counts cannot exceed 200 characters, so it remains to be seen if certain categories will continue to be limited to 50 characters.
Another requirement in some categories is that businesses must include their brand name in their product titles. Although this helps promote your brand, it essentially restricts the character limit even more, forcing business to balance visibility, precision, and helpful information.
How To Stay Compliant
Before the deadline arrives, follow these five tasks help you stay compliant and avoid any issues:
1. Access your style guide from our spreadsheet and track down the category-specific limitations for your title. Find the exact character count and if you’re exempt from having to include your brand name. Keep in mind that Amazon updates style guides regularly, so be sure to stay up-to-date.
2. Write a new title, staying within the new limit for your category and including your brand name, if required. Our tool Listing Builder can help you quickly devise a new one and move any previous info from your title into your bullet points.
3. Set up organic rank notifications for a particular keyword in Keyword Manager. Go to the Notification Settings, and under Rank Change Notifications, choose to receive messages based on whether the rank increases or drops, or only if it drops. You can then specify how high or low you want the rank positions to be and in this instance you should set wide parameters for the notifications. The tool will then message you if your organic rank changes after the new policy goes into effect. (You can also receive notifications on your Sponsored Rank, as shown in the GIF below.)
4. Set up buy box and Best Seller Rank notifications in Competitor Intelligence for your ASINs. If any changes occur, we send an alert to keep you informed. Using CI, you can track keywords a competitor is targeting and indexed for, and see the keywords’ organic rank. You can then choose to receive change alerts for the keywords’ ranking. This can occur on an hourly basis, as shown below.
5. If notified that your ASIN is affected, implement your new title and bullets to your product listing. After you make this update, Amazon will re-index your listing. As a result, you’ll temporarily see a drop in your organic ranking. But based on your sales history, reviews, and traffic, you’ll see your rank resume its position.
Stay Compliant, Stay Successful
The recent announcement regarding titles has received a variety of different reactions. And many sellers may be asking why it took Amazon so long to enforce its own policy. No matter how you feel, ensuring your title meets Amazon’s policy requirements safeguards your listing. Since visibility remains crucial, avoiding penalization and a loss in visibility helps maintain your sales opportunities.
For any help getting in step with Amazon’s product title guidelines, contact us at service@viral-launch.com. Our team ensures your product listing complies with Amazon’s style guide and remains optimized to increase your visibility, conversions, and business growth.
We are taking a deep dive into the foundation of every successful strategy on Amazon: keyword research.
When looking to private label a product on Amazon, it’s extremely evident that the markets are flooded. Now more than ever, it can be an incredibly difficult feat to drive sales for a new product with no reviews and no sales history. That said, there is still a (literal) wealth of opportunity in the Amazon space for savvy sellers who package a well developed strategy with their product offering.
At Viral Launch, we’ve seen one recurring fundamental reason for a product’s failure on Amazon… lack of strategy. It’s not good enough to source a product, throw up a listing, and wait for the sales, and (perhaps unfortunately) focusing on sourcing a product that’s objectively ‘different’ or ‘better’ than your competition doesn’t matter much when you’re given one image and around 100 characters to draw the attention of shoppers.
Everything on Amazon comes down to strategy, and strategy is the result of thorough research. Sourcing the right product and ensuring that it’s positioned correctly in the market is the key to driving success on Amazon. While we have recently published two lengthy posts which cover how to generate product ideas and how to launch and rank products, due to ever increasing importance, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the foundation of every successful strategy on Amazon: keyword research.
The Strategy Behind a Well Crafted Listing
It’s important to recognize that while many people think of Amazon as more of a digital store, the reality is that Amazon.com is first and foremost a search engine. For this reason, when creating a product listing, it’s important to understand that your written content must serve dual purposes.
The first purpose is to produce an attractive listing. Like an advertisement for your product, you need to ensure that you’re using persuasive language and providing a value proposition to help sell your product. If your content doesn’t make sense, doesn’t read attractively, or doesn’t adequately explain the tangible value of the product, shoppers will inevitably be inclined to choose a different product.
The second purpose of your listing is to appeal to Amazon’s search engine. Because your product is inevitably found through customer search queries, ensuring that you’re understanding the keywords that shoppers are using to find your product (and understanding how to prioritize them in your listing) is critically important for driving success. With this, diversifying your keywords as much as possible helps you to index within the results of more searches, thus widening your listing’s potential visibility.
Ultimately, a well optimized listing (a balance between keyword rich content and sales language) is the cornerstone of a successful product. If you focus too heavily on making a persuasive appeal to your shoppers, there is a good chance that you’ll end up limiting the quantity of searches for which your product will be indexed. On the other hand, if you focus too heavily on overloading your listing with high value keywords, it may show up in more searches but it’s likely that the product’s conversion will be low. Even if you can get your listing in front of people, if it doesn’t read well, or draw people in, you’re not going to be able to maximize your sales perspective.
Great listing content is a fusion between art (sales language) and science (keyword research). The art of this equation is something that comes from understanding your product and the benefits, differentiating factors, and qualities that can persuade buyers. The science comes from market research, data analysis, and in most cases, a quality set of tools to help your pursuit.
This article will be addressing the science of keyword research.
Keyword Research
While the purpose of this article is educational and not a sales pitch, and while there are several tool suites that can be utilized to help you conduct research, this article will be referencing the Viral Launch research tools for ease of reference.
While some of this should even be done prior to sourcing a product, when beginning to analyze keyword markets, Keyword Research should be the foundational reference point for building your listing content. To start, you’ll want to search for your product’s primary keyword. This is logically the keyword that you would search if you were looking to buy a product in your market. From there, Keyword Research will populate a list of associated keywords along with key metrics such as search volume, relevancy score, etc.
This list of keywords of populated keywords contains many of the important search terms that you should seek to prioritize in your content. Because Keyword Research is algorithmic, however, you’ll need to review these results to pull out the best keywords to include.
For starters, sort your results by search volume. This should give you the most competitive keywords in your market. These are the terms being searched most heavily by shoppers and have the potential to drive a large volume of sales. That said, they’re also going to be difficult and expensive to rank for, meaning that while it’s important to include these terms in your content, you’re going to want to target some quick-win keywords as well that can help you to drive sales early on.
It’s important to note that you’ll also want to remove any ‘branded’ keywords from consideration. For instance, if you’re selling socks, keywords like ‘Nike socks’ may have high search volume, but since you’re not Nike, these keywords can’t be targeted by your content.
Once you have identified a good selection of high volume keywords, it’s important to now look for keywords with high opportunity. A high opportunity keyword is a keyword that is not included in the content of many/any competing listings. Within Keyword Research, opportunity is scored from 0-1000. Keywords with a 1000 opportunity score means that no listings on page one have this exact phrase keyword included in their content. The lower the score, the more listings include this term.
To identify high opportunity keywords, it’s recommended that you sort by opportunity score, and look for any keyword with an opportunity of 750-1000 with a search volume of at least 1000 searches per month. There are typically plenty of keywords that have high opportunity, but if no one is searching for them, there isn’t much potential to drive sales. Because each section of a listing has a character limit, it’s important to prioritize keywords that have better potential to drive sales (i.e. keywords that have search volume).
Finally, performing a quick review of high priority and high relevancy keywords will help you to catch any other terms that may have been missed. Particularly, priority is determined by assigning a score based on search volume and opportunity, meaning that it will help to show keywords that are easy to rank for while having some degree of customer audience.
It’s also recommended that you repeat this process by searching several high volume keywords within Keyword Research. Though the majority of the keywords should overlap, ensuring that you’re not missing any other valuable keywords can be helpful.
As you collect these keywords, you are able to move them over to your keyword bank, allowing you to create your listing within Listing Builder. You’re also able to copy and/or export your list to a CSV file. It’s highly recommended that you keep an organized record of your targeted keywords for reference for tracking and advertising purposes.
Competitor Intelligence
While using Keyword Research is a great way to understand your market and build a collection of high volume keywords, it’s also important to understand your product market within the context of the competition. By understanding what keywords your competitors are running ads to, driving sales through, prioritizing, and/or ignoring, you can begin to build a strategy around how to position your product within a market.
With Competitor Intelligence, you can review your competition’s keyword data and use their data to your advantage. Through keyword analysis on several market competitors, you can construct keyword lists based on a few different considerations.
Primarily, Competitor Intelligence can show you what keywords are driving sales for your competition. The tool is able to present any listings, organic ranking for each keyword, ad placements, and keyword search volume, allowing you to review and monitor the keywords that correlate to a bulk of your competitor’s sales. Through this, you can start to build a profile of the keywords that drive the most sales for listings in your market and prioritize your listing content accordingly.
Additionally, using Viral Launch’s Reverse ASIN 2.0 technology, Competitor Intelligence will also show relevant keywords for which your competitor is not indexed and/or ranked for. Comparable to opportunity score, if there is little to no search volume for these keywords, they may not be worth prioritizing. However, if your top competitors are missing a few quality keywords in their listing, it may create opportunity for you to drive sales with little competitive resistance. Especially early on in the life of your listing, understanding how to drive easy sales by capitalizing on the missed opportunities of your competition can be a useful tactic to begin building visibility, sales history, and reviews. This data has the power to help you drive sales through opportunities that your competitors don’t even know that they’re missing.
Ultimately, through viewing the keywords that your competitors are using to drive sales, as well as the overlooked keywords which have the potential to drive sales, you can ensure that you’re not missing a single opportunity!
Listing Analyzer
For Existing Product Listings:
If you have an existing product listing that you’re seeking to improve, the best strategy is to start by using Listing Analyzer. By linking your Seller Central account to your Viral Launch account, you’re able to seamlessly pull your product catalog into the Viral Launch interface.
From the Listing Analyzer tab in your Viral Launch dashboard, you can run an analysis on your product. Our software will pull metrics and keyword data from your listing, presenting you with an overview of your product in comparison to the market, along with a listing quality score. Through this tool, your listing’s images, reviews, competitiveness and copy are analyzed and you are also provided with a list of competitive and comparative products.
Additionally (and most importantly within the context of this article), Listing Analyzer will also provide you with an extensive list of keywords which are relevant to your product market. This data is relatively similar to Keyword Research (with regards to the metrics provided), however you are also able to review whether or not the keyword is being utilized in your listing.
From this list, you are able to select keywords that are relevant to your listing and move them into Keyword Manager to monitor, track, and/or incorporate into your listing.
On a final note, it’s important to make sure that you’re putting your best foot forward when it comes to optimizing your listing with the strongest keyword spread possible. That said, if you are working with an older product, particularly if it’s selling relatively well, changing your listing content can create a ‘reshuffling’ of your keywords within Amazon’s system. Because of this, you can sometimes see a short term detriment to ranking and sales as your listing is reincorporated into Amazon’s SEO structure. Therefore, while it can be beneficial in the long term to fully optimize your listing, you may need to weigh this against the potential setbacks to determine if and when to change your content. Ultimately, while this can be a good tactic for working with a new listing, altering your content becomes more complicated as your listing ages.
For a New Product Listing:
If you are beginning your keyword research prior to having an active listing on Amazon, you will want to begin your process by building out your keyword list through the use of Keyword Research and Competitor Intelligence.
Once you have a listing on Amazon, it’s advantageous to run your product listing through Listing Analyzer to further ensure that you’re maximizing your keyword/ranking potential.
While you do need an existing listing in order to run an analysis, it’s worth it to think of Listing Analyzer once your product listing is up on Amazon as a final check to verify listing quality. At this point, you can review the provided keyword data through the tool and make any final adjustments if you notice any missed terms.
Note: If you are running an analysis on a brand new listing, it’s unlikely that you will have a perfect score, as review quantity, revenue generation, etc. in comparison to the market factor in to the assessment. While you want to note these data points as a means of knowing what’s needed to maximize competitiveness for your market, early on, the best use of Listing Analyzer is to verify your keyword list and review competing and complementary products for the purpose of product targeted advertising.
Keyword Manager
Now that your keyword bank is compiled (and hopefully added to your listing), it’s time to start benefiting from your research. Keyword Manager helps you to track your keyword bank and understand how and where you’re driving sales.
Considering it’s almost impossible to go a single day without encountering the immense reach of Amazon, it’s obvious that the largest e-commerce marketplace is also an insanely saturated e-commerce marketplace. While employing thorough keyword research into your listing is a critically important element of success, it is very unlikely that you will magically appear at the top of the search results. Amazon favors products that perform and as a new product, you have to prove that you can get sales in the market in order to gain visibility. Driving sales is not always easy, especially with a new product with no reviews or sales history, but with the proper strategy around marketing and advertising, you can begin to generate sales and improve keyword ranking (thus driving organic visibility).
By utilizing Keyword Manager to track your relevant keywords, you can monitor your progress to better determine which keywords are producing the most growth, and which keywords you’re having more trouble with. You can use this data to develop a strategy to continue building momentum, and you can ensure that you’re not missing a beat by establishing notifications and hourly tracking on your most critical search terms. If your ranking fluctuates, or your ad positioning changes, you’ll be able to respond quickly and efficiently to address the situation.
While Keyword Manager isn’t explicitly a keyword research tool, it’s a great resource for helping you to fully capitalize on your keyword strategy. With the ability to review organic and sponsored positioning, prioritize by opportunity and search volume, and track your movements in your market, Keyword Manager gives you the tools you need to harvest the fruits of your (keyword research) labor.
Conclusion:
As more sellers enter the Amazon marketplace at an accelerating pace, the importance of thorough research and a deep understanding of your product market is crucial for driving success. Robust keyword research is the cornerstone of any successful strategy for launching a product on Amazon. Developing a well prioritized bank of keywords helps you to establish a wide breadth of searches through which you can gain visibility and sales, while also enabling a deeper understanding of how to use PPC and marketing to effectively grow your product.
Ensuring that you have the broadest range of keywords possible, and knowing how all of your keywords interact with the market informs you on how and where to drive sales and ranking. Through adequate keyword research, you can understand where your competition drives sales, which keywords generate the most sales for your market, and which keywords you can most easily gain ranking traction for.
The importance of performing your due diligence when performing keyword research cannot be overstated. Implementation of this process will ensure that you’re well positioned to take on the competition and achieve success with your business. To learn more about how to successfully launch and rank products, check out our blog post here.
Forget Reverse ASIN Lookups, and close out your keyword spreadsheets. Imagine inputting your ASIN into an algorithm that, in return, gives you a full list of your product’s most important keywords… all with no human intervention.
Introducing ARCS™ – ASIN Relevance and Conformity Semantics – the world’s first technology that can programmatically determine an Amazon product’s main keywords.
Why It’s Important to Know Your Product’s Main Keywords
You may think you already know all of your product’s most important keywords. But how can you be so sure? What if you’re just missing a few keywords with significant search volume… who cares, right? Actually, neglecting even one relevant keyword in your copy can result in hundreds of lost sales.
When you include a word in your product listing, Amazon indexes, or catalogs, that word for your product. When a keyword is indexed, Amazon is recognizing that term as relevant. Where and how you use that keyword determine how relevant that word is for your product.
As shoppers purchase through your listing, Amazon starts to prioritize the keywords in your copy. Their algorithms determine each keyword’s relevancy, which has a direct impact on where your product ranks in the search results. With thousands (or even tens of thousands) of Amazon shoppers searching for multiple different related keywords each day, it is your job to get your product in front of as many of those searches as possible.
In order to rank and be found by a shopper, that search term must be relevant to your product. In order for that keyword to be relevant, it must be indexed. And in order for the keyword to be indexed, it must be included in your copy.
To ensure that your product is found by as many shoppers as possible, and to even make sales while you’re sleeping, it is imperative that you start by knowing every single important keyword for your product. Important keywords are those that will lead customers to purchasing your products, which means you need to make sure they’re all highly-relevant.
How to Determine Your Product’s Main Keywords
Identifying the main keywords for your product is not a new concept. In fact, there are entire companies built upon helping sellers to do just that. Let’s say your brand sells a grill brush on Amazon. Today, there are two ways to identify your brush’s most important keywords: manually and programmatically.
Manually Finding Keywords
This first process involves researching your product’s main keywords (that you’re identifying yourself) along with your top competitors’ listings to compile a full list. Using this method, you will often start by using logic to determine “grill brush” as one of your main keywords. You may then run “grill brush” through a keyword research tool to return relevant words that relate to your seed term. Of course, some keyword tools are going to return better results than others based on their algorithm formulations (our favorite is Keyword Research). But no matter how good your keyword research tool is, it can only give results based upon your input. So although your product is in fact relevant to your “grill brush” search, the tool is not understanding your specific product.
Next, you may choose to run a Reverse ASIN Lookup, or even multiple of them, to see what words your top competitors are using in their listings. This helps you understand how other grill brush sellers are prioritizing words, but a Reverse ASIN Lookup’s most obvious issue is that it misses out on keywords that your competitors are not using. If they’re all missing a highly relevant term with decent search volume, you will be missing it too.
While you can gather a great list of keywords through a manual discovery process, you’re not guaranteed to capture them all. Not to mention, the process can be really time and labor intensive. To save time for more important entrepreneur duties, many Amazon sellers are turning to Automated Keyword Discovery.
Programmatically Finding Keywords
Getting started with this method, you don’t even need to identify what your product is. Whether you call it a grill brush, a wire scraper, or a thingamajig, the automatic keyword discovery process is going to identify keywords based on your ASIN itself.
To get your complete list of the product’s most important keywords, simply identify the ASIN you want to run, and let the algorithms go to work for you. The result is a truly comprehensive list of that specific product’s most relevant keywords, all compiled with no human intervention. On the market, there is only one technology powerful enough to successfully complete this automated keyword discovery process – ASIN Relevance and Conformity Semantics, or ARCS™.
What is ARCS™ and How Does it Work?
ARCS™ stands for ASIN Relevance and Conformity Semantics. Formulated through months of hard work by the data science team at Viral Launch, this proprietary technology evaluates up to 10,000 keywords and 500,000 products to determine an ASIN’s most important keywords – with no human intervention.
Far superior to any form of a Reverse ASIN Lookup, ARCS™ takes an ASIN and understands the entire market to programmatically return a near-perfect list. Shedding hours of manual work and any human error that comes along with it, ARCS™ gives you a full list at the click of a button.
How ARCS™ Works to Find a Product’s Main Keywords
We would love to walk you all the way through the nitty-gritty just so you could see how much processing occurs as ARCS™ works its magic. But in order to preserve the algorithm’s secret sauce, we’ll explain the process at a bird’s eye view.
Starting with an individual product, ARCS™ determines candidates for main keywords using a variety of reliable Amazon sources. Using a proprietary discovery process, the algorithm then works to identify up to 10,000 potentially-relevant keywords (we experimented with up to 1 million keywords but didn’t see an improvement past 10,000 in terms of relevancy plus search volume). Through a complex prioritization process involving a variety of critical scores, ARCS™ determines the product’s five main keywords.
ARCS™ can then confidently work with the product’s newly-identified main keywords. The algorithm runs the entire process again, now with a more reliable entry point, to ensure the highest level of accuracy for the list as a whole. To account for additional factors such as competition, ARCS™ runs its secret sauce to then deliver a precise list of up to 1,000 of your product’s most important keywords.
ARCS™ in Action – Try it for Yourself
Don’t take our word for it. Run your product through ARCS™ and discover just how powerful this set of algorithms can be for your business. At the click of a button, you can literally have every important keyword at your fingertips. Changes in the market? Don’t dig through the archives for those messy keyword spreadsheets. Simply re-run the algorithm for an updated list.
Currently, the only tool on the market powered by ARCS™ is Listing Analyzer by Viral Launch. To run your product through the ARCS™ technology, simply import your catalog and click the Analyze Listing button. After the algorithm processes hundreds of thousands of data points, you’ll receive a tailored list of keywords to include in your copy and your ads… all without lifting a finger.
Amazon Enhanced Brand Content (EBC) is one of the most customizable tools in a private label seller’s marketing toolbox. With EBC, you can add your own creative touch to your product listing to build brand recognition with high quality photos, graphics and video.
Two of the largest challenges for private label Amazon sellers are differentiation and instilling buyer confidence. First, your product must somehow stand out from the thousands of others in that market. Second, you must convince online shoppers that your product will fulfill their expectations, even though they won’t have the chance to see the product for themselves until after it arrives at their doorstep. Luckily for private label sellers, Enhanced Brand Content can help with both.
What is Enhanced Brand Content on Amazon?
Enhanced Brand Content is a simple way to visually enhance the product descriptions of specific ASINs in your catalogue. EBC is one of several marketing services available to private label sellers, though it is currently only available for sellers who are enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. EBC is still in a “promotional period” and is free to use – though that may change in the future.
Enhanced Brand Content is your chance to share special details, additional information and instructions that do not fit in your main listing. EBC is especially useful for complex products, new or innovative products, and products in highly competitive markets.
Your EBC differentiates your brand from other brands in your market – generic and name-brand alike. Using consistent colors and fonts across your registered ASINs will increase brand recognition and provide a more coherent look across your catalogue. If you are competing in a crowded market, well-designed EBC could be the deciding factor between you and your competitors.
Consider the example below. Stackable steamer inserts is a fairly competitive market with not a lot of variation between products. Which stackable steamer insert do you think buyers will choose, if everything else is equal: one with a block of text, or one that visually informs the shopper through the use of infographics, cooking tips, and in-depth instructions for care? Any way that you can set your listing apart from competitors can help you claim more market share.
Though the copy is not indexed by Amazon, EBC indirectly helps your ranking by providing extra details that make shoppers feel more confident about purchasing, thereby driving sales, increasing conversions, and potentially decreasing the number of returns. To help your listing’s organic rank, remember to ensure complete optimization of your title and bullet points and add back-end keywords. EBC is indexed by Google, so do not forget to add alt text to images within your EBC modules to help rank higher in Google Search results.
How to Add Enhanced Brand Content to Your Amazon Listing
EBC can only be added to ASINs registered under your brand. In Seller Central, access Enhanced Brand Content under the Advertising menu and enter the SKU of the product you wish to enhance. If you choose a parent SKU, all variations will show the same EBC content.
Choose one of the 5 pre-made EBC templates or create a template of your own. Modules include text, images, images with text overlay, comparison charts, sidebars, highlights, and specifications.
You can use up to 7 modules per template, but you are not required to use them all. It is far more important to provide high quality relevant photos and informational content.If you decide not to use all 7, Amazon will automatically reformat the content to make up for the extra space.
Not every template will work with the type and amount of content you have. For example, if your product has detailed instructions, choose a text-based module. If you have several infographics you’d like to use, choose a template that favors large images. You can always preview how the content will look and make any necessary changes before submitting to Amazon.
Consider using an infographic instead of a text block to share information in a visually engaging way.
Photos or graphics must be equal to or smaller than the maximum size allowed per module. Text can be bold, italicized or underlined, and can include bullet points and numbered lists. Some content will cause Amazon to reject your submission, including but not limited to:
Contact information including addresses or numbers
Blurry or low quality images
Images with unreadable text
Warranties, guarantees, boastful comments or promotional claims (like “cheapest pepper grinder on Amazon” or “#1 best selling item”)
Use of copyright, trademark or registered symbols
Grammatical errors, punctuation errors, misspellings, strings of all-capitalized words
Any violations to Amazon’s Terms of Service or Selling Policies
Amazon will approve or deny your submission within 7 business days. If denied, Amazon will include suggestions on how to edit your content to remove violations. If approved, your EBC will go live on the product’s detail page. You can submit up to 20 templates for review at a time.
Adding Video to Enhanced Brand Content
As of summer 2018, brand registered sellers can also add video content to brand registered ASINs. Video content appears with the main images tiles at the top of the listing. Short videos are a great opportunity to assure buyers that your product looks and acts as you say it will, and to share information with buyers who will not take the time to scroll down for the rest of the EBC. You do not need EBC in order to add video, but the more information you can provide buyers, the better.
Add video the same way you would add EBC: choose an SKU under Enhanced Brand Content in Seller Central, and then click Upload Video. Amazon may reject your video submission if it goes against their content policy. Once your video is approved, it will appear in your product listing in a few hours.
Final Thoughts on Amazon EBC
There is no single marketing strategy that guarantees overnight success, but combining Amazon Enhanced Brand Content with other proven marketing strategies can help you perform better in the long run.
Here at Viral Launch, we want to provide you with all the information you need to become a successful Amazon seller. For more on Amazon selling strategies, we encourage you to subscribe to our blog, check out our Youtube channel, and listen to our Follow the Data podcast.
The saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words, and it holds true even when it comes to Amazon product photography.
Photos make a much bigger impact on shoppers than even the most eloquently written product description. The majority of information transmitted to the brain is visual, and everything else tends to fall by the wayside. Online shoppers might remember bits and pieces of the information they read, but photos make a lasting impression that keeps them on the page.
Because photos make such a big impact, the internet is overloaded with tons of visual content. This means that to stand out from the crowd, you need to produce unique images that capture the attention of shoppers and help them engage with your product like they would in any store on the shelf.
If you’re thinking about selling on Amazon or have already started and are looking for a way to set yourself apart, product photography is a great place to start. As you begin thinking about the best images to represent your product and brand, here are 5 important things you need to know about Amazon product photography.
1. Types of Product Photography
Many of our more experienced sellers are most likely aware of the types of photos that make up a photo set. But to be sure we’re all on the same page, let’s go over the basics:
Product only images – these are clean-cut images that appear on an all-white background and, as the name suggests, include only the product. Product only images show off the main features and details of the product. Amazon requires that the first image in your set, or the “hero” image, for any product be a product only image. It’s usually a good idea to include more than one of these images in your photo set that shows the product from different angles or even up close, so shoppers get the full effect.
Lifestyle images – this type of photo shows the product in context, placing it in an environment where it would most likely be used. Oftentimes, these photos include models using the product to give it further context. Lifestyle images help shoppers to visualize the product in their own lives, exciting them about the product and nudging them to add to cart.
2. Amazon Product Photography Requirements
For consistency across listings, Amazon does require that all the photos in your set meet a few technical guidelines:
Images must be in TIFF (.tif/.tiff), JPEG (.jpeg/.jpg), GIF (.gif) or PNG (.png) format
Image pixel dimensions of at least 1000 or larger in either height or width is preferred
Images should use either sRGB or CMYK color mode
Hero images have their own specific requirements since they are the first images shoppers see when browsing in the search results. These requirements include:
Photo must be on a plain white background (RGB 255, 255, 255)
Image must not contain extra products that may confuse the shopper
Image should not contain any text or graphics
The product should fill 85% of the image frame
Image should not be an illustration or rendering of the product
Photo should not show any excluded accessories
No logos, watermarks or inset images should be included in the hero image
Secondary images, including feature and lifestyle images, need only follow the technical requirements. Graphics and composite photos can be used on secondary images to further detail product features, but ensure they are not overwhelming or confusing to shoppers.
One other thing to consider is that Amazon displays all images in a square format, regardless of the shape of the original photo. Amazon automatically adds white padding around any long, rectangular photo to make it square. This could make the product appear smaller, making it difficult for customers to get a good view. For this reason, when completing your photography, it’s best to display the item or items in a way that can be easily cropped into a square image.
3. Product Photography Affects Clicks and Conversions
Before you hurry the photography process and upload unprofessional images that don’t adequately represent your product, you may be interested to know that product photography directly affects clicks and conversions. Some shoppers may even consider product photos to be more important in the buying process than spelled-out product information. Good product photography will help boost clicks and conversions by:
Making a good first impression – People form a first impression in a fraction of a second. On Amazon, the hero image is the first thing a shopper sees when browsing. Most shoppers are not choosing which items to click on by reading the title, but are instead making quick decisions based on the images they are seeing.
Engaging customers – A high-quality image will grab the attention of shoppers and make them more likely to stick around on your listing. Photos draw the customer in and encourage them to learn more about your product, which when paired with engaging product information, will nudge them to purchase.
Increasing the perceived quality of your product–Badly lit or unprofessional photos can quickly make your product seem cheap and undesirable. Even if you are selling a high-end product, a grainy product image will bring down the perceived value of your brand and customers will not bother sticking around to learn more.
Reinforcing your branding–Photos should always tie in with your overall branding goal. Generic or photoshopped images tell shoppers nothing about your brand or product. Presenting a cohesive brand across all marketing fronts will reinforce a professional image and make shoppers more confident in purchasing from you.
4. A Good Photo Evokes Emotion
With countless brands and products already available for purchase, online competition is fierce. In order to convert sales, you have to do more than just show your product in good lighting. An effective photography set will also evoke emotions and set a mood that connects with shoppers.
Many of the Amazon product photos do not do their jobs of advancing nonverbal communication. Your product photography should speak to customers and draw them in instead of being just another image they glance at and then ignore. Good photos will inspire shoppers to take action and buy your product.
Raising emotions in shoppers can be achieved by using appropriate lighting, product placement and props in your photography, much like the photos below. These images work to actively engage customers by illustrating how the product should be used. Each of these images sets the mood for the customers. Shoppers can imagine using the product to make a refreshing drink on a hot summer day. And all of this is achieved by utilizing natural light and summertime fruits.
5. Professional Photographers Know Best
While it is possible to create engaging and high-quality product images on your own, a professional photographer will have more experience and the right equipment to get the job done correctly. Especially if you’re working on expanding your business, it’s often best to outsource listing elements like this to the experts. At Viral Launch, our team of photographers has worked with hundreds and hundreds of clients to produce high-quality product photography for Amazon listings.
Viral Launch photographers work directly with clients to ensure images accurately represent the product and the unique branding of each business. If you’re just getting started in the Amazon game or have little to no photography experience, hiring a professional might be the best choice for you. This will ensure you get high-quality photos that work to convert sales.
Build Your Business
Product photography is just one component of a successful Amazon listing. While shoppers base many of their purchase decisions on images, you still need the rest of the components in order to make money. On Amazon, you must do everything well in order to do anything well. Consult with the professionals at Viral Launch to learn more about how photography and listing optimizations work hand in hand to promote sales of your Amazon product. We’re here to help guide you on the path to Amazon success!
Keyword Matter. YOU matter. How you USE a keyword MATTERS. Placement, frequency, plurals, hyphens – there are so many intricacies to keywords and listing optimizations on Amazon, and it’s INCREDIBLY important to get them all right. Getting it right means you’ve checked that box off your list – that you can now focus on improving and implementing changes across other mediums. Getting it wrong means you’ll be fighting an uphill battle until it DOES get fixed. In this episode, we’re breaking down 5, updated, data-driven, data-based simple tips to improve your listing optimizations. These are insights that you can take, and instantly go and implement. We’ve seen conversions increase from following these. So listen in, take notes, and take action. Let’s get started.
When it comes to creating a new product listing on Amazon, knowing which keywords to include and where to place them within your Amazon listing can make all the difference. Keywords are incredibly important to your products sales, ranking, and overall success. Properly researched and targeted Amazon keywords are the lifeblood of your listing.
The best use of targeted keywords and keyword variations can often result in improved search volume, increased traffic, longer sessions, and most importantly, improved sales.
Often times you will hear the process of targeting Amazon keywords referred to as Amazon SEO. In broad terms, SEO refers to the process of “Search Term Optimization,” a system of sophisticated techniques used by content creators and marketing teams to optimize the search volume and page rankings for web content, social media sites, or news stories. For our purposes “Amazon SEO” is often used alongside or in place of keyword ranking and keyword optimization.
This guide will take you step-by-step through the procedures used by leading Amazon sellers and keyword experts to get the most out of your Amazon keywords. We’ll cover:
Industry-leading keyword tools, which can help take the guesswork out of determining which keywords to target while helping you to understand which keywords are most important for your product.
Tips and tricks to improve your keyword rank while exposing some myths and misunderstandings associated with keyword search volume.
Key factors when it comes to assembling and arranging your Amazon keywords within the body of your product listing.
So let’s jump in!
PS, if you’d like to check out our video walkthrough on optimizing and writing your listing, check out our video below!
1. Determine Which Amazon Keywords To Target For Your Product
To begin, let’s explore two of the leading keyword software tools available to Amazon sellers, beginner and expert alike. A good keyword tool is vital for sifting through the thousands and thousands of variations which can occur within any given keyword phrase. One of the most common software tools for establishing Amazon keywords is Google Keyword Planner.
Part of Google’s AdWords tools, Keyword Planner is a simple, easy-to-use keyword tool that allows you to quickly establish Google search volume for virtually any keyword phrase or product. Google Keyword Planner features easy-to-read graphs, plus a full breakdown of keyword search volume, and keyword priority.
One drawback to Google Keyword Planner is the broad scope of the tool’s results. Keyword Planner has been designed to collect results from Google’s search algorithm exclusively. These Google-only search trends tend to skew results from groups of exclusively E-commerce keywords, to a broad range of internet content and web searches.
For example if you search “best skateboards” in Keyword Planner, your results will include data for searches referencing popular skateboarders or skateboarding videos. Because of this wide net tendency, you’ll want to pay special attention to your results, being sure to eliminate keywords phrases that involve multimedia, name brands, and specific locations, persons, or businesses.
One way to specialize your keyword searches is to use Amazon-specific keyword software. Doing so allows you to make sure you’re only seeing searches from Amazon, instead of external search engines like Google or Bing. Again, search behavior is very different. An Amazon keyword tool will allow you to best optimize your listing for Amazon search.
For example the Viral Launch Amazon Keyword Tool gives users a huge range of keyword statistics and metrics in one, easy-to-understand place. One huge advantage of Viral Launch Keyword Research is its superior Amazon specific data which gives you extremely accurate breakdowns of the most important keyword insights.
You will see a list of all your product’s relevant keywords, alongside helpful metrics: volume, opportunity, priority, and relevancy. With one search, you have all the information you need to write your listing or optimize your keyword targeting in sponsored ads.
2. Aggregate Then Curate Your Products’ Top Amazon Keywords
Once you have your list of targeted keywords and keyword phrases, you’ll need to condense your findings down to the highest ranking and most relevant words. This process can be tricky and even experienced sellers often get it wrong. One of the most common mistakes new sellers make is to over-emphasize exact search volume.
Though volume, or the pure number of searches for a word or phrase, is very important, it is not the only factor to consider. You also want to consider metrics such as opportunity, relevancy, and broad search volume. These metrics can reveal a host of chances for you to target neglected keywords and untapped markets.
For instance, you can target keywords with high search volume and high opportunity scores. A high opportunity score means that keyword is being overlooked by competitors and is easy to rank for just by adding it to the title of your listing. You would be surprised how many high volume search terms are not included in your competitors’ listings. By giving these keywords priority in your listing, you can quickly gain visibility and pull in sales from overlooked keyword markets.
You might also consider looking at broad search volume. Broad search volume represents all of the keyword phrases that contain that keyword. For example, if you are looking at the term “rattle” and see a broad search volume of 76,518, that means that 76,518 searches contain the term “rattle.”
By looking at the broadest spectrum of search rather than just the narrow spectrum of exact volume, you can get a better overall picture of which keywords are most important to your product. A balance of keywords from these different categories is vital for producing a well-balanced listing which targets multiple demographics and search pockets. Read more about the 3 crucial keyword scores shown in Keyword Research.
3. Capitalize On Strategic Amazon Keyword Placement
Once you have determined the keywords or phrases you wish to target, you can begin to assemble your listing’s title and bullet points. It’s vital for you to keep in mind how the Amazon search algorithm places greater emphasis or “weight” on certain portions of your listing. This means that certain sections of your listing contain greater ranking power than others when it comes to customer search. A simple breakdown from highest priority to lowest is as follows:
Listing Title
Bullet Points
Backend Keywords
By far the most important element of your listing is the title. The title is weighted extremely high and constitutes the most powerful search portion of your listing. When beginning to assembling your title, you want to focus the most effort on the first 5 words. These first 5 keywords in your title will constitute what is known as the Canonical URL.
In simple terms, the canonical URL contains the 5 words that are indexed for online search engines like Google. This search engine indexation is vital for pulling in
outside traffic. A recent Survata study showed that 36% of product searches start on search engines like Google, not on Amazon. If you don’t choose the most relevant and powerful keywords for your title, you put your listing at a disadvantage from being discovered through Google searches.
Next, you want to complete your title keeping in mind that your remaining keywords should be used from left to right in order of importance. The Amazon algorithm reads listing titles with this left to right, making it vital for you to use your highest ranking keywords first.
Once the listing title is complete, you will focus on your listing’s bullet points. The bullet points, or key product features are a chance for you to continue to include relevant keywords and phrases. Many categories have extremely limited character counts for the bullet points, so it’s important to maintain a strategic outlook when building out this section. Don’t hesitate to use various keyword plural forms while including as many keywords gathered from your research as possible without compromising the readability of the bullet.
Pro Tip: Most research indicates that your product description is not affected by Amazon keywords or search engine keywords. This being said, your product description is a great opportunity for you to expound on your product’s unique features and quality. In short, your product description is a chance for you to make a unique and memorable marketing pitch for your product without concern for using the proper ranking keywords or phrases. Use the 2,000 characters allowed in this section to your advantage by creating a unique brand voice and addressing any features that are not covered within the title and bullets.
4. Repeat Keywords and Use Various Plural Forms
Once you have developed a draft for your product’s title and bullet points you want to scan your listing for missed opportunities. Many sellers neglect to include the plural forms and variations of phrases in the listing. Anytime you can include plural forms or mix-and-match various phrases into new threads, you improve the likelihood that your listing will index and rank for multiple variations. This multi-pronged approach coupled with the strategic inclusion of high ranking keywords gives your listing the best opportunity to stand out from the crowd.
5. Leverage Backend Amazon Keywords
All Amazon listings are allowed 250 bytes to include keywords that are not in the title and bullet points. This is a powerful opportunity for you to include outlier keywords which are not seen by Amazon shoppers. These hidden backend keywords can include phrases or terms that may not make sense in the context of your listing. It also gives sellers the chance to exploit the use of common misspellings or slang used in many searches. These misspellings and common phrases can be singled out when doing your keyword research with either Google Keyword Planner or more powerfully with Viral Launch Keyword Research.
When you are in the midst of your keyword research, start to compile a list of candidates for these backend terms. Once you have drafted your title and bullet points, review your list and compile the top ranking words which you have not included in the listing proper. Take caution to exclude name brands or copy-written material from you backend terms, as this practice can be grounds for your listing’s removal.
Once you have established the highest-ranking keywords that you have not included in your title or bullets, simply copy and paste these terms into the edit listing portion of your Seller Central.
Pro Tip: Our current research is showing an emerging trend of powerful foreign language search terms. These keywords, (often in Spanish for US markets) are many times direct translations of the highest ranking english keywords or phrases. The inclusion of foreign language phrases is a powerful way for sellers to tap into underserved markets and exploit this portion of your listing to its maximum advantage. Note* The foreign language phrases are included within the Viral Launch Keyword Research Tool.
In conclusion, we encourage every seller who is forming a new listing to keep these three principles in mind.
Research: Be sure to take your time and do the proper research to establish which keywords and phrases to target. No matter what software you end up using, take the time to be thorough and don’t miss out on high ranking words or outliers in your market.
Target: Always keep in mind where you are placing keywords within your listing. Always remember that your title and bullet points are the key aspects of your listing when it comes to achieving keyword ranking. Always Apply the principles of keyword placement and plural forms to achieve the best results.
Diversify: Remember to think outside the box for where unused keywords might be used. Utilize the backend terms to the best of your ability to capture these outliers and put them to work for your listing.
The application of these 3 simple principle coupled with the powerful software tools and data available online can put your listing in a powerful position to start converting keywords to cash in no time.
Pro Tip: Use a Listing Builder, like the one included in Keyword Research, for a seamless experience writing your Amazon listing. Listing Builder allows you to write your listing and see, in real time, which important words you’re still missing. View your optimization score and how many potential searches your could include in your copy.
Once you’ve got a product up and selling, it’s time to think about optimizing your performance for increased sales.
And that means keyword ranking. Make sure you have all the most relevant keywords for your product with Keyword Research.
What is Keyword Research?
Watch this quick explainer video for an overview of what Keyword Research is and how it can help you increase your sales.
Now that you understand what Keyword Research offers, it’s time to start using it to optimize your listing.
Keyword Research Tutorial
Join Amazon Expert Cameron Yoder for a quick tutorial of Keyword Research.
Once you’ve got the hang of using Keyword Research to find the highest volume, highest opportunity keywords for your product, it’s time to start writing your listing.
Keyword Research Listing Builder
After the initial launch of Keyword Research, we added an awesome new feature to help you write your listing. Check out this blog about Keyword Listing Builder and find out how to use it.
Still have questions about using Keyword Research or your Pro Subscription? Login to your Viral Launch account and live chat with a coach! Just look for the chat symbol to start a new conversation.
In Amazon’s recent letter to shareholders, the company announced that for the first time ever, “more than half of the units sold on Amazon worldwide were from third-party sellers.” With every passing day, competition on Amazon gets more intense. It may seem like many of the quick-win markets are quickly becoming crowded, but there are often easy opportunities to put new and differentiated products out there that, with a little help, can increase Amazon sales.
In order to stay relevant on the world’s largest ecommerce marketplace, you have to find new ways to differentiate your products while keeping costs low. Whether you’re just sourcing a product or already selling, we’ve got 3 simple tips to help you increase Amazon sales by differentiating your products.
TIP #1 — Before you source, find market gaps to fill
As you narrow down your list of product ideas and hone in on a market, start reading competitor product reviews. You want to identify common complaints and recurring frustrations.
Are most of the products in the market flimsy and cheap? Maybe customers were looking for a different version of the product. Maybe they felt their options were too expensive.
Once you’ve identified a few common complaints, ask your supplier if they can make changes to address these pain points. You’ll want to make sure that any changes to the product are inexpensive and that your costs will still be low enough for you to compete in your market when it comes to price.
In other words, don’t add a $2.00 improvement to a $3.00 product. Keep your costs low while improving on the current best selling products in the market. It could be as simple as choosing a different color or material for your product without even changing the function.
Just make sure that demand for that change is there. Don’t ask your supplier to make you an aquamarine lemon squeezer just because it’s your favorite color. Look at the numbers to make sure they support your decision.
You can use Keyword Research to find if there is demand for these differentiating features. For example, if you search the term iphone case with Keyword Research, you’ll find iphone 6s case blue gets 1,660 exact searches a month and blue iphone 6s case gets 2,494 exact searches a month.
This demonstrates a definite desire for blue iphone cases. But there are only about 2 listings on page 1 for the term iphone case that are blue. With almost 2,500 searches a month, you can probably assume that blue is a desirable color for this product for a portion of the market.
It makes sense to do this kind of research during the sourcing process so that you can evaluate the cost of differentiating a product before you jump into a market. But this is also something you can do once you have a product that is selling. You can always ask your supplier to make small changes to improve your product. This all might seem like nitpicking, but each tweak will help you increase Amazon sales for your products.
TIP #2 — Show shoppers that your product is better with your hero image
Photos are still a differentiator. Until the majority of sellers begin to actually invest in high quality photos, this still remains one of the best ways to differentiate your product.
If nothing else, invest in a few quality studio shots to use for your hero image. Your hero image is the main image for your product – the one that shoppers see on a search result page.
By purchasing a few professional hero images, you can split test them to find the optimal image for you product.
Product photography is extremely undervalued by most FBA sellers but so important to increase Amazon sales. It is the way that people judge your product. Even before they see price, shoppers see your hero image.
Elements of a hero image that gains clicks and conversions:
A spotless, professionally edited, pure white background
Crisp, clean, and accurate portrayal of the product
Expert composition that shows off your product and provides the information shoppers need about what is included
Being informative with your photos does not mean putting text on your images. If you want messaging in your hero image, put it on the packaging for your product. Using text in your main image is against Amazon’s Product Image Requirements, and it clutters the images, making it look tacky and unprofessional.
It’s not always enough to just get shoppers to a product page. Once they are there, use lifestyle images to help shoppers understand how the product is used, what size it is, and how it might look in their day-to-day lives.
Use well-written Amazon SEO copy that helps shoppers understand the benefits of your product. Then, once you’ve convinced a shopper that your product is the best, make sure they have a great experience. Speedy and professional customer response go a long way when questions and complaints come in.
TIP #3 — Expand your product’s visibility with Sponsored Ads
It’s not enough to put a product up on Amazon and just expect it to start selling. Make sure shoppers can find it by running a launch and/or running sponsored ads. Even if you run a launch and are ranking on page one for your main keyword, sponsored ads can help expand your visibility and increase Amazon sales.
You can use Keyword Research to find high-volume keywords that are hyper relevant to your product. Use the keywords that you find to set up broad match campaigns. Let them run for a week or more, and then see which keywords are most profitable for you.
Take the most successful keywords from your broad match campaign and put them into a phrase match campaign with slightly higher bids. Then let it run for another week before you come back and reevaluate. If there are a few keywords that are really performing well, put them into an exact match campaign and increase your bid a little more.
In this way, you can cater your sponsored ad spend so that it is optimized to increase Amazon sales. When you find the best keywords for your product, you can hit the sweet spot of minimal spend and maximum return. A small ad spend can go a long way to increasing your product’s visibility, sales, and overall ranking.
It’s not too late to get into a good market. Find that sweet spot in the market by differentiating your products. Discover the perfect product to sell today with the Viral Launch sourcing software suite.
Every Amazon seller wants to know how to optimize their product listing. Product copy is extremely important. To hit sales targets, you need to get Amazon listing optimization right. Content helps buyers understand the details of your product. And more importantly, it determines how visible your product is to those searching on Amazon.
When it comes to search visibility, here’s what you need to know. Say you’re selling a trash can, and you use the keyword trash can. But you never incorporate the term garbage can. When a buyer searches for garbage can—the word you didn’t include—your product doesn’t appear in their search results. Not because your product isn’t relevant but because you didn’t put that term in your listing. Without a wide enough variety of keywords, you lose out on potential buyers and potential sales.
Including a variety of relevant keywords is vital to your visibility. Basically, your product won’t appear on page one for a keyword that isn’t included in its listing. So, what’s the key to Amazon listing optimization?
Finding the Right Keywords
It’s all about finding the right keywords and being strategic with keyword placement. Strategic placement of a wide variety of keywords improves your chances of indexing and ranking for multiple keywords, not just the obvious ones. This makes your product much easier to find in a crowded marketplace and can also improve your conversion rate.
Using Keyword Research, you can find the most comprehensive set of keywords that are relevant to your product. You’ll see a lot of different metrics for each keyword, including exact and broad search volume, search volume trend lines, and three different scores. You can read more about what each score means here.
We recommend sorting by Priority Score first to get a good list going for your product. Priority Score will show you the most relevant keywords with the highest volume first. Use the checkboxes along the left-hand side of the results table to select the keyword phrases that apply to your product. Then copy the keywords to your clipboard.
Paste your list of keywords into your document of choice, and then go back to Keyword Research. This time sort the keywords by Opportunity Score. Look for high volume words that have a score above 700. Copy the terms that you find to your clipboard, and paste them into your document too.
Expand Your Visibility
Before you begin writing, you should know that Amazon’s search algorithm values unique keywords. This is different than Google SEO, which prefers pages that repeat on one or two main keywords. But on Amazon, having a wide variety and less repetition is the most beneficial approach.
When you construct your Amazon copy, you will naturally repeat some keywords. But if you focus on using a wide variety, you will expand your visibility. Not every shopper will use the same search term, so including a variety helps put your product in front of more buyers.
Once you use a keyword, don’t worry about using it again. For example, if I’m writing a title for a first aid kit, I might start out like this:
Travel First Aid Kit
Now that I’ve used first aid kit in the title, I’m not going to use it again. But if I want to capture the keyword phrase first aid kit for car, I can simply add for car to my title and include the whole phrase.
Travel First Aid Kit for Car
But what if I want to include the phrase first aid kit for kids? Ideally I would use for kids somewhere after the term first aid kit to maintain the phrase order. So for example, with the title I’m building, I might do something like this.
Travel First Aid Kit for Car: Emergency Kit for Kids
Notice how first aid kit and for kids are still in the correct order. You can get the most ranking power when you keep a phrase completely in tact, but you’ll have to make choices about which phrases to maintain and which to split up.
Focus on Amazon Listing Optimization
These difficult choices are why creating an optimized listing that’s still easy for your customers to read is so difficult. And it’s why we offer our copywriting services. Depending on what stage your Amazon business is at, you will want to outsource the actual writing of your listings to a professional copywriter.
There are a lot of moving parts when it comes to writing product copy for Amazon listing optimization. Enlisting the help of someone who has written hundreds of listings ensures these moving parts get put together in a strategic way that maximizes ranking potential.
At the same time, if you’re just starting out and trying to save money, DIYing your listing can help keep costs down. Just make sure that you’re being strategic with your keywords, especially in your title.
The title is the most important part of any listing. Amazon gives weight to the keywords in the title more heavily than anywhere else, and with each sale, the words in your title are fair game for a ranking boost.
You want to have a good combination of high and low volume keywords here while keeping them extremely relevant to your product. You want to be clear on what your product is and what its major features are without making your title a long jumble of keywords. So make sure it’s readable and accurate for your customers.
If you’re looking for all the benefits of Keyword Research but don’t have the time or skillset to write your own listing, let our team of professional copywriters do it for you. You’ll save yourself time and increase the profitability of your FBA business. Whatever you decide, just remember to focus on getting your Amazon listing optimization right.
