Breaking Down Amazon Listing Optimization

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.  

 

Optimize My Listing

 

Use an Amazon Keyword Tool, NOT Google Keyword Planner

To find and target keywords on Google, you might use Google Keyword Planner. So to find and target keywords on Amazon, you need an Amazon keyword tool. Whether a company website or an Amazon product listing, everyone’s aiming for the top, the coveted first page of search results.

When it comes to integrating keywords and ranking on Amazon, unfortunately, there’s no silver bullet. But sellers must start by learning how Amazon search differs from Google and knowing the direct impact that has on keyword research.

Amazon SEO vs Google SEO

As an Amazon seller, it’s important to understand how to best integrate keywords into your listing. Many sellers fall back on out-of-date Google SEO practices if they consider SEO at all. Really, they should be much more concerned with Amazon SEO best practices. While both Google and Amazon are search engines and focus on some similar metrics, their algorithms are different. Not only are their algorithms different, the goals of their users are different.

Think about it. When you visit Google, are you always searching for a product? Likely not. You might be shopping for a new phone case, but you may also be looking up the menu to that sushi place you’ve been wanting to try, or the location of a nearby tire shop, or reviews for that movie you’ve been dying to see. Simply put, Google can be a product search engine, but it’s largely a research engine. And when users do search products, they are often expecting to find reviews of top products. They aren’t expecting to shop necessarily. 

Amazon, on the other hand, is largely a product search engine. Users who end up on Amazon are further down the funnel. They have moved from the research phase closer to the ready-to-buy phase, with credit card in hand. In fact, 55% of buyers are starting their product search on Amazon. Consumers may not have a specific brand in mind when they go to Amazon, but they likely have a product in mind that they are hoping to purchase.

Amazon Keywords vs Google Keywords

So what does that mean for keywords?

It means that consumers aren’t always using the same search terms across all platforms. Someone looking for a phone case might type “iPhone case reviews” or “iPhone case comparison” into the Google search bar but type “rubber iPhone case” or “durable iPhone case” into Amazon.

That’s not to say a user would never type the latter terms into Google. But, there may be keywords that are relevant to a Google search that would have little to no value on Amazon. And with 80 million Amazon Prime members in the US, competition is high for those searches. You don’t want to waste time with keywords that won’t help you rank.

The value of targeted keywords, both long and short tail, in your Amazon listing is far-reaching. If you aren’t using the words and phrases that consumers are searching for in your copy, then you likely aren’t selling well. The more sales you drive through a particular keyword, the higher your chances of ranking for that keyword.

Why You Need an Amazon Keyword Tool

So if you’re trying to craft a listing for Amazon, why would you use an Amazon keyword tool that focuses on Google data? Google Keyword Planner is designed for Google’s algorithm and pulls data from Google searches. Using it exclusively–or really at all–to generate your keyword list for Amazon could mean overlooking high-volume Amazon keywords and missing the full scope of keywords Amazon consumers may be searching.

According to SEO marketing company, MOZ, the algorithm used for Google Keyword Planner has several flaws. For starters, it groups keywords into “volume buckets”, so a word with 180,000 search volume in a month might be rounded down to the 165,000 search bucket. Google also misses out on approximately 35% of keywords recommended by other search Amazon keyword tools, is inconsistent when mapping and considering search volume for spelling variations, and occasionally recommends keywords that are not really connected to your original search phrase.

If you’re okay with sub-par results that may not even match the search results of your Amazon customers, then Google Keyword Planner is a sufficient tool. But to truly home in on search data from Amazon alone, you need an Amazon keyword tool that does just that.

Keyword Research, the newest software tool by Viral Launch, is the most accurate Amazon keyword tool in the galaxy. It provides search volumes based only on actual Amazon data, updated frequently. Keyword Research scours the depths of Amazon for an exhaustive list of customer search terms related to your seed keyword by running a Reverse-Market Lookup.

Think of it as a master reverse-ASIN lookup that reaches across all your Amazon markets, taking all of your top competitors into consideration instead of just one. The result is an enormous pool of relevant keywords for your searched product.

So if you’re looking for the most comprehensive, all-encompassing keyword report for your Amazon product, then say goodbye to Google Keyword Planner and check out Keyword Research today!

TRY KEYWORD RESEARCH

Exit mobile version