Amazon keywords are relevant to the Amazon search terms that the user types in Amazon’s search bar to look for a particular product or category.
A keyword connects a customer to a related product they’re looking for. Thus, keywords and Amazon product listing optimization is vital.
If you want to boost your e-commerce conversions, the right types of keywords and keyword research strategy can do wonders in increasing your sales and conversion. This can bring in loyal customers to your product listing.
Now, let’s look at the seven types of keywords for keyword research to help you create the amazon keyword research strategy and boost your sales on the platform:
1. Niche Keywords
Niche keywords are one of the types of keywords that focus on a specific area of industry. Most of them are long-tailed keywords that have three or more words. An example would be “sustainable jacket.” It covers a clear and specific topic appealing to a specialized part of a given market. In this case, it’s sustainable clothing.
Niche keywords usually have a lower search volume since they’re more specific, bringing in more site traffic.
2. Brand Comparison Keywords
This type of keyword is used when users are serious about making a conversion but still weighing down options. Users that type commercial keywords on search are likely a step ahead of but not quite in the conversion phase, although close.
For example, keywords like “Clearasil vs. Neutrogena facial cleanser” indicate the users are serious about buying but still exploring options for the best choice. To know more, check out this ultimate guide to optimizing listings using Amazon Keywords.
3. Product-Specific Keywords
These keywords relate to the specific offerings of your brand. These are usually phrases or terms referring to the products and services of your company. That’s why you need to optimize your listings for particular keywords.
You need to identify keywords for your services and products to allow your existing and prospective clients to find your products through search. For instance, you’ll likely get results from a reputable brand if you search for a “copier.” Whatever phrase that’s typed, you’ll come up with results that are offering these products and services in a particular industry.
4. Long-tail Keywords
Sometimes, users use specific phrases when searching for a specific product or service.
These keywords are made up of several words and are longer than the average keyword. These are known as long-tail keywords. A great example of a long tail keyword would be, “best running shoes for injured knees.”
The graph below shows the benefit to using long-tail keywords. As the long-tail keyword gets longer two positive trends occur: lower competition and higher conversion rate.
5. Problem-solving Keywords
People who use these keywords want answers, not to be sold to. To target this particular audience, you must include who/what/when/where/why/how, and general phases.
Let’s say you’re selling sporting goods. Examples of keywords might include “what are the current trends in the sporting goods industry?”
6. Transactional keywords
These are often referred to as “do” keywords or the keywords buyers use when they have already decided they want to buy a specific product or service. Usually, buyers are at the conversation stage of the purchasing process.
For instance, they might type, “buy hiking shoes online,” once they’re ready to buy.
7. Seasonal Keywords
Seasonal keywords are keywords relating to seasons of the year. These keywords will usually have high traffic during certain times of the year, like people looking for “presents,” or “Christmas presents,” during Christmas.
If you have information that shows your customers look up these products during a specific time of the year, then you need to put that information into good use.
Over to You
So there you have it. By identifying the different types of keywords, we hope you can create a high-powered listing to win sales and profits in a highly competitive Amazon market. Good luck!
Using Amazon analytics is a key unlock to ensuring your business performs and grows as much as possible. But with the influx of information available, it can be challenging to focus on the metrics that truly matter.
In this guide to Amazon analytics, we’ll go through the details of the most critical insights for your business:
Conversion Rate
Click-through Rate
Retention Rate (Repeat Sales)
Market Basket Analysis
Search Queries
Average Prices
What is Amazon Analytics?
Before we dive deeper into specific metrics, let’s do a quick overview of Amazon Analytics, what these metrics are, and who has access to them.
Amazon Analytics is available for sellers in the Amazon Brand Registry and not for third-party sellers—so the reports aren’t accessible to just anybody. If you aren’t part of the registry yet, know that it can take some time for you to get registered, but you will gain access to the following benefits (among others):
You can use Amazon Seller Data analytics to improve business performance by using customer and product-related data to enhance your strategies. It will allow you to position your products better and add an edge to your store compared to generic sellers who might not have the information you gain from Amazon Analytics.
Conversion Rate
Let’s say, for example, that you’re an Amazon seller, and one of your most popular products typically gets 1000 views per day and about 50 or 60 sales in the same time frame. This puts your conversion rate at around 5-6%, which actually isn’t that bad!
Conversion rate is essentially your percentage of conversion or how many converts you have compared to your number of visitors. This metric is arguably one of the most important because it tells you how well you’re actually selling your products beyond exposure alone.
A good conversion rate is vital because you need viewers to actually buy your products in order for you to make a profit. Moreover, the benefits of a good conversion rate have plenty of downstream impacts on your business because you are likely to get the following:
More exposure
More reviews
More repeat customers
Note, however, that conversion rate isn’t everything. You could have insanely high conversion rates yet still fail your bottom line because you were not able to manage your expenses versus your sales.
The key here is balance.
Make sure you already have a sustainable model first where you can successfully source and sell on a profit. If you keep your expenses too high, then you’d also have to increase your sales to match in order to break even—good conversion rate or otherwise.
And if your conversion rate is less than desirable, it’s time to assess and ask yourself the following questions:
Are you selling an inferior product?
Are you reaching the wrong target market?
Are the reviews deterring potential customers from making a purchase?
Are you not providing sufficient product information?
Are you often not in stock?
The goal of these questions is to assess where you’re going wrong. Because at the point of viewing, the issue is no longer exposure—the customer is already seeing your product. The problem now becomes solely about how you sell and, potentially, the quality of your work.
Getting to the root of the issue is essential if you want to grow and progress your business. Without diagnosing the reasons for your low conversion, you’ll be stuck repeating the same patterns over and over, which is the last thing you want as a business.
Click-Through Rate (CTR)
Your click-through rate is the number of clicks versus the number of impressions. This number indicates how many people actually click on your campaigns—ideally, around 2-3% of impressions.
This Amazon metric is another vital piece of the puzzle because it allows you to assess the efficacy of your campaigns. You will probably benefit most from this when used alongside A/B testing. For example:
Millennials vs. Gen Z as a target market
Advertising in California vs. Florida
A funny catchphrase vs. a more serious heading
A video vs. a GIF
When you compare two differently produced ads to one another, it will be easier to determine which methods will earn you a higher CTR.
But remember, with A/B testing, you need to be careful not to change, ideally, more than one thing at once. If you release wildly different ads, the sources of the disparity in CTRs may become imperceptible.
Retention Rate (Repeat Customers)
With Amazon Analytics tools, you will also be able to assess how many of your customers eventually go on to become repeat customers.
While it might not seem that relevant initially, your retention rate lends helpful information as to what makes your brand stick. It could boil down to any of the following:
Good quality
Reasonable price
Accommodating customer service
Excellent product-market fit
Brand authenticity
Paying attention to your retention rate is crucial because you’ll easily be able to address any issues that come up when your retention rate drops. Did you recently change suppliers? Have you let customer service slip a little bit? Has your product not been reaching the right market?
The questions are endless—and the answers are incredibly valuable.
Nevertheless, there is still no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to your retention rate. And the data might not come as fast as you need to be a dynamic and responsive seller.
For example, a seller specializing in consumer goods may have a much higher short-term retention rate than sellers who sell gadgets simply because of how different sales typically look in these different segments. If you’re selling cheaper, high-volume items like snacks, you’re more likely to have a higher retention rate.
Search Query Dashboard
Courtesy of Ecomcrew.com
The search query dashboard is a relatively new Brand Analytics feature that lets you take an in-depth look at your query numbers.
In this dashboard, you gain access to a lot of valuable data, such as:
Search Volume
Rank
Conversions
Clicks
Impressions
Cart Adds
Total Searches
All in the context of search queries. And with this new information, sellers can now see compiled data on paid and organic search data for each search term—allowing for better, more improved marketing strategies.
This all boils down to where your customers hear about your products—ads or organic traffic. When you can pinpoint where your customers are coming from, then you will be able to tailor your marketing strategies to serve specific areas better.
For instance, if most of your customers come from ads, it might benefit you more to improve your SEO strategies rather than increase ad spending.
Information from the dashboard can also help spot trends early and identify sales opportunities within a given time frame. Because the dashboard shows which search queries are ranking, it will be easier to assess the audience’s needs.
Market Basket Analysis
Courtesy of Analyticsvidhya.com
Your market basket analysis is one of the most exciting things to gain from Amazon product analytics.
The market basket is the term used to refer to a set or bundle of products that are often bought together at the same time, such as:
Toothbrush and toothpaste
Coffee beans and syrups
Metal straws and insulated cups
And the list goes on. The bundle could even be comprised of products that do not conventionally go together, which is why market basket analysis is so valuable.
If your customers are purchasing unexpected products together, you never would have been able to predict that—missing out on the potential sales made from selling in bundles.
In other words, a market basket analysis allows you to understand your customers needs better. Why are they buying this product and that product together? What needs do these products fill?
The answers to those questions may be inferred from the results of your market basket analysis.
And although at first, it may seem like the benefits stop at creating bundles of products, this simply isn’t the case. As a seller and business owner, you will benefit immensely from understanding your customer, which you can do by analyzing their needs.
Average Selling Price and Average Order Value
With Amazon Analytics, you can also determine your Average Selling Price (ASP) and Average Order Value (AOV). While different, these two are helpful metrics to boost your bottom line.
Let’s start with your Average Selling Price. Your ASP is the average amount you make per item that you sell. Keep in mind that average data can be significantly skewed by outliers, so if you have 20 items below $20 but have one thing at $500, know that that will substantially impact your ASP.
Your ASP is a valuable piece of information because it tells you how many times people need to purchase from your store for you to reach a sales threshold. A higher ASP might benefit your business because then fewer people would have to buy your product for you to turn a profit.
Nevertheless, a higher ASP may not always be a good thing, especially if you’re dealing in an industry with low-priced goods.
Similarly, your Average Order Value is the average amount each buyer spends per order. This is a pretty similar metric to ASP, only that you’re using the number of buyers as opposed to products as your baseline.
Using ASP and AOV, you can better determine how many products you need to sell and how many buyers you need to convert to achieve your goals. These numbers are most useful for financial analysis like:
Break-even analysis
Gross Profit
Gross Margin
Target Revenue
Budgeting
As an Amazon Seller, it can be easy to get caught up in marketing data, but using information from Analytics to assist your financial process is equally important. With the correct data, you can successfully create projections and support the long-term goals of your business.
Why Should You Pay Attention To These Metrics?
At the end of the day, not all data points are made equal. Some pieces of information are more valuable than others, especially considering the context of your industry and the types of products you sell.
For example, retention rate might be more useful in the short-term for a seller of fast-moving goods while less critical (but not entirely irrelevant) for a seller of appliances.
Regardless, all those metrics mentioned above are vital to the success of your Amazon store because they focus on the most important thing: data.
If there’s one thing you’re sure about when running a business, it’s that the data will not lie to you. It doesn’t matter how much or how little effort went into a marketing campaign. If the customers don’t like it, the data will show the truth.
Numbers like your retention rate and CTR are good points of analysis for your business because they allow you to view your brand factually. As an owner, you may experience plenty of bias concerning your products, and data is a fantastic way to bypass this scenario.
Tips for Analyzing Amazon Analytics
Numbers, even valuable ones, are just a bunch of gibberish if you don’t know what they mean. And the same is true for Amazon product analytics.
Here, the true value lies in storytelling: how well can you capture the customer’s desires behind just a handful of numbers? How do you know what happened behind the scenes when all you have for proof are these random digits?
Understandably, knowing the story behind your data is challenging; at the very least—here’s how you can make it easier.
A/B Testing
We mentioned this in passing earlier, but A/B testing is key if you want to obtain valuable data. If you don’t A/B test where applicable, you’ll be stuck guessing what factors impact your insights.
A/B testing is a pretty simple concept. You test drive two or more variations of the same campaign in an effort to ascertain which one of them is the best. Reviewing results after testing the variations will allow you to uncover the information you would have otherwise not gotten without testing variations.
Metrics are Interconnected
Most of the metrics we mentioned above are connected to each other in some way. Analyzing each metric in the context of another metric provides a clearer picture of what’s happening with your Amazon products.
For instance, let’s say that you, an Amazon seller, are worried about your decreasing average sales price and increasing AOV after a major shop revamp where you added more low-value items. If you are going to look at your ASP alone, alarm bells will probably start ringing in your head. And if you’re looking at AOV alone, you’d probably be relieved.
But when you look at both of them together and assess the facts of the situation, it’s pretty clear what happened. You added more low-cost items to your portfolio, which decreased your ASP but increased your AOV because customers were more likely to buy low-cost items even though their total would increase.
Pay Attention to Time
Time is an invaluable factor in the success of your analysis because not all periods are the same. There might be times during the year when your shop naturally has more sales (e.g., holidays), while you may not have as many at other times.
If you consider time in your assessments, you are more likely to catch variations due to seasonality and the cyclic nature of product interest.
Plus, you’ll then be able to tell which periods are better to run campaigns in and which months of the year you need the most stock.
Conclusion: Amazon Analytics
Amazon now provides sellers with so much information through Amazon Analytics, and capitalizing on the most important ones can do plenty of good for your business.
While maneuvering the many different metrics may be initially challenging, it gets easier with practice and constant technique readjustment.
For even more Amazon data and seller solutions, Viral Launch is here! The Viral Launch software suite for Amazon sellers offers insights into product ideas, keywords, competitors, and even Amazon PPC automation. Soar past your competition with accurate, real-time and historical data.
Congratulations! You’ve developed a product and finally got it set up with an Amazon listing! All that hard work is now ready to pay off… but HOLD ON! Why isn’t your product showing up as one of the top items when you search for it on Amazon? If nobody sees your product, how are you going to make a profit? You’ve got to get seen! Fortunately, there are several simple strategies to put in place to greatly increase the visibility of your Amazon listing! Let’s get started:
Create Those Keywords!
You may have heard of keywords before, but if not, please listen up! Because they are a fairly simple way of amping up your listing’s notoriety as long as you know which ones to use. Let’s begin with the actual definition:
Keywords are the words and phrases people look for when searching for something online.
It is very important to compile a list of keywords relating to your Amazon listing. From there, you can enter these words into the backend of your listing’s search engine optimization (SEO) bar. BUT FIRST, how the heck do you discover which keywords are YOUR keywords? Here are some helpful tips:
In the Amazon search bar, type in a range of words to see what the drop-down suggestions are. Compile a list of whatever words are relevant to listings like yours.
Check out any competitor results to see what is already out there and then compare what you learn.
Utilize long-tail and short-tail keywords while making your list. Long-tail keywords are rather specific and usually have a low search volume. They may have a higher conversion rate because the customer typically knows exactly what they are looking for. Short-tail keywords represent broader searches that typically have high search volume and may have lower conversion because the customer is browsing for different options.
Do you need help finding the right keywords? Check out our Keyword Research tool to help get your listing higher on Amazon.
A Great Title!
GRAB YOUR POTENTIAL CUSTOMER’S ATTENTION with a catchy title. The product title (product name) is one of the primary fields used by Amazon and search engines to measure the relevance of a detail page as part of a customer search. To increase the chances of someone clicking on your title, try incorporating the following:
Your title should consist of only the minimal amount of information needed to identify the product.
Keep the length of your title somewhere between 60 and 80 characters for optimal efficiency. Longer titles usually are tougher to read than shorter ones. It’s also a good idea to check the titles of similar products that land at the top of an Amazon search page.
Make sure the title matches what is on your product’s physical packaging.
NEVER use all caps in your title. Rather, just capitalize the first letter of each word except for prepositions (in, on, over, with), conjunctions (and, or, for), or articles (the, a, an).
If your title contains numbers, list them as numerals (1,2,3) instead of spelling them out (one, two, three).
Lastly, your title can include proper punctuation, like hyphens (-), forward slashes (/), commas (,), ampersands (&), and periods (.). You can also use abbreviated measurements like “cm”, “oz”, “in”, and “kg”.
Nail That Description!
Be sure and deliver a detailed explanation of your product’s usage, features, and benefits in the bullets and description sections. Also, add any specific product information that may not be explained anywhere else in the listing. Here are some helpful particulars on precisely what to put in your product description:
Include any brand names.
Add in all sizes when applicable.
Add what type of material the product is made of, like polyester for a shirt.
Include important details like colors, packaging, and quantity.
For an even more comprehensive list of product description details, check out Amazon Seller Central for every guideline.
High-Quality Images!
If you want to increase your product’s visibility, then you’d best make sure its images are of the highest quality. Make certain your product looks great and has all of its features showcased front and center. This is going to help make your product stand out from a crowd of competitors, which will help boost your overall Amazon visibility.
To get high-quality images of your product you can either hire a professional photographer or utilize a wide range of online tools to create images yourself.
The Price is Right!
The price of your product can greatly influence its sales growth and conversion rates, which leads to better visibility. By researching your competitors, you can understand how to give your product a competitive price and make compelling price point adjustments along the way.
You can adjust your product’s pricing automatically through Amazon’s Automated Pricing page, without having to revisit the SKU every time you want to make a change. There are also other ways you can optimize your price point such as:
Take shipping costs into consideration. Offering free shipping is a great way to increase your sales. Be sure to clearly spell out your shipping policy and utilize Amazon’s Info & Policies page to adjust shipping settings.
Create a Competitive Buy rule or a Competitive Lower Price rule through Amazon’s Compare Prices page. This will allow you to automatically match your product’s competitive price which will increase your chance of being featured in the Buy Box.
Run A/B testing with different price points to see if it makes a difference in your sales.
Keep track of your product’s Brand Dashboard ranking and manage your product reviews. Positive reviews lead to a better search ranking, so be sure to follow the best practices for maintaining positive feedback/ratings.
In Closing
Congratulations again! In addition to having a soon to be bestselling Amazon product listing, you now have some helpful tips for getting it seen by the widest customer audience possible. Take some time to research the above suggestions and see what works best for your particular product. Remember, you have already laid out the groundwork by getting your listing up and running. Now is the time to finesse its finer points to give online customers a proper representation of how wonderful your product truly is!
How you can make the most of the newest Amazon keyword: Squid Game.
As most of the world knows, Squid Game was released by Netflix on September 17th, 2021. Not even a month into its release, it is the number one watched show on Netflix. Plus, it is the streaming platform’s most watched tv show in its history. What once was a keyword no one has heard of before just 3 weeks ago is now one of the largest Amazon keywords.
As you can see in the image below, “Squid Game’s” keyword phrases dominate halloween costumes and costumes in general. It is on trend to be the halloween outfit of the year. Similar to the Harley Quinn costume in 2016 with Suicide Squad. It is fascinating to see how quickly keyword trends and phrases pop up. This verifies again that it is vital for Amazon sellers to stay up to speed on social trends. If you are able to get involved with selling early, you can make thousands of dollars quickly and efficiently with not much competition.
Squid Game reaches beyond Netflix
Alongside costumes becoming a trending search on Amazon, Vans saw a 7,800% increase in sales of white slip on vans. They’re the TV show’s premier shoe with an increase in sales across the globe. Netflix, Vans, and those selling track suits are on par to make big bucks in 2021.
The trend continues.
According to our Keyword Manager and Research tools, Squid Game Costume has over 500,000 searches starting in October. In September, it only had around 50,000 searches. Those who were in the selling game that early were the first to make big bucks on those searches. It is still not too late. Our data shows that the search volume will most likely continue to trend upwards till about October 31st. After halloween, search volume will more than likely drop off.
What is next after Squid Game?
As the movies Marvel’s Eternals, new episodes of Netflix’s Bridgerton, and Spiderman: No Way Home are coming out later this year, it is important to keep in mind that these will open up avenues for more selling opportunities. Try to get involved in these early before they skyrocket in keyword trends like Squid Game.
With data research going back over 4 years, Viral Launch provides their users with the largest library of Amazon keywords. The Keyword Manager tool is the most popular among users. Especially for its ability to quickly compare and contrast specific Amazon keywords and how it compares to similar ones. Users can optimize the best SEO for their products to hit the number one spot on Amazon.
As the largest and latest round of stimulus checks make their way into bank accounts across the USA, we take a look into how you can use it as an investment into your business.
According to the IRS, about 90 million Americans were sent their $1,400 stimulus checks on Wednesday alone, with more to be sent in the coming weeks.
The newfound financial flexibility creates opportunities previously not afforded for those fortunate enough to receive the $1,400 as “extra” money. One popular way to view the stimulus check is as an avenue into investing, but investing isn’t limited to stocks.
Instead of investing in another company, why not invest in your own?
Whether you’re a longtime seller, beginner, or considering leaping into FBA, there are plenty of ways to rejuvenate or jumpstart your Amazon business with $1,400. By investing in your e-commerce business, you could easily turn your stimulus check into a long-term money-making machine.
We should mention this isn’t necessarily a guide. Every seller’s journey is different. The options we’ll highlight below are merely a few options you may want to consider. With prudent planning, these options present a promising opportunity for you to get a great return on investment from your stimulus check.
Without further ado, let’s dive into it!
Elevate Your Product Research Game
When it comes to selling on Amazon (and in most aspects of life), having the luxury of reliable data to base your decisions on is a tremendous luxury. For Amazon sellers, this is made possible through product research.
Whether you’ve yet to begin your FBA journey or have a catalog full of successful products, product research is crucial for sustained profitability. When you have access to comprehensive market data, it’s almost like having the answers to a test.
While reliable Amazon sales data is crucial at all stages, it’s especially vital for beginners. The research that goes into deciding upon your first product serves as a foundational aspect of your Amazon career. Choosing to source and sell a product without conducting intensive research with data you can trust is a surefire way to make your first product your last product.
So if you’re beginning to look into FBA, test out a few software providers. Most software providers will offer a free trial, giving you time to see if they’re right for you.
How to Find Successful Amazon Products with Viral Launch
Feel free to test trials from different software providers simultaneously to compare and contrast the data. If you notice any inconsistencies, don’t be shy. Ask their customer service team how they arrive at their numbers. With such an important decision that can pay off handsomely, don’t leave any stones unturned.
Aspiring Amazon entrepreneurs aren’t the only ones who can take their product research game up a notch. Often, Amazon sellers don’t utilize all tools within their toolset.
Whether there are underutilized tools in your current software plan or an opportunity to upgrade your plan for additional access, there’s no better time than now to explore unfamiliar tools. Amazon is constantly evolving, so sellers must evolve with it.
Boost Your Business with Captivating Creatives
It’s springtime! You know what that means. Spring cleaning!
For Amazon sellers, the seasonal cleaning isn’t limited to dusting ceiling fans, clearing out the refrigerator, and giving your home a good deep cleaning. It may be worth considering if your listing creatives are due for an upgrade.
Do your listing’s copy and product photography abide by Amazon requirements and follow the style guidelines? Is your competition doing something with their photos that seems to be working? Are you maximizing your visibility by having a keyword-optimized product listing, or are you missing out on indexation for keywords customers are using to products like yours?
These are just a few of the questions you should ask yourself when considering updating your creatives.
Even if your product photography is in tip-top shape, additional photos can still provide plenty of benefits for your business. For example, possessing extra product images opens the door for creative advertising.
One way you can spruce up your advertising with enhanced photos is Amazon Posts, a relatively new option to increase brand visibility. Amazon Posts is a social media-like platform within Amazon that allows brand registered sellers to flex their advertising muscle. Appearing on product detail pages selected by Amazon, brands get the ever-important chance to poach customers from competing listings.
How Amazon Posts appears to shoppers.
The best thing about Amazon Posts? It’s totally free. Well, submitting your Posts is free, anyway. You’ll still want professional photos capable of enticing customers to earn a click. Since Amazon Posts is somewhat new, it’s flying under the radar of many sellers, but can be an incredibly efficient weapon for stealing customers from the competition.
Additionally, having extra photos come in handy if you sell outside of Amazon or may consider selling elsewhere at a later time.
Lastly, having extra photos at your disposal provides an even better opportunity to experiment for peak optimization. Once you’ve got premium product photography, don’t forget to split test! With a plethora of split testing sites to choose from, it’s an easy step to maximize your conversions and profitability!
Flex Your Marketing Muscle with PPC
Another great way to invest your stimulus money into your business is by using it to take the next step with Amazon PPC (pay-per-click) advertising.
Although Amazon debuted PPC advertising in 2012, it has grown considerably over the last 2-3 years and shows no sign of slowing down. With Amazon expected to net nearly $13 billion in advertising in the United States marketplace alone, the company has every reason to continue pushing and developing PPC.
Whether this means finally taking that PPC course, creating your first campaign, or trying out an unexplored ad type, doing it with a bonus $1,400 makes it a prime opportunity to experiment with PPC.
For sellers currently selling, it especially makes sense to test out new campaigns now as plenty of customers are flush with their stimulus money and tax season right around the corner.
After all, you’re not the only one receiving the stimulus. More customers shopping with more money is a recipe for more customer searches. As your product appears more frequently through search and on competitor listings, the sample size for your campaigns grows larger and, thus, more reliable.
Fortunately, the options are flexible for you regarding your PPC campaigns. Set your budgets as low or as high as you feel comfortable with, and barring disaster, let them run until the reporting data begins to stabilize. Once they’ve matured, you’ll have real data on your performance that you can use to optimize to your advantage.
Scale Your Store by Expanding Your Brand
Suppose you feel like you’ve squeezed nearly all the juice you can out of a product. First off, congratulations! It’s every Amazon sellers’ goal to reach and maintain peak performance, but what do you do once you’ve achieved it? For many, it can be a never-ending pursuit of perfection.
However, it may be more beneficial to scale your brand by finding your next home run. Think of your stimulus check as $1,400 off the development of your next product, and this becomes especially beneficial.
Of course, this entirely depends on your goals, resources, and risk appetite. Ideally, the learning curve for launching a new product shortens with each new product. If you’ve built a strong brand on Amazon, the likelihood of your next product being a success increases exponentially.
Instead of squeezing every penny possible out of your current storefront, dig into your sales reporting numbers and do your best to determine the best course of action for your business.
In Conclusion
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to supercharge your Amazon business! Whether jumpstarting your entrepreneurial career or looking to take your existing e-commerce operation up a notch, investing in your business with your stimulus money could provide an excellent, long-lasting return on investment.
No matter what you decide to do with your stimulus money, enjoy it! Without a doubt, extra cash in your pocket is nice. But creating long-lasting, sustainable sources of income is even better.
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In the pursuit of maximum visibility, too many sellers neglect keyword optimizing their product listing.
You’ve performed product research and found the perfect product to sell. You found the right manufacturer. You’ve created your Seller Central account and are ready to start your FBA career. Next up: Product Listing Optimization.
It’s time to get down to business on your Amazon marketing strategy! That begins with making sure your product listing is set up for maximum visibility and able to convert shoppers to buyers.
We consider your product images and copy to be the foundation of a successful Amazon marketing plan. Every aspect of your selling experience will benefit from high-quality images and sales-inducing copy optimized for search.
Want the latest Amazon news and updates sent to your inbox? Sign up below!
Although many don’t think of Amazon as a search engine, that’s precisely what it is.
Is your listing optimized to take advantage of this humongous audience?
Sellers who don’t optimize their listing to reach all the customers for their product are not only leaving sales on the table; they’re encouraging customers to buy from competitors, resulting in ranking changes that further minimize your visibility. Whether creating a new listing or enhancing your existing listing, Viral Launch’s Keyword Research tools are all you need to maximize visibility, increase exposure, and most importantly — boost sales.
STEP 1: Find your seed keyword
First, we’ll need to determine our seed keyword. In the Amazon world, this would be the most relevant keyword that has the highest search volume. In other words, the most popular term that customers are using to find your product on Amazon.
Think about the product you want to sell. If you were a customer, what would I search for my product to show up as a result?
For some products, this is as simple as it sounds. But for others, it can be trickier than you’d think.
Consider soft drinks. Is it soda, pop, or are you like me and use “Coke” as a catch-all for every fizzy beverage? Without a doubt, this likely depends on where you’re from or where you currently live.
From this example, you can see how colloquial language can change depending on geography and how the same product may have a few different primary keywords.
Finding the right seed keyword is one of many reasons why Viral Launch’s Keyword Research tool is a must-have for writing your listing. Filled with years of search volume data, Keyword Research makes the process of finding a seed keyword and knowing your primary keywords a simple one.
For the remainder of our SEO exercise, Keyword Research plays a huge role not only regarding what keywords we use but where we place them. The proprietary keyword metrics such as Priority Score, Relevancy Score, and Opportunity Score provide valuable insights for us to draw from and prioritize our keywords.
Dig around with keyword research before deciding upon your seed keyword. You may be surprised at what keywords fetch the most searches for your product.
Step 2: Find Relevant High-Volume Keywords
Filter out keywords that aren’t relevant to your product. Use the filters to customize your keyword list, removing competitor brand names and any keywords that don’t apply to your product.
After you’ve found the right seed keyword, you’ll have a comprehensive list of related keywords along with helpful data points such as Viral Launch’s exclusive Priority Score and Relevancy Score. We recommend sorting by search volume estimates, as these are going to be where much of the traffic via search.
Sort this list by search volume estimates to get an idea of what keywords or phrases people are using to find your product. Since search volume estimates are an incredibly powerful indicator of consumer demand on Amazon, we can quickly see which keywords are being used to find your product and the depth of the market.
Ensuring that your product is indexed for the majority or all of your keywords are the first step in making sure your listing shows up for customers. Without indexing for these keywords, achieving sustainable sales is an uphill battle, to say the least.
As you filter through your list, you’ll find keywords that don’t apply to your product, such as competitor brand names. Unless you’re selling one of these brand names, it’s best to remove them entirely from your keyword list.
How to Filter
We recommend using the “Keyword Excludes” filter to take irrelevant or inapplicable keywords for maximum efficiency. Due to Amazon’s robust size, it’s impossible for a machine to automatically pull a keyword list ONLY related to your product. But the “Keyword Excludes” filter allows you to take out keywords that do not apply to your product. Once completed, you’ll have a keyword list made exclusively for your product.
In the image listed for this step, you’ll see I’m filtering out “La Croix” since that is a competing brand. Further down the list, this brand name is mentioned multiple times. Filtering it out just once will get rid of all mentions of “La Croix” with that exact spelling.
For the same reasons we remove results with competitor names, you’ll want to eliminate other results that aren’t relevant to your product, such as size, color, dosage, or product specifications that don’t apply to your product.
Once you’ve finished filtering, put these keywords into action by adding them into your listing’s copy. You can do this yourself OR use a tool like Listing Builder to make the process much more streamlined.
STEP 3: Piece It All Together
The beauty of Listing Builder is that it allows for experimentation with your listing’s copy and enables real-time feedback for you to see how each change affects your listing.
Creating a listing can feel a lot like putting a puzzle together, and Listing Builder empowers you to move the pieces around to see what works.
You’ll see your filtered-down list of keywords, sortable by search volume estimate, priority score, and opportunity score. On the right, you’ll see the fields for an Amazon listing that you can use without affecting your actual listing.
As you type each keyword in, you’ll notice that each keyword will be crossed off your list. This feature assists you to be as space-efficient as possible with your listing. Likewise, Amazon doesn’t place extra weight on keywords for repeated use, so once you’ve used it once, there’s no need to add it again for SEO.
Know your (character) limits
Your product listing has a character limit for title and bullet points, typically between 50 and 200 characters for each. Your limit depends on what category Amazon recognizes your product as, and this can play an enormous impact on how you execute your strategy.
If you include your brand name in your title to align with Amazon’s style guide, 50 characters become even less. Product listings with 50 character titles will have to be more “meat and potatoes” while extended character limits allow more room for sales-inducing, descriptive language.
Across all listings (except for listings with EBC), you will have up to 2000 characters to use at your discretion.
HOOK CUSTOMERS IN WITH YOUR TITLE
You never get a second chance to make a first impression, and your title is the first impression on the shopper. A thoughtfully crafted title and a professional main product image are a recipe for you to get customers to choose your product over the other search results.
Amazon recommends starting your title with your brand name. We always recommend meeting their style guidelines to ensure you don’t get your listing suppressed.
Staying within their guidelines can be a pain and stand in the way of the keyword or phrase you’re just dying to fit within your limits. But we must remember this is only part of doing business since not following the guidelines can defeat the purpose of optimizing the copy in the first place.
DON’T BE A BOT
A common mistake that sellers make is keyword stuffing. Keyword stuffing describes including as many keywords as possible without regard for readability or sense. Not only is keyword stuffing against Amazon-style guidelines, but it’s also not shopper-friendly.
Nobody wants to read your keyword list, so don’t make it your product listing! All too often, sellers use various keyword stuffing methods and see great optimization scores, but wonder why their product isn’t selling.
Writing a keyword-optimized listing is both an art and a science. It requires the science of search data with the art of integrating these keywords into your listing in sales-inducing language.
Ideally, your listing is indexed for each and every keyword on your list. Depending on character limits and how many keywords are relevant for your product, this might not be possible. But don’t panic! This underlines the importance of being strategic with which keywords get left on the cutting room floor.
Our end goal is to increase rank, which occurs when you achieve sales through searches for keywords that you’re indexing for. Don’t get too caught up writing to the algorithm! Remember the goal is to inform and market to the reader you’re trying to convert to a customer!
MAKE SURE YOUR BULLET POINTS HAVE BITE
Once your title has been expertly crafted, the bullet points should be next up on your order of operations. This is where customers get to know your product. What’s unique about it? What sets it apart from the competition?
The bullet points are an excellent place to boast selling points and add keywords that couldn’t be squeezed into the title. Most listings will include five bullets, so think about 5–7 selling points of your product. Prioritize them, and place them in a way that makes the most sense.
Sticking with our fictional soda example, let’s highlight a few of the selling points to start it off.
TASTE THE TROPICS: Quench your thirst with a can of our refreshingly sweet, all-natural orange soda
Within 100 characters, we caught the shopper’s attention with a catchy slogan, informed the customer it comes in a can, and highlighted two major selling points for our fictional orange soda: it’s refreshing and completely natural.
We’re answering customer questions while addressing a few primary benefits of this particular soda. We’ve used a few crucial keywords as well, all without appearing to stuff them unnaturally.
CLOSE THE DEAL WITH A KILLER PRODUCT DESCRIPTION
The customer found your product and liked what they saw with your title and header image. They saw your bullet points, and they haven’t left looking for competitor products. You’ve got this customer on the hook.
Now close the deal.
Psychologically, the customer is looking for a final reason to buy or not buy your product. Answer any potential questions they may have. Show and tell the customer why your product is superior to others on the market.
Your product description likely has a 2000 character limit and offers minimal indexing weight. But do not make the mistake of ignoring this section because it won’t increase your visibility.
The longer character limit and lack of indexing weight make this area ideal for describing your product’s selling points.
Take on the mentality of a customer. What’s in this product? How is it made? What sets it apart from Competitor X? How does this product make my life better?
Answering these questions could be the difference between a customer adding to cart or starting their search over again.
DON’T SKIP THE BACK-END SEARCH TERMS
Sellers frequently make the mistake of leaving their back-end search term areas blank! Just because customers can’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t have value.
The backend search term fields are a terrific way to grab “low-hanging fruit” in the form of relevant search terms containing common misspellings or search queries made in foreign languages. Toss those lower relevance keywords that you weren’t able to squeeze into the title or bullet points here.
The backend search-term field is a lifesaver for including keywords that wouldn’t make sense to include in a product listing such as common misspellings and Spanish phrases.
Importantly, leaving this area blank willingly misses out on thousands of searches each month and the sales that come with them.
Also, you’ll see optional areas to fill out, such as Intended Use, Target Audience, Other Attributes, and Subject Matter as backend fields. While we have found no significant correlation between these fields, Amazon occasionally tweaks its algorithm.
Despite the lack of tangible benefits, we recommend filling these fields in case these fields come into play later.
In Conclusion
An expertly crafted, keyword-optimized product listing makes you more likely to land you on the coveted Page One of results. Of course, this comes after sales trickle through via the keywords you’re indexing for. Then, you’ll see your rank improve so you can start receiving
Both inexperienced and veterans sellers should optimize their product listings for maximum performance. Optimizing your product listing by keyword is a tactic that rookie and experienced sellers alike should be doing. Trends change, so it’s worth monitoring your keyword performance and optimization score every few months. Monitoring keywords keeps you on top of your game and give your product detail page an edge over the competition.
With Keyword Research and Listing Builder, it’s never been easier for sellers to create their keyword-optimized product listing. If you have any questions about Amazon’s guidelines, their product page style guide comes in handy.
Additionally, our customer support team is always willing to help provide clarity. Sign up today and select a plan that includes our listing optimization software bundle to maximize your listing today
Selling on Amazon is unlike running any other online store.
The beauty is that it’s both marketplace and search engine rolled into one: Buyers search for and purchase what they need without ever having to navigate to another site. This makes for an exciting and dynamic seller experience — but it also means sellers must market correctly in order to see real results.
Because of this layout, you need to treat Amazon as a search engine when advertising your products. If you want to get your products in front of people who are searching for them, you’ll need to know how to optimize the right keywords for your Amazon listings.
Any failure to understand how to optimize your Amazon listings gives your competitors an advantage in your market. Don’t give your rivals the upper hand!
How Do Keywords Work on Amazon?
On any other search engine, such as Google, getting a brand or product to rank high means building up your organic search engine optimization. The same is true on Amazon. The majority of sales happen organically, with products that are highly optimized.
When optimizing your listing, be strategic. Keep SEO in mind to set up your product for the highest potential visibility, and most important, make sure to get things right the first time. Editing a listing that was already written can hurt the listing’s SEO ranking.
For example, make sure to include the most frequently used variations and prioritize the right keywords for the right audience at the right time. You’ll need the help of our Amazon keyword tool, which is designed to help you find and use every relevant keyword.
For one of Viral Launch client, the strategic use of the Amazon keyword tool helped it reach $40,000 in sales within 30 days of its new product launch. By the end of the launch, the product had gone from ranking No. 300 to No. 1 in search results for the targeted keyword.
A Few Amazon Keyword Tips
Our Amazon keyword tooltells you which keywords shoppers use most often when they shop for products like yours. It also helps you include these keywords in your listing without breaking Amazon’s character limits in any of the fields.
When used correctly, the Amazon keyword toolgives you the power to find all the keywords and variations relevant to any product. To use them to your ultimate advantage, keep these three points in mind when choosing which keywords to use:
1. Lean heavily on search volume data.
Our Amazon keyword toolgives you actionable data about the search volume of any keyword. The industry-leading search volume estimates generated are constantly updated, so the data is always fresh and safe to rely upon.
Each time you research a keyword, the tool will also provide exact and broad match data surrounding it. You can see the immediate and far-reaching impact it could potentially have on your SEO ranking, as well as the keyword’s current standing in the market.
2. Dive into the keyword’s history.
Every relevant keyword around your product has a history, especially those that have the highest search volumes. Our keyword tool is the only one that can bring you exhaustive historical data, helping you dive deep into the history across the entire market — including competitor usage.
Accurate historical keyword data is important for several reasons. It includes historically relevant horizontal keywords you can use to boost the product’s listing. Additionally, it gives you full market context so you can strategize around each keyword’s popularity trends.
3. Keep the keyword’s relevancy in mind.
Although search volume is essential to choosing the right keywords, relevancy to your product is just as important. Some terms might have attractive volumes but may not actually fit the customer base for your specific product.
Because the majority of Amazon sales happen organically, our Amazon keyword tool can give you deep insights into which keywords and variations are most relevant to which products with the Viral Launch Priority Score. It allows you to easily compare terms, finding the most appropriate ones for your listing based on relevancy and search volume.
Finding the right keywords for your Amazon listings is vital to successfully selling on Amazon. But you can’t do it manually. Learn more by starting your free trial of Viral Launch to get access to our suite of keyword research tools.
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After launching a new product and implementing strategies to generate reviews and early sales, in time, you will have established a great foundation for long-term product growth. At this point, it’s time to begin building on that foundation to achieve favorable keyword ranking and drive considerable sales growth. You can achieve this with an aggressive Amazon growth strategy.
Though you may have a mountain to climb to make your listing the ‘top dog’ in your category, the beginning of this journey is the slowest and most difficult part. Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for a successful product, it’s time to start implementing tactics to accelerate your momentum.
You still may have a ways to go before you can consider this product a success. However, after you’ve gathered some initial reviews and are driving some sales, that momentum can be utilized to continue growth with the following Amazon growth strategy tactics.
Price Testing
Establishing a low price is a great metric for generating sales in the early stages of a listing, providing a tangible value proposition to lure price-conscious buyers away from your competition. That said, while it’s critically important that you price appropriately for the market, you may have not started at a price which provides you with a healthy margin for profit.
Considering that Amazon is first and foremost a search engine for products, ensuring that you’re favorably ranked in search results should be your key objective. In order to rank well, you need to sell well. Keep this in mind when experimenting with price.
Assuming that you’ve gathered a reasonable base of reviews and that you’re consistently driving some sales, you may be able to experiment with different pricing options.
As you’re able to position your product more competitively in the market, the instinct may be to immediately raise your price to the ideal level. That said, your conversion rate may still be relatively price contingent, meaning that you can experience a steep drop-off in sales. Additionally, Amazon’s algorithms are typically not favorable towards dramatic price swings and a steep price increase can sometimes result in a loss of buy box control (even if you are the sole seller on the listing).
Instead, it’s recommended that you slowly step-up price over a longer duration while closely watching your performance and conversion metrics. The main priority is to retain forward momentum so if you start to see sales engagement decline as your price rises, you may consider reverting to a low price or experimenting with coupon offers as a means of maintaining your progress.
While you may have more flexibility in pricing as your listing matures, sales velocity and ranking should still be at the forefront of your mindset. Selling more units at a thinner margin should trump your price point in order to continue to establish your listing in the market. This is once again an instance in which you should be thinking about the long-term Amazon growth strategy for your product.
Aggressive PPC Tactics
Assuming you had established some advertising campaigns shortly after launching your product, you should now have a foundation of data from which to more aggressively pursue PPC. While the purpose of PPC in the early phases of your listing was to gain some visibility and give your product the opportunity to sell, as your Amazon product listing becomes more established, that growth strategy should begin to shift to more aggressive tactics centered around driving ranking.
The endgame of establishing and maintaining favorable SEO ranking is the listing’s ability to obtain a growing quantity of organic sales. Because of this, it’s important to review your campaigns in tandem with organic performance.
To provide some perspective, prior to e-commerce, if a brand wanted to advertise their product, they would purchase a tv/radio/print ad and develop a message to be distributed through the channel. In order to gauge the value of that investment, they would need to review sales data to see if there was a correlation between their advertising and an increase in sales.
When advertising on Amazon, you’re able to see an exact return on your advertising spend (ACoS). While this is a great metric to review, it’s easy to get fixated on this spend amount. If your ACoS is high, it’s an easy justification for ending your campaign. The problem is that ACoS doesn’t show you the full impact of your advertising efforts.
It’s also important (and contrary to Amazon’s position) to note that Amazon is not an adequate platform for driving brand awareness. Because PPC provides you with very limited creative capability, it’s exceptionally hard for a private label seller to establish an adequate brand voice. Some of this can be done through social media engagement and more traditional advertising tactics but your on-Amazon growth strategy should be focused on SEO and sales rather than trying to build a base of loyal customers.
At this stage in your product’s lifecycle, it’s important to begin to compile high performing keywords to focus ad spend on while simultaneously understanding the less tangible benefits of advertising. Attention should be placed on both maximizing profitable revenue from easy wins, and developing strategic tactics to advantageously position you across your entire market.
Manual Targeting
When spending on advertising, rather than thinking of it in the context of spending to increase sales, it can be valuable to understand it as buying data from Amazon. When you allow an advertising campaign to run, you’re able to collect a large amount of information about how shoppers perceive your listing. By using your advertising reports as a resource, you can better understand what keywords are most effectively luring buyers to your account and how to more efficiently direct your spend.
Assuming that you’ve been running automatic, discovery, and product targeting campaigns, you should progressively be collecting a large amount of data around your campaign performance. To access that data, you’ll want to download advertising reports from the Business Reports tab in your seller central account.
There are different types of reports which provide different information but one of the most valuable is the Search Term report for sponsored products. From this data, you can determine which keywords are driving sales and how effectively.
As you collect more data through the use of PPC, you should begin to isolate terms that convert well for your product. These terms can be the basis of developing effective and profitable campaigns. Essentially, if a keyword is consistently generating sales at a relatively low ACoS, there can be some assumption that it will continue to perform in that manner. It’s important to note that you’re still going to want to regularly review the data to ensure that it’s maintaining performance, but if keywords are consistently performing at a profitable ACoS, you can assume that they will continue to do so.
In these instances, breaking these keywords out of your automatic or discovery campaigns and placing them in their own manual targeting campaign with a dedicated budget can be advantageous. In this way, you can ensure that a dedicated budget is being implemented to drive a continuous return. Ideally, performance for the keyword will remain stable, meaning that you’re effectively putting one dollar in to get two dollars out.
If this trend continues and ACoS continues to be profitable, the next step is to simply ensure that the campaign isn’t running out of budget on a daily basis. If you’re running out of budget on a profitable campaign, it means that you’re missing the opportunity to maximize sales and revenue from it. That said, the number of impressions that your ad receives is contingent on how frequently a term is searched. For lower volume keywords, a term may only be searched a few times per day, meaning that your ad can generate profitable sales, but not at a high volume. Essentially, this means that there is a limit to how much you actually can spend when directly targeting a keyword, but assuming it’s profitable to do so, it’s advantageous to make sure you’re maximizing that potential.
Ideally, in time, more of your budget will be tied to singular high performing keywords, effectively playing to your strengths and driving a decent volume of profitable sales. As you drive more sales, your listing will continue to climb in ranking, accumulate reviews, and establish a extensive sales history. This may afford you opportunities to convert better and gain more relevance with higher volume search terms for which your product previously didn’t perform as well for. In other words, as your product receives more reviews and is better positioned in the market in terms of competitiveness, you may consider running advertising on higher volume and more competitive search terms.
Search Engine Optimization
The first benefit of advertising (beyond the direct sales driven through your ads) is that it contributes to Amazon SEO. Typically, and while sales obviously have a stronger impact, any engagement with a listing positively impacts keyword ranking. An accumulation of clicks, add-to-carts, and sales in time will help to drive your listing closer to the top of relevant search results. This is especially true when your ad is engaged with through a specific search term. However, keywords that get an excess number of clicks with few to no orders will likely result in negative rank movement. Simply spending hundreds of dollars inefficiently on a single keyword is not the magic bullet to rank improvements; you must convert for the term as well.
While it’s not advisable to spend money blindly on inefficient campaigns, when monitoring keyword ranking improvement and organic sales growth alongside campaign performance, you may find that there is a net benefit to a campaign with a higher ACoS. A keyword tracking tool such as Keyword Manager can be extremely helpful for monitoring ranking changes in correlation with ad spend.
Spending to Facilitate Organic Sales Growth
Along with driving organic ranking for your product, advertising spend can in-turn influence organic sales growth. This somewhat follows the logic of traditional (pre-Ecommerce) advertising.
While obviously, establishing better keyword ranking establishes better visibility in the market, which correlates to more organic sales, there is also the less calculable idea that running advertising increases your visibility with consumers. Because repetition influences mental processes, it’s possible that by running advertising, a shopper may overlook your paid ad spot but end up purchasing after viewing the organic listing. In this way, PPC can partially function similarly to a billboard.
Additionally, while this happens more heavily with higher cost products, it’s common for shoppers to browse and consider a purchase over a period of time. As a result, it’s possible that shoppers are viewing (and possibly clicking on) your ads without making a purchase at that time. At the point where a purchasing decision is made, it’s possible that they would click on your organically ranked listing and/or searched for your product directly.
Defensive Ad Spending
Particularly in instances where you’re performing well and/or have enough of a brand presence where people search directly for your brand or products, using ads as a defensive measure can be an effective way to maintain market share.
When a shopper is searching for a product, on any given page there is a limited number of ad spaces available. Though you may be in an advantageous organic positioning for some of these terms, aggressively advertising can be an effective way to suppress competition and ensure a better probability that your product is purchased. With this tactic, the focus may not be on profitable spending (particularly though the campaign performance itself) but rather as a method of affirming broad performance for your product by dominating the paid digital shelf space.
Especially in instances where you have several products that are relevant to a search term, defensive ad spend can help influence shopping decisions by establishing high visibility for your brand. By holding multiple ad spots within the search results, repetition can help to lure buyers into exploring your brand more thoroughly while simultaneously preventing others from gaining the same degree of visibility.
Conclusion
Putting in the effort to source a product strategically, thoroughly research the keyword market, and lay the foundation for sales and review generation should put you in a position to eventually reap the rewards of your hard work. With that context, at this stage in your listing’s life on Amazon, you can begin to shift your growth strategy to more aggressive tactics. By reviewing your performance and campaign data, you can begin to isolate profitable keywords which you can exploit in order to maximize profitable revenue while simultaneously looking at the total influence of PPC spend with relation to organic sales and ranking.
Using these tactics, you can begin to push your listing to visible and favorable ranking position, grow your organic sales potential, and attempt to minimize the visibility of your competition.
These Amazon growth strategy tactics will, in time, help to drive a listing from the back of the catalog to a major contender in the market. While this process can take time, money, and effort, this long-term strategic play will eventually help a listing to truly dominate the market.
By maintaining some aspects of the traditional school of thought on the benefits of advertising while also appreciating the depth of data that PPC provides, advertising on Amazon can provide you with a wealth of advantages in a congested market.
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.
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.
