The saying goes that opportunity often looks like work. That’s certainly been true of Amazon keyword optimization.
Paying for keyword results that may or may not be relevant, sometimes spending hours trying to decide which ones to put in your listing; it’s exhausting.
Then there’s fierce competition to think about. So many sellers have zeroed in on the same group of keywords, making those keywords competitive and difficult to rank well for. It’s like if Google Maps showed only one Starbucks in all of Manhattan.
That store would constantly be packed with people and nearly impossible to place an order with. You’d probably use a different map to see all of the other Starbucks locations and visit one with the shortest wait possible to get your coffee immediately.
Amazon keywords are kind of the same in that the main keyword for your product is the one showing up on all the current tools. And that Amazon keyword is overcrowded. You have to decide if it’s worth it to wait in line for a sale. And until now, there haven’t been any other tools to show you the open keywords for your product. So you’ve had no choice but to wait and wait and wait for a sale in a crowded market.
But with the Opportunity Score feature in Keyword Research, the latest Viral Launch, game-changing software, you can identify all of the keywords that your competitors are not taking advantage of. While they’re focused on the same group of overworked keywords, you can locate and strategically incorporate hidden gems. Core keywords they don’t know about.
So, how does Opportunity Score work to help you get these keywords that you can immediately begin ranking for?
How Opportunity Score Evaluates Keywords
To put the most relevant and high opportunity keywords in front of you, Keyword Research runs a Reverse Market Lookup that reaches across all Amazon markets associated with your seed word. The result is an enormous pool of keywords related to your product.
Until now, a popular method of identifying important keywords was through a Reverse ASIN Lookup. A Reverse ASIN tool requires you to input an ASIN (product) or a list of ASINs. The tool then pulls a list of keywords that the given product or products are indexed for within Amazon.
The only problem is that a Reverse ASIN Lookup doesn’t show you the full picture because it can’t. A reverse ASIN lookup assumes that the listings associated with the ASINs have virtually perfect keyword use while ignoring the probability that the listing is almost always missing vital keywords, keywords that allow you to truly stand out in that market.
Keyword Research takes a widescreen view of a keyword’s market performance by evaluating thousands of listings. It does a Reverse Market Lookup to find virtually every associated keyword and then runs each term through our Market Relevancy Calculation. This process ensures that you see all of your product’s most important keywords without having to weed through the irrelevant ones.
How Opportunity Scores Are Calculated
Let’s look at a search result page for the seed keyword t-shirt to better understand how Opportunity Scores are calculated.
If you search the term “t-shirt” in Keyword Research and sort by Opportunity Score, “tees for men” comes up as a 1,000 Opportunity Score keyword. So what does that mean?
Basically we’re looking at all t-shirt products and finding where tees for men is showing up. All of the orange-shaded listings have tees in their title but not for men. The blue-shaded listings have for men but not tees. And the blue-ish brown-shaded listings have tees as well as for men.
But since tees for men is a 1,000 score keyword, we know that tees and for men do not appear consecutively and may not even be in the correct order in the listing title. Since so few sellers have included tees in their title, and even fewer have included both tees and for men, the Opportunity Score for the phrase tees for men is 1,000. That perfect score means that 0 of the top 10 listings have that full keyword phrase in the front end (or the title, bullet points, and description) of their listing.
Opportunity Score sifts top sellers for a particular keyword, screens their listing content, and scans whether or not those listings are using that particular keyword. For the listings that are, it then weights them by identifying where the keyword is placed and in what context – title, bullets or description. This weighted system is what produces each keyword’s Opportunity Scores.
How To Read and Implement Your Opportunity Score Results
You’re looking for keywords with a high Opportunity Score and solid search volume. Anything north of 8,000 exact is a good mark to shoot for. But keep in mind that search results are relative to your product. For instance, product X’s top keyword may have search volume of 1.5 million, product Y’s top keyword may have search volume of 5,500.
Keywords with Opportunity Scores of 1,000 are obviously ideal but so are keywords with scores in the 700-900 range. What you’re looking for is a balance of essential high volume keywords and high opportunity keywords that other sellers aren’t prioritizing.
For example, if you’re selling a flashlight, you must include flashlight up front in your title. But you can also include the phrase flash light, which has an Opportunity Score over 900 and high search volume. This allows your listing to catch searches for both terms and puts your listing in front of other sellers for the term flash light. More opportunity, for more searches and more sales.
And it’s easier than ever to find high-volume, high-opportunity, keywords with our new filter feature. Create a custom filter for Exact Search Volume that is Great or Equal to the volume you’re interested in, and apply it to your results. Then you can sort by Opportunity Score and see the highest opportunities with the highest volume.
What Opportunities Can You Find Today?
With competition on Amazon continually increasing, you can’t afford to miss opportunities to get ahead of the curve. Along with the accurate keyword results and monthly search volume that Keyword Research provides, Opportunity Score adds that turbo boost you need to shoot past other sellers in ranking, compete with even the best of the best in your category, and drive sales.
Start discovering keyword opportunities for your listing today with Keyword Research.
Understanding the nuances of Amazon customer search is what can really help you rank higher Amazon in the most efficient way possible. Just a handful of small opportunities that other sellers might consider crumbs, really add up. Join hosts Casey Gauss and Cameron Yoder for a conversation about how to feast on the crumbs of your product markets.
Keyword Research integrates seamlessly with our other research software, Market Intelligence and Product Discovery. Find product ideas with high search volume, and see exact and broad match volume as you do market research.
Episode Transcript
CAMERON YODER: Hey, everybody, what’s up? My name is Cameron Yoder, and I’m here with Casey.
CASEY GAUSS: Hey, guys.
CAMERON YODER: And we’re actually in – we’re actually in Las Vegas right now. We hit up a couple conferences, a couple Amazon seller conferences. And it’s been a good time. We’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of really awesome sellers, and Casey actually spoke at one of the conferences here. And it’s just been honestly a really good time to meet some of you, and to talk to some of you, and meet some people that we haven’t met before.
And as always, it’s just good to be in the community, you know, just meeting and talking with people. Anyway, so we’re actually going to dive into more about Keyword Research, not exactly specifically the tool that we introduced last week, or the tool that we just came out with, but we’re going to talk kind of deeper level strategy behind – or basically deeper level strategy that you as a seller can use when you’re researching keywords, the mentality that you should be developing. And we’re going to talk about, again, just deeper level strategies and strategies that you can implement today when it comes to research.
CASEY GAUSS: Hey, guys. I do want to stipulate that, you know, we are not planning on – we’re not trying to shove Keyword Research down your throat. We really just think that, you know, there are some really cool opportunities that have to do with Keyword Research just in general that we really want you to be aware of because whether you’re in a high, highly-competitive market there is still so much opportunity.
Whether you’re in a low competition market, I imagine there’s tons of keywords that you’re not targeting. So yeah, we’ll jump into just high opportunity keywords. So one, you know, so there’s always people jumping into markets that they really have no business being in, or maybe you’ve just been in this market for a while, it’s just gotten so competitive, and you’ve kind of just lost market share.
Well, there’s still, from what we’re seeing, generally so much opportunity that’s out there. So let’s take the Garcinia cambogia market, for example. If you’ve been around for, you know, more than a year you probably know this product to be somewhat of a joke, right? So there’s a ton of products out there that everybody is sourcing, and everybody knows that everybody else has sourced it at some point. These are products like grill gloves, Garcinia cambogia, turmeric, fish oil, grill brushes, garlic press; you know there’s a number of these products.
And so Garcinia cambogia, like I mentioned, is one of them, a very, very competitive market. At one point it was insanely high-volume. I think it’s still pretty high-volume, but there’s definitely some more mature players in this market. So when we go and we run keyword research we find, you know, just quickly scanning through I found 10 words, each with at least 1000 searches a month in volume, all with over 900 opportunity score.
So the one keyword for this is luxury Garcinia cambogia. There’s over 2000 searches a month for it and 990 opportunity score. What this means is – to recap the opportunity score, basically what we’re doing is for each word we’re going to look at the top sellers for this word, and we’re trying to understand do they have this word in their listing. And if so, where do they have it, and how are they using that? The reason being is we are trying to help you understand how easy it would be to rank for a particular keyword. And so to understand how ranking works on Amazon it’s important to know that Amazon is paying attention to the very specifics of keywords and how they’re used in your listing.
So the rules of indexation and the rules of ranking are different. So if you put brush in your listing you will be indexed – meaning Amazon associates this keyword for the product – you will be indexed for, you know, the singular and plural form of that just by putting one version in. So if I put brush in my listing I’ll be indexed for brush and brushes. But one thing that is – and it, you know, generally doesn’t matter where you put that. You know there are limits in terms of back-end search terms. But regardless, you know, if you put it in the bullet points, you put in the title, it all is indexing the same.
But when it comes to keyword ranking, though, this is quite a bit different. And so, you know, basically Amazon is looking at the content of a listing at the time of a sale. So as a sale goes through they’re looking, okay, what words are in the title, what words are in the bullet points, what words are in the back-end, and so forth, to then boost them up in the search results. And so what we see is that words contained within the title get more rank power per sale than words found anywhere else in the listing.
And so this is a very important thing to note. We also see that the specifics are important. So if you only had brush in your title, but you had brushes, you know, in a bullet point, then each sale that happens the word brush is going to be getting higher ranking or moving up the ranks faster than the word brushes. And so these specifics, these nuances, are very important for you to understand how to build the best listing possible and get that advantage over the competitors.
So taking all of this into account plus a bit more, all the data that we have found through our 30,000+ launches, we’ve put into this opportunity score. So we’re looking at, okay, for luxury Garcinia cambogia, how are the top-ranking products using it in their listing? Is it found in the front end? If so, where and how? And so a thousand is the top opportunity, meaning that nobody has it in the front end of their listing in any form.
So for luxury Garcinia cambogia the opportunity score is 990 with 2000 searches a month. All that to say you’re selling Garcinia cambogia, this really competitive market, but there is plenty of opportunity for you to kind of, you know, get the crumbs. Like I said, I think there’s six words or something like that that combined have over 8000 searches per month. Each one has over 1000 searches individually and an opportunity score of 900. So collectively, you know, these crumbs add up to, you know, half of a piece of bread – or half of a loaf of bread.
CAMERON YODER: A cookie.
CASEY GAUSS: Adds up to – I don’t know what it adds up to, but I don’t know what the analogy is, but regardless, you know, you can add up these words. So for example, luxury Garcinia cambogia, misspellings as well, assuming that they do not auto complete within their search results. But here’s a word that has over 1000 searches a month, but is Cambodia Garcinia, but reviews on Garcinia cambogia, there’s over 1000 searches a month for that. So you could just prioritize the word review somewhere in your listing, and now start getting significantly more boost in the search results and another misspelling, Carcinia cambogia.
So if Amazon isn’t auto-completing these words you can throw them in your listing, throw them either in the front end or the back end. Misspellings probably belong in the back end, but it really kind of just depends on what your brand looks like and what the misspelling is to see if you can throw it in the front end. Again, the title provides a really distinct difference in terms of rank power that it is driving. So all this is saying is even in really competitive markets there’s tons of opportunity out there. Go position your product well. Make sure that you’re doing your keyword research to really understand where are the holes – where are the gaps in the market so that I can push my product in there?
CAMERON YODER: I just want to add a little bit to that. I think high-level sellers might take this piece of information and think that there aren’t keywords that they haven’t seen yet, that they could apply to their listing. But this advice honestly applies to all people. I mean it’s not like every single person knows every word in the dictionary, right? And just because of that, you yourself cannot determine if there’s a group of people searching a word that you don’t know about.
And because of that I would really encourage you all, if you’re low, or if you’re a beginning – if you’re a beginning seller, or if you’re an advanced seller, to go and find – do keyword research with the purpose of finding those words that you haven’t seen yet because you will find them, and all of those added up, even if they’re small, to stick with the crumb analogy, can make a whole piece of bread or an entire cookie, whatever the end result of that analogy is.
CASEY GAUSS: Yeah, another one that we were doing some demos here at one of the conferences and people, you know, could not believe that one, people, other top sellers for these words did not have these words in the front end of their listing, and then they were blown away that, you know, some of the most popular tools out there were just missing these really, really important words.
So another high opportunity keyword, if you search trash can you will find trash cans, the plural form, with over 10,000 searches a month, 1000 opportunity, meaning no one has the plural form of can in the front end of their listing, which is just insane to me. The fact that you don’t think to throw cans, the plural form, in your listing is crazy. But there’s over 10,000 searches a month. Easily just throw cans in your title and now you get all this additional traffic without doing much work at all.
So next up I think we are going to talk about horizontal markets. So horizontal markets, again, from kind of a technical perspective can be difficult to find. So there are some popular keyword tools out there that are missing a lot of these horizontal markets, and this is something that, you know, is really important. So one example is going back to trash can, you know this word, we keep using the word but it just has amazing examples.
For example, a horizontal market would be a word where there are no root words contained within this new word. So basically what that means is let’s say we are selling a trash can, a horizontal market would be kitchen garbage, or garbage bin, or waste bin, because you do not find trash or can anywhere within the word. And so there’s tons of these horizontal markets. They can be difficult to find. Another example would be, you know, let’s say you’re selling a first-aid kit and trauma bag would be that example for you. There’s so many of these horizontal markets. Again, make sure that you’re hitting them. A lot of tools that have existed on the market have not been doing us a good job of finding them. But there’s a ton of opportunity out there.
Next up, so this is talking more specifically about Keyword Research, our tool, but we do want to highlight some benefits of the integrations. This is one thing that, you know, I’m just really excited about. But I guess I get excited about a lot. So one benefit of Keyword Research being now integrated within Market Intelligence is too often we see someone going after a very, very niche market, and the sales on Market Intelligence look amazing.
So if you were – but you don’t really know in reality what keywords are driving those sales. So on Market Intelligence or any tool that, you know, this Chrome extension or whatever that’s showing you estimated sales, these sales are for the product as a whole independent of what words it is not ranking for and where. So people can get confused pretty easily.
So if we look at the water bottle market, let’s say someone searches 32 ounce insulated water bottle, and they think you know, the sales look amazing. The top seller is selling $230,000 a month, the third ranking product 100,000, and you know, 26,000 and 40,000 in between those. So it looks like sales are amazing, but if you look at the search results that are now showing within Market Intelligence you see there’s only 378 searches over the last 30 days for this.
So that is a clear indicator that wow, if there’s only 378 searches this revenue cannot be coming from this keyword. So then if you go and you look at insulated water bottle, what you’ll find is okay, there’s a lot more searches, almost 29,000 searches over the last month. And you can, again, see the revenue. If we were to go to water bottle I would imagine we would see a lot of these same products showing up and obviously much, much higher search volume. So basically what we’re hoping to do here with Market Intelligence is just to help you understand that you should, when doing your product research, you should be looking at the main keywords that are driving the sales. And what is the best indicator of that? That is search volume. Cam?
CAMERON YODER: Yeah, I just want to maybe say this in a different way because I think without a visual picture it’s a little hard for listeners maybe to picture something like this. But I just want to give a picture. Again, let’s stick with the insulated water bottle. So you search 32 ounce insulated water bottle, and you see – you’re pulling up all the results and you’re looking at sales information, so monthly revenue, right? So if you pull up 32 ounce insulated water bottle, and I’m a seller looking to maybe get into the insulated water bottle market, I’m going to see all these huge, huge monthly revenue numbers, right?
And I’m going to think, well shoot, everyone is killing it in the 32 ounce insulated water bottle space, so I’m going to source insulated water bottle – or 32 ounce insulated water bottles. What I don’t know, however, is if those sales are being attributed through other keywords. In other words if someone else, or if other people are buying these insulated water bottles through a more primary keyword, such as insulated water bottle, or water bottle in general. So what I need to do is make sure that people are searching for that specific term or that specific market. And in some cases like this people can easily get tricked into buying a very specific product.
Maybe it’s something that’s a little bit of a longer tail keyword and they think it’s a great market when in actuality it’s actually those sales are being attributed through another keyword. And finding the primary keyword is going to give you a more accurate picture of that market, and it’s going to give you a more accurate picture of maybe what you’re stepping into, to either validate that idea or save you from stepping into a market that will underperform, basically.
CASEY GAUSS: And last topic, integrations with product discovery. So this is something that I have been dreaming of for a while, and especially when I realized that we would be able to integrate keyword research data with product discovery. And this is – it’s because you cannot do this literally anywhere else in the world, and that is find underserved markets on Amazon. So what, you know, we did a webinar last night and we were walking through some examples, and you know, it just made perfect sense.
So basically what we mean with an integration with product discovery, which is a product finding tool, you know, we’re tracking coming up on 100 million products on Amazon. We’re tracking millions of keywords, brands and categories to help you identify, you know, great product ideas, great product opportunities, brands that are killing it so you can emulate their success or find, you know, what tactics or driving such.
Anyways, so if you go to the keyword search type in product discovery you can now put in search volume exact, and the search volume, again, is coming from Keyword Research, and here’s where this gets really cool. So basically by having search volume and sales volume we are able to find markets that are underserved. So what I mean by underserved is people are, you know, searching, you know, bachelorette or bridal shower gifts, let’s say.
So they’re searching bridal shower gifts, and they go there and they’re not finding anything that they want, and so they just end up not purchasing something. The opportunity here is for you to find these markets where people are running tons of searches but no one is buying because they aren’t finding what they want. And this gives you validation to understand people want this, no one’s finding – you know, there isn’t a good option available, so I can bring something totally new to the market that satisfies this need.
So one like amazing example that Cam has ahead, or up on the screen right now, is gender reveal. So people are searching gender reveal, and there’s over 25,000 searches a month for this, and there’s only $6000 in average revenues. Gender reveal party supplies, 33,000 searches, and the average product is doing $4,900 a month. So there is a ton of search volume. There’s very low revenue coming in on these products, and that is just one keyword.
If you were to go add up all of the keywords that were related to gender reveal, gender reveal party supplies and you were to look – because the revenue stays the same. The search volume just continues to add up. So anyways, these products are doing, you know, $5,000, $6,000 a month on average, but collectively you know there’s got to be well over, you know, 75,000 searches a month. So just a ton of volume, and basically people just are not buying what they, what they’re seeing.
And so this, you know, go see what’s out there. Obviously people are not super happy. Maybe read some reviews to see what people are really looking for. Go do your research. Go see what you can source, and then bring that to market because you know people are looking for these products. They’re just not finding what they’re looking for.
CAMERON YODER: Yeah people, so people – it’s been very interesting for us to be in Vegas and to be talking to people here just about keyword research in general, not specifically about our tool, but talking to other people and how they use keyword research tools. It’s very interesting for them to use them to find untapped – or to find product ideas, right? So they’re using Keyword Research, other research tools, to find product markets. They’re using the tool for the purpose that they weren’t intended for, right?
And so they’ve asked us – people have asked us about, well should I use Keyword Research? Or can I use Keyword Research to find other markets that I am not in right now? And the answer is yes, you can because other markets are going to pop up. Like if you search trash can, something specific like another horizontal market will pop up or something like it, like mesh bin or something like that. That includes another marketplace for you to jump into. But the integration here with product discovery allows for full search of new product markets that you’re not in yet using Amazon keyword search volume.
So Casey, where we touched on searching for markets that have a high search volume and low sales because that’s indicative of a lot of people searching for a product but not buying, which is indicative of a market that people are not happy with necessarily, or an opportunity for you to make a better product in. On the other hand, let’s say you flip the – so we set a minimum search volume, and we set a max sales number, right, to limit the amount of sales that are popping up for these keyword markets.
Let’s flip that a little bit, and let’s search for markets that have a minimum search volume. So we’re searching for markets that have a high search volume, and we’re searching for markets that have a high revenue, whereas before we were capping the revenue. Now we’re finding markets that have a ton of sales, right, and a ton of search volume. At the same time we’re going to throw in one more metric here. We’re going to cap out the review count.
So we’re searching for markets that have high number of sales, high number of searches, but a capped out number of reviews, something like 100. This, this is a small – and I’m just keeping it simple for podcast’s sake, but this then is indicative of markets that are getting a lot of searches and a lot of sales but are still young, right, so the markets that are still opportune for entry, basically if a market has a lower number of reviews but a high number of sales that’s a better chance of you entering in and competing.
Well this pulls up markets that a lot of people are searching for, that a lot of people are buying in, but that not many other people are competing in, something like that. Our goal with this is to really challenge the mentality of people when it comes to keywords, when it comes to research, when it comes to product research and just keyword research in general. So I would honestly, honestly encourage each of you to begin to question the way that you think about keywords and begin to question yourselves with what you’re looking for, how you’re looking for it and maybe even how you can optimize your processes and your listing optimization.
Well, everybody, we wanted to – we want to thank you so much for sticking with us. We hope that you found some value with this, especially when it comes to just thinking about processes in a different way. That’s what we want to do. We want to challenge sellers to better themselves. We want to challenge sellers to improve and scale their businesses and honestly have fun while doing it. So we thank you so much for tuning in.
Thank you so much for listening. Again, if you have any questions feel free to send us an email, hit us up on Facebook. We would love to hear your feedback on the podcast or just any general questions that you have. Whether it be something about researching keywords or researching markets, we want to hear from you. So hit us up. Thank you so much. We do this for you. If you said hey this weekend, thank you so much for stopping by and saying hey. Hopefully we will see you all sometime in the near future. Anyway, thank you guys so much. Until next time, remember, the data is out there.
If reviews are the currency of Amazon, then Amazon keywords are the lifeblood.
Without the right keywords in your listing, you miss out on thousands of potential sales each month. But by including your most relevant keywords, you can capture every possible impression driving thousands more in revenue each month.
Viral Launch Keyword Research, the most accurate Amazon keyword research tool on the market, provides you with a list of your product’s most relevant search terms. With one simple search, you can quickly find your most important keywords alongside search volume taken straight from Amazon.
Still not sure how to do keyword research for Amazon? Keyword Research provides all the keyword metrics you need to determine how to best use each term. You’ll see exact and broad search volume, search volume historical trends, CPC suggested bids, dominant categories, and threeimportant scores.
These scores include Relevancy Score, Priority Score, and Opportunity Score. Each of these metrics rates the keyword on a scale of 1 to 1,000 and will indicate, in different ways, how to best utilize the keyword for your product.
Amazon Keyword Metrics
Relevancy Score
Relevancy Score is what allows Keyword Research to provide the most relevant Amazon keywords for your product of any keyword tool on the market.
Relevancy Score is a scale between 0-1000 that rates how relevant each keyword is to your seed keyword. To determine relevancy, Keyword Research runs a massive Reverse Market Lookup. This is similar to a Reverse ASIN Lookup, but bigger and better.
Essentially, we’re looking at the top-selling listings across your entire product market to ensure we’re capturing all your most important Amazon keywords and running multiple reverse-ASIN lookups. This ensures you don’t miss any crucial keywords for your market. And as a result, we gather a large pool of hyper-relevant keywords for your product.
The downside to a Reverse ASIN Lookup, as opposed to a Reverse Market Lookup, is that it only finds indexed words for one single competitor. That means you could miss some really crucial words for your product. In contrast, a Reverse Market Lookup finds the most comprehensive list of indexed words from all of your top competitors.
Next, we take that comprehensive pool of keywords and run it through our sophisticated Market Relevance Calculation. This proprietary process weeds out irrelevant terms and gives you a list of hyper-relevant Amazon keywords. From that Market Relevance Calculation, we rate each term based on its importance.
For example, garbage cans has a fairly high Relevancy Score, meaning it is very closely related to the seed term according to our Market Relevance Calculation.
Using the Relevancy Score
Place highly relevant keywords in your title and/or bullet points
See which keywords most directly relate to your product
Determine which keywords your top competitors are using most frequently
Priority Score
Priority Score is a scale between 0-1000 that rates a keyword’s importance based on relevancy and search volume. To arrive at this score, we look at the term’s Relevancy Score and factor in the search volume. A highly relevant, highly searched term will have a high Priority Score. But a less relevant, less searched term will have a low Priority Score. The higher the Priority Score, the more important the keyword, when it comes to optimizing a listing.
For example, trash can has a high Priority Score, meaning it is highly relevant to the seed term coupled with relatively high search volume.
High priority words should be placed in a product’s title, whereas mid-priority keywords can be placed in the bullet points, description, or backend. When using Keyword Research to optimize your listing, we suggest sorting your resulting terms by Priority Score to ensure you’re seeing your product’s most important keywords first.
Using the Priority Score
Place high priority keywords in your title
See which keywords have the most sales potential with a good combination of relevancy and volume
Opportunity Score
Opportunity Score ranks Amazon keywords on a scale of 0-1000 to show you terms with low competition and high opportunity to rank. A high Opportunity Score means the term has not been integrated into the front end of the top performing listings that are ranking for that keyword. A low Opportunity Score means the term has been integrated into many of the top ranking listings.
For example, garbage cans and trash cans (both plural) have very high Opportunity Scores, meaning the top products are ranking for these two terms without even having the phrases in their title, bullet points or description. In other words, the top-ranking products for these keywords are neglecting this term, which will make it easier for you to rank with the keyword in your title or bullet points. And combined, there are over 15,000 searches per month up for grabs!
Trash can (singular) has a low Opportunity Score, meaning most of the top products are prioritizing this phrase by using it in their front end.
For high opportunity Amazon keywords, there is a lot of potential to rank by simply adding the word to your listing’s title or bullet points. For example, in a search for bluetooth headphones, you’ll find the term “audifonos headphones” with over 33,000 searches per month and an opportunity score of 1,000.
This means none of the top ranking listings for audifonos headphones actually have that term in their title, bullet points, or description. Your opportunity to rank here is high because the top ranking listings are not prioritizing this keyword at all. No other keyword tool offers this kind of strategic insight.
And as an added bonus, high opportunity Amazon keywords are less competitive, so these markets also tend to have lower quality listings. So if you’ve got great reviews and good photos, the addition of a single keyword could mean increased impressions and high conversion rates, bringing in thousands more dollars in sales every month.
You can also use Opportunity Score in conjunction with Suggested CPC Bids in order to find high opportunity, low-bid terms to target.
Using the Opportunity Score
Place high priority keywords in your title or bullet points for easy ranking
Find hidden-gem keywords that your competitors are neglecting to use
Bid on high opportunity, low-bid keywords with Sponsored ads for low competition
Prioritizing Your Amazon Keywords
Because keywords are the foundation for how your product is discovered by Amazon shoppers, it is crucial to include the right terms. On top of that, it’s important to know how to best prioritize them.
Your title is the most important element of your listing’s copy, so include highly-relevant, high-priority and high-opportunity keywords. With each sale, the words in your title are fair game for a ranking boost.
Your bullet points are secondary and should be used for your remaining important keywords, along with additional mid-level terms.
Your description and backend keywords are great places to include long-tail keywords so that you can be found for anything a shopper searches relating to your product.
Whether you’re researching a market in conjunction with the Viral Launch product research tools or you’re seeking relevant Amazon keywords for your current product, Keyword Research shows you all of your related terms with just one simple search. And with the keyword metrics, Relevancy, Priority, and Opportunity Scores, you can ensure you’ve got the most comprehensive understanding of your product’s Amazon keywords.
Keywords are the foundation for ranking. Missing critical keywords in your listing can lead to thousands of dollars in missed sales. Incorporating the right keywords in your listing can give you a huge competitive advantage. But current tools fall far short of providing the insight needed to set up a listing to rank. But that’s about to change. Introducing Keyword Research from Viral Launch, the most accurate keyword tool in the galaxy.
Learn more about what each of the Keyword Research scores mean and how they will change the way you do Amazon listing optimization
Keyword Research integrates seamlessly with our other research software, Market Intelligence and Product Discovery. Filter for products with high search volume. See exact and broad match volume as you research
CASEY GAUSS:
Keywords are the foundation for ranking. Missing critical keywords in your listing can lead to thousands of dollars in missed sales.
CAMERON YODER:
Incorporating the right keywords in your listing can give you a huge competitive advantage, but the current tools available to sellers fall far short of providing the insight needed to efficiently and effectively set up a listing to rank. I’m Cameron Yoder.
CASEY GAUSS:
And I’m Casey Gauss, your host for Follow the Data: Your Journey to Amazon FBA Success. In this show we leverage the data we’ve accumulated at Viral Launch from over 30,000 product launches and our experience working with 8,000 brands to help you understand the big picture when it comes to Amazon, and more importantly, the best practices for success as an Amazon seller.
CAMERON YODER:
Today we’re excited to announce the launch of our most recent seller software, Keyword Research, the most accurate and comprehensive keyword tool in the galaxy.
CASEY GAUSS:
In this episode we’ll talk about why we had to create Keyword Research, including what’s wrong with current tools on the market and how better Keyword Research can help you increase your bottom line. Let’s get started.
CAMERON YODER:
All right, Casey, we’re talking about a big subject today. This is an exciting time for Viral Launch. It’s an exciting time for you. We’re talking about Keyword Research, Viral Launch’s new tool. Let’s talk about how you’re feeling through all this. How has this experience, this product release been for you?
CASEY GAUSS:
This product release has probably been the most stressful for me, so I’m usually like, I guess what you would say kind of like VP of Product or something here at Viral Launch, so it’s always like my job to have all the answers, I feel like, and so we worked on this tool. We probably started working on like the main algorithm for relevance in September. We tried all this like working with a data scientist on natural language processing, and like so we did that for three months, so into like December – actually longer. We did that like through January, and then February we were still trying to make NLP work, natural language processing, work. It wasn’t working, wasn’t working, and there was so much pressure to like get this tool out. Like we’ve been working on it for so long. The front end was done. Anyways, finally we sat down. We spent a week having just breakthroughs on our algorithm, like quality standards, all of that. We finally figured it out Friday, right before the weekend, and that was like only a couple of weeks ago.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, that was not too long ago.
CASEY GAUSS:
That was super exciting, though. So like as an entrepreneur it’s like this series of peaks and valleys, right? And so you’re going through the valley, you’re going through the valley, and it’s that effort. You know, it’s that consistently pushing through the hard times that gets you to those peaks. And I think the deeper the valley the better the, you know, the mountaintop, or the ascent to the mountaintop. So anyways, super rewarding once we finally figured it out, and now we know, you know, if it’s this difficult for us to figure out, hopefully it’s equally as difficult for competitors, like – and hopefully that means that much better quality for everybody. So I am feeling so good. I think this is going to be our most popular tool. I think this is going to be an absolute game-changer for sellers. So I am so stoked to see kind of feedback, see like the impact that this has on people’s businesses. You know, product discovery a super, super valuable because I think product selection is, you know –
CAMERON YODER:
It’s huge. It’s huge.
CASEY GAUSS:
It’s like the single most make-or-break decision that you’re going to make when selling on Amazon. But it takes months and months for you to see the return, right? You come up with an idea through product discovery, but now you’ve got to get samples. You’ve got to find suppliers. You have to order it, and anyways, it’s like months and months until you actually see the return, whereas with Keyword Research there are so many keywords people aren’t finding right now because their like current keyword tools just aren’t surfacing them. And so by putting these things in your listing tomorrow, the next day, or within that week, you’re going to see results. And so I’m super excited to get these case studies back. I don’t know – and like – so again, this is a lot of personal stuff. Sorry if you’re not so interested, but like the team is growing. We’re at like 43 people or something now. And it’s so cool to see like we have a legit marketing team now. We have like a seven-person dev team. And so it’s so cool to see all these different, you know, departments working together. This is going to be our biggest launch so far. It’s so cool to just see, you know, Viral Launch continue to mature and everybody come together. Like I’m just so proud of this team. So all in all, long, long answer to that. Sorry, guys.
Announcing Viral Launch Keyword Research
CAMERON YODER:
Now just in case – okay, just in case you missed the intro or the announcement, basically Viral Launch, or whatever – everything Casey was talking about – Viral Launch has a new tool out based around keyword research, so finding accurate keywords to use in your listing, right? And we’ve just spent the past long time developing it, releasing it. Casey, how would you say – I mean we’ve had a couple product releases up to this point, but how would you say Keyword – that Keyword Research has differed? What’s different about this Keyword Research tool being released than the tools we’ve released in the past, just being the product release itself? So with our release for Product Discovery, what’s different about this time around?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, I mean we’ve just learned a lot of things around what has worked and what hasn’t, getting people’s attention, making sure – you know, for Keyword Research, I think, again it’s such a game-changer you would not believe. And I mean if you ever check out the tool you will really get to see kind of the difference, the night and day difference between what you’re using for your keyword research and our Keyword Research tool.
CAMERON YODER:
Right.
CASEY GAUSS:
And you will like, I don’t know, be disappointed or upset that this is the data that you’ve been using versus like the actual data or what you should have been using, I guess. And so anyways, so I feel a deep sense of responsibility to make sure that the messaging is like perfect for this so that people can truly see like hey, no, this isn’t just marketing speak, but like this is going to be so much better for my business. And so I think there’s a lot of pressure on me, that I’m then trying to put on the team to make sure that we really get this perfect. But anyways, yeah, you know I think the product launch will be hopefully a better, like ramp-up period, getting people more and more excited. You know, we have a much bigger audience at this point, and hopefully people have just continued to realize, you know, Viral Launch is a data company. And yeah, so hopefully this is an easier sell to people because now you love and trust kind of what Viral Launch has been producing on the research side.
CAMERON YODER:
Right. Let’s jump back a little bit. So again, talking about just Keyword Research and the tool in general, what made you think that Viral Launch should or needed to come out with a Keyword Research tool?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, good question. Actually I want to preface first, so there’s a million keyword research tools out there, keyword tools out there for Amazon. I would really encourage you to at least, you know, listen to this podcast, even if it’s on 2X to get through it, like just at least check out the tool. I think you really owe it to your business. There’s so much that is different here, and I don’t want you to just pass it off as another tool. So anyways, why did we need Keyword Research? A lot of reasons. So like it has been – it has just always blown my mind. It has always been a goal of mine to, if somebody else didn’t do it, build a better version of Merchant Words, right? So not to hate so much on like the tool – like it’s so bad, right? So if you search like – we have all these just hilarious examples, right? So if you search –
CAMERON YODER:
Specific keywords that we’ve searched.
CASEY GAUSS:
Right. Reading glasses, right? Reading glasses for babies, high search volume. Reading glasses for dogs, over 10,000 searches a month Merchant Words is estimating. You search eye cream, cat eye cream is I think like the second suggestion, saying there’s like 90,000 searches a month. If you search fish oil, fish oil diffuser – there’s no such thing – is one of the top suggestions. They say like 80,000 searches a month. And from these case studies that we’re doing, a lot of the time Merchant Words only has like 10% of the actual words that are related to the product or the market that you’re searching, and their volumes are so off. And so, so many times Merchant Words is suggesting words that don’t even – people aren’t actually searching on Amazon, but you’re prioritizing them. You’re putting them in the listing simply because intuitively they make sense. But you’re not really following the data.
And so we had to create Keyword Research because keyword tools are so important. We see so many people – like you cannot rank for keywords, high-volume keywords if you’re not prioritizing them well in the front end of your listing. Or if you don’t even have them in the front end of your listing how are you going to rank for them? And ranking, like driving sales through organic search, is the majority of people’s businesses on Amazon. Like this – you know we say the lifeblood of Amazon for like reviews, this is like the oxygen or something, you know? You absolutely have to have this, and this is what is, you know, really driving your sales is what keywords that you have in your listing. And these current keyword tools were just misleading people so bad. Or sure, maybe they have a bunch of good results, but you, for every good result there is like 100 bad results, and you’re spending hours sifting through these words.
CAMERON YODER:
And I think it’s an important perspective to point out – there is one thing I want to reemphasize that you said, but another thing that is important for listeners to understand is if you’re a listener and you’ve used a keyword research tool in the past, then you’ve been trained to not trust results, right? If you use whatever, one of these tools, you’re going to pull up results and you’re going to know – everyone that we’ve talked to has said this – you’re going to know 100% that some of these results are bogus, but you’re going to use it anyway because it’s the only thing available. So we wanted to change that, and it’s going to be, I think honestly maybe a little bit difficult for people to jump on board at first because they’ve been trained to not trust it. But this is actual data. It’s real data, and it’s something that you can trust.
The Most Relevant Keywords
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, so like the two biggest selling points here, I think, are just the relevance of words. So you’re only getting words that are relevant to your listing. We even show a Relevancy Score so that you can see how relevant is this term to the term that I put in, right? And then second is the search volumes. So this is all data only from Amazon. We’re not using any kind of outside sources to build up the keywords, the volumes. Like you’re getting only good, high-quality data. And so the level of trust, like Cam is saying, is going to be kind of night and day difference. So yeah, I think it will be a bit of a learning process, but anyways, I mean you, like I said, you will see the differences here. And there’s a bunch of additional features, but yeah, we can just stay in the meat of it right now.
CAMERON YODER:
Let’s break down what’s – we talked about it a little bit already, but I want to get kind of a streamlined process going of what is wrong with current keyword tools, right?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, yeah.
CAMERON YODER:
So okay, what is one of the number one things that is wrong with keyword tools out there presently?
CASEY GAUSS:
So I think across the board the biggest problem is that there’s so, so many keywords that these other tools are missing. And I’m not just talking about some long-tail keywords. I’m talking about high-volume, related words. So it’s so difficult right now – and this is where our big breakthrough was. It’s so difficult for you to – and this is why we originally were testing out natural language processing using semantic, finding these semantically-related words from content. It’s very difficult from a technical perspective to get the word first-aid kit and be able to come up with the word trauma bag and know that trauma bag is a related word that you should be prioritizing because first aid and kit, none of these seed words are in these, some of these other high-volume words. Like again, trauma bag or emergency kit, like that has kit, but emergency isn’t in first-aid kit. And so it can be hard for these tools to find these other words. And so we have some case studies. You would just not believe the number of words, important words, the volume that the majority of tools out there are missing.
You know, there is an example. We’re still finalizing the case studies completely, but anyways, just at a high level there is an example for eye cream, right? So we said there is 600,000 aggregate searches a month for all the keywords related to eye cream, so 600,000 – 540 related words, and the most popular keyword tool out there missed 450 words out of 540. The volume they missed was 475,000 searches out of 595,000. So what that means is either if you just typed in eye cream into this keyword tool, then you are missing out on, you know, a huge, huge percentage of volume, or you’re going to have to intuitively know to go search all these other words, and you’re going to have to spend a ton of time running all these other searches to try to get the comprehensive list. And then the fear sets in of how many words did you miss? You know, you have to spend all this time, as well. So the second most popular keyword tool – we don’t really want to name any names – but second most popular keyword tool missed 312,000 searches a month out of 595,000. So yeah, they missed like over half, right? And they missed 350 words out of the 540. So it’s like insane.
The tools that people are using are missing out on major, major search volume. And that’s a problem, number one. Second is time, right? So right now existing tools provide so many junk words, right? And I understand from a technical standpoint like it’s hard to get rid of these words. We’re making sure to return only highly-relevant words. At the same time able to get a very broad scope. So we are significantly reducing your keyword research time because we’re able to return only high-quality, relevant terms. And we’ll show you how relevant these terms are. And so if something has a very low Relevancy Score, then now you know, like okay, I shouldn’t be prioritizing this. And we have a priority score to help you do that.
CAMERON YODER:
It’s kind of a – it’s a compounding effect, right? So if you use – if you’re using other data tools, like you said before, just simply put, other tools from the data that we’ve accumulated, are not providing the full list of keywords that should show up for the keywords that you yourself are searching. And then from that you yourself have to put in more time double checking, cross-referencing all of those keywords to make sure that you’re getting the right ones in for your listing.
CASEY GAUSS:
Yep, I would definitely say those are the two biggest ones. I mean obviously we have some features that solve some other problems, but yeah, I’m good with sticking with those.
Our Market Relevancy Calculation
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah. So okay, how then does – what does Keyword Research do, which is Viral Launch’s tool? What does Keyword Research do to get the most relevant terms, because it’s not about – it’s not all about volume, right? It’s also about relevancy. So it’s about pulling up a tool. A great tool is going to pull up all the words, or as many as possible, for related to the search term that you input. But it also is going to be so much better if the terms that are brought up are relevant to the keyword. So not only is it volume; it’s relevancy. So what does Keyword Research do to pull up volume, a lot of keywords, but not only that, keywords that are relevant for the term that people are searching?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, I mean we don’t want to share too much because we don’t want to allow other people to replicate what we’re doing. But essentially we have this entire – like you would not believe the amount of data that we’re crunching just to try to get this list of words. And so we have this huge kind of extraction process that is very difficult where we’re going and just getting an insane amount of words. Then we go and we have this even larger algorithm that goes and then scores each of these words to help give it this Relevancy Score. And then yeah, then we have our own process of getting the search volume for each of the words, both exact and broad.
And another thing – this is kind of like a, you know, side feature or whatever, but another thing that we’re doing that you’re not really going to find really anywhere else except maybe one tool or something, but is trend. So you know if you’ve used Market Intelligence or Product Discovery you know that we love data, right, especially understanding historical context so that we can better understand or predict where it’s going in the future. So we’re showing you the search volume trend. So you can see okay, you know, fish oil looks like a good market – it doesn’t, just so you know – anyways, fish oil looks like a good market, but search volume is like significantly declining. Or you know, this term is increasing very rapidly. You should definitely prioritize that. And so yeah, I don’t want to share too much about our process, but I don’t want to give too much away, but essentially it’s really focused on keyword aggregation, just getting a very, very – casting a very wide net. And then we pull in all these words, and then we go through them to look for the words that are winners, and then we throw out the ones that aren’t.
CAMERON YODER:
This tool is – Keyword Research is really designed to improve the Amazon seller experience when it comes to keyword research and just creating a listing in general, right? So Casey, what are your favorite features of the tool that are going to help listeners of the show or just Amazon sellers in general?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, so I mean we’re continuing to talk about it. The things I’m most proud of are just the breadth of words we have, what we call all these horizontal words where you search eye cream, but then you get face moisturizer, right, or moisturizer for face, like you get eye gel, right? So you get all these words that are similar, but like maybe what we call horizontal words that maybe don’t share any of the seed words. So I’m really proud of that. So the quality, the breadth, and then I really love the trends just because I like seeing where everything goes. Usually these search terms report, give like hundreds and hundreds of words, which is awesome that we have all these long tails in there.
Opportunity Score
And then one thing that we haven’t talked about yet is our Opportunity Score. So to date we’ve always looked at keywords in two lights, right, is this relevant, and then what is the search volume. But what we haven’t really taken our time to do, just because manually it can take a long time or just a decent amount of work, is looked at these keywords from a strategic standpoint. So how are my competitors prioritizing these words? How difficult is it to rank not just by, you know, how many units I need to sell, but by how other sellers are prioritizing these words. So if, for example, nobody had fish oil in their title, they didn’t even have it in their bullets, all they had was fish oil in their description, it would be so much easier for you to rank for fish oil if you had it in your title. And so there would be this, you know, strategic arbitrage opportunity for – so maybe fish oil isn’t the best example. Let’s take burp less fish oil, for example. So burpless fish oil, a decent volume keyword, and let’s say nobody, none of the top-ranking burpless fish oil listing, or results for burpless fish oil, have that keyword in their title. And there’s still good volume. Nobody has it in their title. So that’s an awesome opportunity for you to prioritize it, put it at the beginning of your title, run some promotions for it. But you’re going to be able to rank a lot easier than if everybody else had it in their title. And so we’re showing you what we call this Opportunity Score which shows you, you know, how well, or to what degree, are the top sellers for this keyword prioritizing the keyword.
How to Use Opportunity Score
And our hope here is that, let’s say you do happen to be in the fish oil market, which I really hope you aren’t unless you have, you know, a good amount of money. But anyways, so let’s say you are in this fish oil market. Well, there’s plenty of words out there that other people are not prioritizing that still get decent amount of volume, so you can more easily rank for those words, build up your sales and just continue to climb up the ladder, right? So go after burpless fish oil because there’s good volume and nobody has it in their title, or only a couple people do. Then go after this other mid-volume keyword that has good volume but people only have it in their bullet points, or a couple people have it in their title. Like basically we’re showing you this Opportunity Score so that you can strategically look at words from a volume perspective, from a relevancy perspective, but also from a how are my competitors leveraging this word.
CAMERON YODER:
In other words, what are people, what keywords are people searching for that competitors are not putting or prioritizing in their list, basically?
CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, yeah, completely. And then right now we still have a lot to do with this tool, actually two other features. One, I like seeing we’re aggregating all the exact search volume for the word to show you, okay, fish oil, for example, has you know, 500,000 searches a month and then, you know, whatever, omega-3 has X number – like so it’s really cool to go and see what the total number of potential impressions are for this keyword or this market that you’re thinking about entering, right? So the last one is sponsored ad suggested bid, and so this is, again, another cool opportunity for you to identify these arbitrage opportunities, right? So if you see there’s a ton of search volume on this keyword but the suggested bid cost is really, really low for a keyword – boom. There’s an opportunity for you to go get in on a high-volume keyword while paying less than, you know, market average across the board for that kind of volume. So that’s one of our premium features. But again, basically we’re trying to build this very comprehensive tool to help you identify these arbitrage opportunities. Where can I easily rank because no one’s prioritizing it? Where can I easily bid on keywords or do it, you know, cheaply because nobody else is? Yeah.
Integration with Viral Launch Software
CAMERON YODER:
One of the things I’m really proud of with the tool, and I’m honestly looking forward to in the future just for Viral Launch in general is an integration between the tools. So we’re actually working on integrating Keyword Research with our other tools, Product Discovery and Market Intelligence, which will provide you – honestly it will save a lot of time. One of the goals with this tool, again, is just saving time and money. And so as you’re using something like Market Intelligence you’ll be able to look at the market data for a keyword, but also will be able to kind of cross reference keyword data at the same time. That’s just – I’m looking forward to future integrations with the tools that we’ve come out with or just kind of further implement with the current tools we have.
CASEY GAUSS:
That should be live when the tool goes live. So if you’re listening to this podcast, then yeah, Keyword Research should be integrated with Market Intelligence. It should be integrated with Product Discovery. Basically what that means is you run, you know, Market Intelligence on the fish oil market or page, then you’ll see obviously Market Intelligence data, but you’ll also get to see what the search volume is exact and broad for those keywords. So I think that’s huge. No other tool is doing that. And so it’s like basically the way to get access to that is you have to have a subscription to Market Intelligence. You have to have a subscription to Keyword Research. And then second, yeah, we throw this into Product Discovery, and I think I’m super, super excited about this, the reason being is for the first time ever you’re going to be able to look for markets where the search volume is high but sales are low. And what this means is opportunity markets where customers are coming and they’re looking for this particular product, but they’re not finding anything interesting. They’re not finding what they’re looking for.
So take, for example, grill brush with LED lights, right? Like let’s say everybody wants to brush their grill at night and they want lights and whatever, right? So if there were, you know, 20,000 searches for grill brush with LED lights, but there’s very few sales for the products that are ranking for them, then that means that there isn’t a good grill brush with LED lights, well so I would imagine. There are some other factors that are in there. But anyways, it’s a really cool opportunity for you to find these underserved markets, and you just can’t get that anywhere else. And again, the way that you get this integration is you have to have this Product Discovery subscription and the Keyword Research subscription, and then they work kind of in unison there. So yeah, I forgot about the combination or the integration, and I’m really excited about that.
CAMERON YODER:
Yeah. Casey, is there anything else you want to let our listeners know about Keyword Research?
CASEY GAUSS:
No, not really. I mean we’re – next step, phase 2 is we’re working on a listing building feature, which is really going to hopefully help you prioritize words, based again on opportunity, volume, help you to make sure that you’re writing the best listings possible. But yeah, I think that’s about it.
CAMERON YODER:
Look forward to it. If you haven’t yet, go check out the tool. If you even haven’t yet, go create an account on our website. There is a free trial for the tool. So really if you haven’t yet, go to our website, create an account, check out a free trial. You will be blown away. We also are going to have a couple different resources on YouTube, and we’re going to be putting up more content for Keyword Research as well, so keep an eye out for that.
Well, that is all for this week. Thank you so much for joining us on Follow the Data. For more insights and reliable information on how to succeed on Amazon, subscribe to the podcast and check us out on YouTube. I have a series of Product Discovery walk-throughs up on our channel that will really help you understand how to best leverage the tool. In fact, I just posted a new video about how to use the new Product Discovery search presets. So if you want to check it out just search Viral Launch on YouTube, go to our page and look for my face.
CASEY GAUSS:
If you’re listening on iTunes please, please do not forget to leave a review and rate the show. If you’re listening on any other platform like SoundCloud, Stitcher, leave us a comment. We love feedback. If you haven’t gotten that from any other interactions with us, we love honest feedback on literally everything. And if you sell on Amazon, which I imagine is the demographic of people listening, then you know how important reviews are. And so we would love it if you could go leave us a review.
CAMERON YODER:
Thank you, again, for listening so much, and as always, if you want to be featured on the show, have an Amazon-related question or an idea for an episode, or you just want to say hey, feel free to leave us a voicemail. Our number is 317-721-6590. Until next time, remember, the data is out there.
