It’s no secret that neatly tailored product listings will enhance the chances of an Amazon seller to grow their customer base and increase sales. The million-dollar question is how to keep them profitable in the meantime. 

Once crafted, even a perfect listing must be regularly updated to keep getting clicks. Therefore, committing to a particular procedure of ongoing listing optimization is the only way to increase your Amazon products’ visibility and fuel conversions. 

Although diligently done keyword research makes up a significant share of an efficient optimization process, you should approach this holistically.

Try to focus on Amazon policies, pricing calculation, promotion strategies, and -of course!- customer experience. In this article, we’ve mustered up key tactics, helping you to nail a compelling Amazon listing that resonates with your targeted audience and appeals to Amazon’s search algorithm.

Ⅰ. First Things First: What is Amazon Listing Optimization?

On launching a new product, you either choose the existing product listing page or create a new one. This page is meant to tell shoppers all they need to know about your product.

When properly optimized, Amazon product pages guide your potential customers through the enormous Amazon marketplace and help them to easily find your products. 

At the same time, a skillfully nailed product listing also works as a major purchase trigger. That’s why your Amazon listing needs recurring SEO and content updates.
All that said, there are some sound reasons to be more strategic and clear-sighted while optimizing product pages.

Reasons to Optimize Your Product Listings

Regularly done product listing optimization helps Amazon sellers to

• Improve search discoverability with correctly used Amazon SEO and keyword research strategies. 
• Increase impressions and CTR by optimizing and updating the content which is preserving the critical focus on the buyer’s pain points.
• Improve conversion rate by monitoring reviews and delivering a high-class customer experience.
• Stay up-to-date with Amazon Trends and Policies. Given that even the hottest Amazon trends fade sooner than you think, online sellers should always know the novelties to keep up their sails to the Amazon wind. 
• Beat the competition by spying on your competitors’ most profitable keywords and using them in your product titles and descriptions.

Ⅱ. How to Optimize an Amazon Product Listing

Whereas Amazon SEO is the main door to product visibility, enriching your product detail page with the relevant keywords is a must. 

Furthermore, given that Amazon has recently made some updates to its A9 Algorithm, Amazon sellers should be very careful about the weight of the ranking factors which it now determines.

With this in mind, here are some actionable tips to optimize your Amazon listings with the A10 algorithm.

1. Do the Keyword Research

Conduct thorough research on the relevant search terms, laser focusing on the buyer’s intent. While performing it on your own can be intimidating, a robust Amazon SEO tool can significantly diminish the difficulty of nailing high-ranking keywords for your product listing.

A keyword research tool can make the life of an online seller much easier. Even more so when that tool is backed by a team of experts to help you turn a badly performing product listing into a bestseller. 

While it can be burdensome to identify and patch all the gaps on your own, the Seller Labs Managed Services team is glad to conduct research on your behalf and come up with actionable recommendations on much more than just keyword analysis.

2. Update Backend Keywords

Backend keywords are words and phrases that you want Amazon to index, but you don’t need shoppers to see. Thus, if you sell headphones, your hidden keywords may contain synonyms such as “earphones” and “earbuds.” 

Once you’ve finished your keyword research, you can add backend keywords in the most strategic places of your product page, like product titles and bullet points. 

Backend keywords should only include generic words that enhance your product’s discoverability. 
Amazon indexes only the first 250 bytes in a product detail page’s backend keywords, so you have to be sparing and intelligent. That limited number means that finding strong keywords and leveraging them is more critical than ever.

Master Informative Product Titles

Titles are the first thing about your product that a shopper reads. If your product title isn’t descriptive and optimized, you’re doing yourself a disservice and creating a purchase blocker.   
With that in mind, we’ve narrowed down a list of what you should and shouldn’t do while optimizing the product titles.

DO	DO NOT
Stay within the 200 character limit	Overstuff with keywords
Include the most important keywords first	Write about promotions, like “Free Shipping” or “For Sales”
Capitalize the first letter of each word	Use HTML characters or other symbols, such as ®
Address buyer’s intent	Include prices or seller information
Specify brand name, material, purpose, model,  color, and quantity	Capitalize conjunctions, prepositions, or articles
Spell out measurements such as pound, inch, feet

Default title style to get you started is Brand + Model + Product Type + Additional information. Look at the example below to get a complete picture of how you can frame your product title.

Also, read Amazon’s Product Title Requirements so that you can create the perfect title for your listing.

Write Compelling Product Descriptions

Your product description is where you’ll want to double down on long-tail keywords and feature/benefit descriptions. 

Consider the questions you would have if you were researching a product like the one that you sell. What would compel you to purchase it? Be honest, objective, and persuasive. 

Do not use this section for keyword stuffing, and do not mention the competition or make claims that you cannot substantiate. It is a place to tell your story and make a connection with your buyer.

Perfect the Bullet Points

The bullet points section comprises the most essential details about the product features and also serves to highlight its benefits. You have fewer than 1,000 characters to use for all five bullet points — so make them clear and persuasive. 

Make bullets easy to read, formatted in a consistent fashion, and full of pertinent, keyword-rich information. Make sure that every bullet point starts with a feature name or short recap. This will help your ranking in search results, and your conversion rate as bullets resonate with both the algorithm’s hunt for keywords and the shopper’s hunt for features and benefits.

Check out an example of how bullet points can be listed.

3. Include High-Quality Product Images and Videos

Being a core part of Amazon Listing Optimization, a good product image can convey precise information about your product while still looking great. A picture can literally be worth a thousand words when it comes to showcasing your product’s aspects.

With the main image, you can use up to six more secondary photos. Amazon also offers sellers in select categories the ability to upload 360-degree product photographs, so using them in your product listing will be a wise idea. 

Here are the main requirements for the Amazon product images:

	Main Image	Secondary Images
✔ High-quality and high-resolution large images for zoomability		Main Image	✔ High-quality and high-resolution large images for zoomability	Secondary Images	✔ All important product elements shown: size, accessories included, the product from all angles, key features indicated, etc.
✔ Product is shown on white background		Main Image	✔ Product is shown on white background	Secondary Images	✔ Lifestyle shots showing your products in action
✔ No text, graphics, or inset images		Main Image	✔ No text, graphics, or inset images	Secondary Images	✔ The scale of a product showcased with other objects or related products
✔ The entire product and all included items are displayed		Main Image	✔ The entire product and all included items are displayed	Secondary Images	✔ Product occupies at least 80% of the image

Check out a complete list of Product Image Requirements and Product Listing Video Guidelines on the Amazon website.

4. Improve Your Product Reviews 

Reviews, the primary identifier of customer loyalty, go hand in hand with the purchase likelihood. If your product has a five-star rating and a significant number of positive reviews, it has excellent chances to show up high in the organic search results and thus, increase your customer base. 
Against this background, a skilfully-mapped strategy for effective reviews management is critical for your Amazon listing.

How Can I Build a Strategy for Handling My Product Reviews?

1. Implement continuous review management to maintain a high product review score.
2. Monitor your Amazon reviews to keep up with the responses.
3. Comment on negative customer reviews. It shows your awareness of the customer and might persuade them to amend the review or remove it altogether.
4. Encourage shoppers to review your product through buyer-seller messaging or add a call-to-action to your product insert and include it with your order shipments.
5. Rinse and Repeat. Watch your endeavors come full circle:

Good Reviews ⇒ Good Impressions ⇒ High Conversion ⇒ More Sales ⇒ Good Reviews

5.  Manage Your Prices

No matter how mind-blowing your product is, you will hardly sell it at the desired price until and unless it is backed by good reviews and high rankings. 

There are a lot of factors to consider while calculating and setting prices. You should have a particular pricing strategy, depending on your product performance. 

Here are the examples of pricing strategies for you to apply:

Price new products intelligently

Starting at a lower price and increasing it in sync with the number of positive reviews is a wise decision for a new product launch.

Make use of loss-leader products

Using discounted pricing is a nice option to give away products with bad reviews. What is more, shoppers who come to purchase the loss-leaders will also purchase profitable products.

Adjust your margins

Playing with your margins while keeping the price profitable is one of the ways to increase the sales volume of a steady product. 

Additionally, you can take thorough market research to know your buyer persona and determine the optimal range for a product’s price according to the value the customer perceives.

Ⅲ. A Bonus Pack of Strategies from Our Experts

Along with the fundamental ways to leverage listing optimization, Amazon offers plenty of advanced strategies to help your listings grab their fair share of audience attention. Here are a couple of them.

Enroll in the Amazon Brand Registry

While doing your due diligence with keyword optimization, you can supplement your efforts by registering your Brand on Amazon. With a suite of programs and services clustered under the Amazon Brand Registry umbrella, you can strike oil in terms of product listing optimization. Here are some of the programs to capitalize on:   

A+ Content enhances your opportunities to create a compelling brand’s story and quickly build credibility with your customers. Given that the Amazon Algorithm does not index A+ Content, it has nothing to do with discovery or traffic. It’s about interacting with the shopper and driving conversions.

Julia Kleiber, Senior Account Manager on the Seller Labs Managed Services team, shares her opinion on how the A+ Content can help you seal the sale:

Amazon Vine Program is used for generating reviews within the Amazon guidelines.

To get high-quality “Vine Voice” reviews, you should provide samples of your product which Amazon sends to its top reviewers. The most trusted consumers will use your product and leave honest and practical feedback, inspiring shoppers to purchase. 

Amazon Live Creator is a real catch for Amazon Sellers looking to increase customer engagement. One doesn’t have to be a video expert to go live on Amazon and shake up their promotions with offers or discounts, which can be applied during the live broadcast only.

Drive External Traffic to Your Amazon Listing

While depending solely on Amazon can be unwise, external traffic opens up new opportunities for beating the competition. By mastering the various ways to drive traffic to Amazon listings, online sellers can increase sales and solidify customers’ loyalty.

Whatever marketing strategy you choose, Paid Advertising, Emails, Social Media with Facebook Advertising, TikTok videos, and Instagram Influencers will all help to drive external traffic to your product listing, which is a clear win.

Ⅳ. Mind the Hidden Pitfalls

Along with Amazon Listing Optimization tips, Seller Labs Amazon experts also bring more daylight to the most common mistakes made while optimizing amazon listings.

Spying on the Competition

Keeping an eye on the competition isn’t a bad idea. However, seeking to copy or emulate what a competitor is doing can be detrimental. This is especially true if you don’t even know what the sales/revenue for a competitor is. Emulating someone you think is doing well on the platform may backfire on you if they’re actually just pouring money into advertising.

Solution: Know your balance and your strategy.

Running Out of Stock

In a nutshell, running out of stock on Amazon kills your findability. If you don’t have any inventory, your product doesn’t appear in the search results for either organic or PPC search terms.  
Solution: Plan your inventory ahead of time with a robust inventory management system.

Amazon Terms of Service (ToS) Compliance

We’ve seen Amazon take a stronger stance in recent months on enforcing policies. Brands now need to think more deeply about various regulations  (pesticide registration) and be more careful about the words they use to market their products. Simply saying “This product can help reduce stress” is against the policy, because it isn’t verified by a 3rd party. Brands used to get away with this but now need to be extra careful when creating images or text. What is more, it’s getting harder to have changes approved instantaneously. Amazon has applied some strict protocols for approving/denying changes on the product detail page.

Solution: Avoid getting into hot water with Amazon guidelines with Amazon Listing Optimization Services.

Ⅴ. How Seller Labs Can Help You Optimize Your Listings

Updating and perfecting your Amazon listings is one of the most time-consuming tasks, yet it’s critical for keeping your business afloat and standing against the competition. 

With a customer incentive as a focus and robust Amazon Seller tools in your corner, you have all the chances to rank higher and ramp up your conversion rate. If you are looking for an intelligent solution to help you optimize your listings, Seller Labs PRO has you covered by:

• tracking historical changes in product price, sales, and reviews 
• providing actionable data on search volume, estimated sales, and CPC for every keyword 
• offering AI-powered recommendations to see potential sales from seed keywords

Additionally, you can turn to our Managed Services team, which will be glad to do the heavy lifting of listing optimization on your behalf. With more than 5-year experience we know how to:

• remain ToS compliant while appealing to potential shoppers
• inspect and identify blank spots in your strategy  
• apply those changes to a given listing quickly and effectively 
• chip away at the problems which eat out your profitability
• have significant output gains based on the efforts you’ve put