Omnia influit, omnia mutantur… (Everything’s in its flux)

Amazon is not the same as it used to be 5 years ago. Like a living organism, it has been constantly evolving since it first saw the light of the day back in 1994. 

Who could have imagined that a book-selling startup with only a 30 % chance of success would turn into a global heavyweight housing thousands of brands and products, leading online sales and competing with long-established players like Walmart?      

Starting from nuts and bolts, each new Amazon seller faces the same challenge at every step of his or her growth, which is to win the market share against the ever-changing background. For the sake of being profitable, Amazon sellers have to stay in tune with the Amazon shifting winds and up to date with digital marketing as well.

So, it is with great excitement that I’d like to tell you that Seller Labs’ Annual Conference Resonate recently kicked off! Yes, we have stepped in with another series of interviews with authoritative eCommerce experts on the most thorny topics, from Brand Building to Logistics.

This article specifically covers Amazon SEO hidden pitfalls, skillfully enlightened by Robyn Johnson in her video presentation. In case you are short of time to watch the whole video I’m here to offer a 3 minute read post that touches upon the fundamentals and advanced strategies of Amazon listing optimization. Off we go!  

How do I Know It’s Time to Optimize My Listings?

In the context of Amazon becoming more and more competitive, listing optimization methods have to undergo considerable changes. Stuffing the product titles and product descriptions with the relevant keywords doesn’t work efficiently anymore.

Unless and until brand owners take up more activities to optimize Amazon product listing -and get them intertwined with ad campaigns!- they will sorrowfully leave money on the table in the way they rank on Amazon. Faint brand awareness allows for the poor market share and unleashes your competitors for a knockoff.

So, how to optimize your product listing and when do you know it’s the right time to go for it?

• Measure your awareness! Go inside detailed page sales and traffic reports and concentrate on unit session percentage to compare it over time and see if your conversion rates went up or down.
• Master your strategy! Get to know how many keywords you are indexed for compared to your competitors, which will give you a picture of how they are getting their traffic.  

By doing this, sellers identify whether their listing is struggling because it is not being indexed or because it is not ranking. The mechanism normally starts with resolving the indexing, which implies getting down to a thorough keyword research.

Once we get as many indexed keywords as possible we can work specifically on ranking.

1. Get Started with Keyword Research

If we follow Robyn verbatim here, “keywords can be addressed as doors to potential customers”. Essentially, sellers strive for maximizing the number of these doors, while Amazon’s aim is to limit them by capping at a certain character amount.

With the restricted amount of space we have to be more strategic and think through the variations, synonyms and best regional words that answer your buyer’s persona to find the most important keywords and leverage our sales.

The million dollar question: How can we do that?

Find Keywords manually 
At this point reverse ASIN search, which is frequently used as a main keyword search tool is not enough. Looking up the additional keywords manually gives you the easiest access to get some traction on your listing by using the ones which the majority of your competitors don’t utilize.

Have keyword frequency counter at hand
What for? The answer is RELEVANCE. Besides its ability to sort the keywords by frequency from the highest to smallest, this search term tool also takes you away from the keywords with mixed profiles.

2. Integrate Keywords and Craft Your Product Listings

Here are the main pillars of high ranking to bear in mind while crafting the product listings on your product pages:

• Target Audience. On finding your products Amazon shoppers are reluctant to make a purchase until convinced that the offered item is the one they need. In the matter of highlighting the true saleable benefits of your products it is crucial to visualise the customer’s intent and form your buyer’s avatar. Make sure you scrupulously sift customer reviews, mainly product reviews, to get rid of all purchase stoppers in your bullets and photos.
• Amazon Keyword Restrictions. Availability and relevance of your keyword phrases can play a bad prank on you if not paid particular attention. Amazon keeps implementing new guidelines on the keywords that every seller should be aware of to avoid flag words.
• MOBILE-FIRST priority. Product image requirements for mobile phones don’t just narrow down to having white background and proper shooting angle. Things usually grow tricky when it comes to optimizing the title and product images for the mobile version, as they are the only things shown above the fold. In view of this fact, the chief elements from bullets, like dimensions, main features and benefits, or other things that a potential customer searches for must be clearly outlined in the secondary images.
• Verification and Testing. Probably after finishing with the keyword research and integration you feel that you are going to have an awesome, perfect listing! Nonetheless, make sure you verify it by comparing the effectiveness of the words you prioritized in your ads. Also, you can try A/B testing for different versions of bullets to hone in the message that converts the best.
• Build with Flat Files. Sorry to report that, but while creating the Amazon product listings a prevailing number of sellers miss out on the opportunity to put additional keywords, like genre, color, fabric type into flat file structured data. When it is filled out the competitor advertising can be pushed a little bit further, which is our main goal here.

3. Apply Ad Strategies That Contribute to Optimizing Amazon Product Listing

Do you know why advertising on Amazon affects organic SEO? Remember that Amazon search engine is the most greedy and capitalistic on the Internet. Just kidding. Primary factors that affect organic SEO are conversions and sales velocity for a specific keyword phrase. Then, to increase those conversions we should incentivize purchases.

How? By offering discounts, clippable coupons, lighting deals, and promotions like BOGOs (buy one, get one free). Managing new ad types, like Sponsored Brand Video Ads would also be of a great help here. 

Again, keyword ranking campaigns stand for a driving gear of ranking improvement by means of advertising. Keyword ranking campaigns provide a big bump in overall sales over a long period of time and enable you to regain ground over competitors. You’ll be able to find more definitive information on the way this campaign works and its ins and outs in the video.

4. Manage Your Inventory

Inventory is playing an increasingly important role in the way that we manage product launches on Amazon. You really need to think how you are going to handle your IPI (Inventory Management Index), Restock limits and Stock outs. Consider healthy margins, make sure you have the money to invest on ads for new launches and for defending ad strategies to maintain your position.

Let’s sum it up

What if you’ve done all but impossible and your high quality product is still not selling?

Sometimes it is really hard to identify what is the next step to be done as a seller. To strike the oil in Amazon SEO we need to think about ranking on Amazon holistically. 

• Start listing optimization.
• Use clippable coupons and advertising that help drive conversions. 
• Watch conversions yield your reviews.
• Work with reviews and the data you got from ads to identify what changes need to be implemented to the listing. 
• Complete the process of optimization over again, if needed. Apply and rinse again – this is the effectual algorithm guiding you to the top rankings. 

As we have just found out, the listing optimization process is complicated and many-sided. Here is why having a smart keyword search tool at your service would be another significant checkpoint on your list. Scope Amazon Keyword Tool is a discerning Amazon keyword and SEO tool which helps to improve your frontend and backend keywords, develop the keyword strategy and therefore guides you to the top of the rankings. Since this tool is provided as a part of the full-fledged Seller Labs PRO solution you discover a host of benefits by using out-of-the-box functionality: Ignite for your PPC advertising, Communication Center for cherishing product reviews, and Inventory Management for actionable metrics.

In case you need time to consider all pros and cons of having Seller Labs PRO in your corner, Seller Labs Managed Services can help you particularly with your product listing optimization right now. Proceed with SEO strategies with a team of experts at your back.

TALK TO A MANAGED SERVICES EXPERT