Optimizing for Search on Amazon
With competition increasing, more and more sellers are finding that simply creating a listing on the marketplace will not guarantee that your product will be found, let alone purchased.
The Amazon.com marketplace is becoming more and more crowded with an estimated 2 million third party sellers selling over 12 million products.
To be successful on Amazon, sellers need a solid search engine optimization (SEO) and marketing strategy in place. A good strategy will maximize your traffic and conversion and improve your ranking in organic search, increasing your overall sales and long term profitability.
What is Amazon SEO?
Amazon makes money by showing customers what they are most likely to purchase based on the search term entered. To accomplish this, they designed their search engine algorithms to be heavily based on sales history and conversion rate for a particular keyword. Without these two metrics your product will just be lost in a jungle of thousands of products.
To help get your product noticed in search, sellers need to design a strategy that will increase their sales and conversion rates and show Amazon that your product is something that customers want.
This is a two step process:
- Optimize your page to ensure that your page convinces a customer to buy (conversion)
- Push a targeted audience to your page (traffic)
Product Page Optimization
Some sellers make the mistake of creating product pages with little thought as to how the customer will view the page, and whether or not their content will encourage a customer to buy.
Amazon product pages are both your showroom and your sales person – you have to invest time into creating them so that they work for you and sell your product.
Optimizing for Search on Amazon – Images
Often overlooked by sellers, but not by customers. Amazon gives you space for 9 images, you should use every one. Customers will often make purchasing decisions on images alone, so make them high quality and informative. Use your images to show customers all the details of your product, including how it is used.
Optimizing for Search on Amazon – Copy
This includes title, bullets and description. These are all indexed for search so make sure you are using keywords relevant to your product, but do not make the mistake of keyword stuffing. Remember the page content has to explain and sell the product to the customer, so focus on what a customer needs to know to make a purchase.
Optimizing for Search on Amazon – Back End Search Terms
This is where you can keyword stuff. Not visible to customers, but indexed by the search engine, you can place any keyword that was not used in copy here. However don’t get tempted to stuff with long lists of keywords that are not relevant to your product. Remember, you want a high conversion rate. Using irrelevant keywords will not help you with that.
Optimizing for Search on Amazon – Driving Traffic
The primary tool you can use to drive extra traffic to your product page is Amazon’s Sponsored Product ads.
This is a pay per click (PPC) advertising platform that will place ads alongside the organic search results as well as on the product pages themselves. Used correctly, this can be a good way to boost your traffic to your page. A properly optimized campaign will target high converting keywords and help attract the attention of the search engine algorithm and ultimately boost your organic sales.
Other ways to increase your high converting traffic include running promotions and creating coupon codes, then advertising them on discount sites or social media. You will want to design your campaign to target your audience carefully, the last thing you want to do is send a lot of traffic over to just browse and thus lowering your conversion rate.
A list-it and forget-it strategy will do nothing to help you compete with the millions of products for sale on the platform. As the marketplace continues to grow, sellers wanting to take their piece of the pie will need to consider carefully how they can best compete and showcase their products.
By: Liz Adamson – Egility helps resellers, manufacturers, and brand owners navigate the ever changing Amazon marketplace. Primarily focusing on SEO, product page optimization, Sponsored Products and marketing, they stay up-to-date on the latest tactics for managing and growing your Amazon business. The consultants at Egility will review your current Amazon presence and design and implement a comprehensive strategy to increase your sales.