Amazon SEO: Top Tips to Help You Sell More

Richard Clayton

August 3, 2015

Last year Amazon recorded a staggering $88.9 billion in net sales. The Seattle-based giant is expected to reach the $100 billion milestone in sales within the next 2 years. During the course of last year, more than 2 billion items were sold through Amazon by third-party sellers and 4 times as many Amazon sellers earned a million dollars compared to eBay sellers.

According to Chris Poad, Director of Sales for Amazon UK, the amount of sellers earning £1 million or more increased by 33% last year worldwide. This is not surprising when you consider that Amazon has more than three times more product searches than Google’s search engine. This means that ensuring product visibility is of upmost importance.

So, how can you improve your Amazon SEO?

Keyword Research

Keyword research is essential before launching your product online. First, you should always ask yourself, “Is there demand for my item? From there, you can decide whether to concentrate on a niche with a lower search volume, or to play with the ‘big boys’ using higher search volume keywords.

Tip #1: Start typing the item you wish to sell into the Amazon search bar. You will see several autocomplete results, which indicate the high performing keywords.

Together with this method, the Amazon Keyword Tool is a great free tool to find long tail keywords. If your keyword is too broad – for example, ‘NFL Jersey’ – you won’t be found by people who know exactly what they want.

Tip #2: Import your keywords and ideas into Google’s Keyword Planner tool. With this, you can estimate the search volume of your keywords.

Competitor Analysis

The demand for your keywords indicates how competitive the field you wish to enter is. Check your competitors. Are their items recognized best sellers?

Tip #3: Use a tool such as AMZ Tracker to keep track of competitor sales and your keyword rankings.

You won’t have to look far for the top players in your field, as Amazon tends to rank the most popular products at the top of the search results.

You may say this is a catch-22, and you’re right. I want to sell more, but to do so, I need to get to the top of the list. A shortcut to selling more can be to use Amazon sponsored products. Doing something like this in the initial stage of selling your product could give the push you need to come out on top in the long run,

Tip #4: Amazon sponsored products are very effective in assessing the value of keywords. You can see data based on impressions, clicks, and conversions.

Listing Your Items

There’s a lot of information needed when listing your item, taking what I’ve said already, here’s the critical information you need for each field.

Product Title: Clarity is important. Include brand, description, material, size, color, and keywords.
Search Terms: There are 5 fields here, where you can use up to 50 characters. Use all five fields, avoid repetition and make sure to spell check!
Image: Amazon recommends an image size of 1000 x 1000 pixels. Make sure that the background is plain white and upload up to 5 images.
Bullet Points & Description: These have to be coherent and not just stuffed with keywords. The bullet points (at the top) tend to carry more weight with Amazon’s algorithm, so go back to your keyword research. Other search engines will also be looking at these words. If you get this right, you will also have the opportunity to feature high in Google. For the description, use text from the bullets along with additional keywords. Work in your main keyword phrase about 3 times.

Experiment

In order to get the best results and to consistently improve, experimentation is vital. Amazon is an ideal platform for this, as any change to your listing will take effect within several hours.

Tip #5: When experimenting and optimizing your Amazon product pages, make sure they are completely separate from those on your own site. This will help you avoid any duplicate content issues.

Reviews

Amazon stresses that seller performance is critical to ensuring you occupy that top spot. Using a tool such as Feedback Five allows you to automate the process of asking for reviews. 90% of people usually don’t leave a review so make sure your customers let you know why you’re great and boost your ranking in the meantime.

Tip #6: Most negative reviews are usually related to customer service (late shipments, out of stock items). Veeqo allows you to link your Amazon Seller Central account to your other sales channels to effectively manage your stock.

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