Amazon is an incredibly powerful platform for selling your products. It’s comfortably the most popular e-commerce marketplace in the U.S., with more than 197 million monthly visitors. If you want to get your product in front of an enormous audience, Amazon is the place to do it.
However, tons of other brands are doing the same. So, to remain competitive in the marketplace, you’ll need good search engine optimization (SEO). In the world of Amazon, this is also referred to as optimizing products or Amazon Standard Identification Numbers (ASINs). Amazon SEO is all about optimizing your product listings, so they appear in relevant search results, showing up on your target customers’ radar and driving new sales.
Why Is SEO on Amazon Important?
There are more than 12 million products for sale on Amazon, which can make it difficult for your product to stand out to potential customers. To get in front of in-market shoppers, you need to work within the parameters of Amazon’s ranking algorithm, known as A9.
Most purchases on Amazon come through keyword searches — up to 90%. This means if you want to attract customers, you need to please this algorithm. If A9 can’t relate your product to a keyword because of bad SEO, your product will be left out of the ranking for that keyword entirely and never be shown to customers.
And there’s no room for mediocrity here: research suggests that 64% of Amazon customers never even make it past the first three products in their search results, so it’s key to make sure you rank as highly as possible.
SEO strategy on Amazon can also affect your paid efforts in Sponsored Ads. If your listings are not optimized for relevant keywords, your bids will get left out of the ad auction for those keywords altogether. A brand without an SEO strategy on Amazon is like a rudderless ship in a vast and turbulent ocean.
How Is Amazon SEO Different from Google SEO?
The SEO marketers are most familiar with is the kind that relates to Google and other internet search engines. Amazon’s SEO is similar, but there are some key differences that are worth diving into.
One main difference is that, compared to Google, Amazon prioritizes different ranking factors. To Amazon, the most important factors in determining product rankings are the total number of sales and a product’s conversion rate. It’s all about the purchase — the number one way Amazon determines if a product is relevant to a search is if a customer purchases the product as the end result.
There are also many similarities between Google and Amazon SEO. For example, putting as many keywords as possible on a page (also known as “keyword stuffing”) does not equate to a good SEO strategy on either platform.
Keyword stuffing often results in content that’s confusing and hard to read. It may be full of all the right individual words, but it doesn’t do a sufficient job of actually selling the product to a customer. Salsify found that 69% of customers will leave a product page if it doesn’t have enough information for them to make a purchase decision. This hurts conversion rates and ultimately sales, and that’s far more damaging to SEO than keywords.
The bottom line: keywords are also useful to Amazon SEO, but not if they come at the expense of actually convincing those reading your product description to buy the product.
5 Amazon Ranking Factors You Should Optimize
Now that we’ve covered how Amazon SEO works, let’s look at strategies you can implement to boost your products’ visibility. Here are Amazon’s most important ranking factors for search results:
1. Sales Rate
Sales rate is the number of orders a product receives on a typical day. This metric is how Amazon’s A9 algorithm scores the relevance of a product to a customer search, making it the main factor in why a product ranks highly.
Ultimately, people are on Amazon to buy products, so a purchase is the strongest possible indication that a product is relevant to a user’s search. This is why optimizing for conversion rate on Amazon is more valuable than attempting to boost rankings through keyword stuffing.
2. Titles
Of all the content on an Amazon product page, the title is the most important piece to optimize for SEO. The best way to do this is to make the product title as specific and relevant as possible. Include information like size, color, function, and highly relevant keywords.
For example, “[Brand Name] Earphones” isn’t anywhere near as effective a product title as “[Brand Name] Black Wireless Bluetooth Earphones with Noise-Cancelling Technology.”
3. Key Feature Bullet Points
In most categories, Amazon allows you to list up to five key features for your product in bullet point format. This is the perfect place to insert long-tail keywords into your content without compromising on sentence structure or readability. Often, a capitalized header at the beginning of the bullet point is helpful to give context.
To continue with our example of a product listing for earphones, a good bullet point to include would be: “Perfect Earphones for Exercise: These wireless earphones have specific technology that makes them sweat-proof, and their sleek design is made to fit comfortably in your ear.”
4. Images and Content
Images are an often-overlooked part of SEO, but they can have a big impact on conversion rates. It’s best to have at least six images, a product video, and A+ Content instead of text descriptions on your product page — this will cause your conversion rate to increase which, as we know, is the number one factor for Amazon SEO success.
5. Metadata
Some of the most important SEO work takes place behind the scenes, where customers might never even see it. This includes elements like:
- Dimensions
- Color details
- Category-specific information
- Metadata search terms
Taking the time to fill out these details in the backend of each product listing is an easy way to improve the SEO of those products and drive more customers to your listings.
Amazon SEO Is an Ongoing Task
The most important element to remember about Amazon SEO is that the job is never finished. Many brands treat the SEO process as a one-and-done tactic and never revisit it.
This is the wrong approach and could cost you greatly. Amazon’s algorithm is continually changing — Amazon changed its necessary product information and metadata requirements 167 times in Vendor Central alone in 2020. Also, customer search term behavior changes daily, so you’ll need a robust advertising strategy to stay on top of changing trends.
That means the most successful brands are the ones constantly evolving their Amazon strategies. It helps to use Amazon’s A/B testing opportunities on their Amazon Experiments page to play around and find out which approaches work best for your products.
You should also review keyword-specific data from advertising reports, as this will help you see which keywords your products are converting for at the highest rate. This data is incredibly useful as it can be used to inform changes to your Amazon SEO strategy, allowing you to outrank your competitors and consistently show up at the top of your customers’ search results.
At Booyah, our Amazon experts specialize in helping brands develop the most effective SEO strategy that improves rankings for relevant searches and maximizes sales.
Learn more about Booyah’s Amazon SEO services.
