In 2022, Amazon’s sales revenue was about $514 billion, with most of this money coming from third-party sellers. To get these sales, Amazon sellers must learn many skills, including Amazon SEO.
Below, you’ll learn about the basics of Amazon SEO, how to optimize your listings, and how to find keywords you can target. Let’s get started.
What is Amazon SEO?
Amazon SEO, or search engine optimization, is when you improve your product listing to appear higher on Amazon’s built-in search engine. The key word is “optimization,” which is jargon meaning “improvement.”
Improving your listing can take several forms, but here’s where SEO gets tricky: its main purpose is to help sellers get more organic traffic. Let’s break this down:
Traffic refers to the number of users visiting your product listing. What makes that traffic “organic” is the reliance on Amazon’s search engine. So when a buyer searches for “blue bow ties,” your listing will appear higher than others with an optimized listing.
Alternatively, inorganic traffic typically refers to paid advertising. When you have to pay for a top search slot, that cuts into your potential earnings.
So, SEO has two major advantages: it saves your money and provides you with an additional (and free) channel to get sales. Without knowing its value, let’s get into what it takes to optimize your listing.
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How to optimize your listing (step-by-step)
Knowing that optimization means “improvement,” it becomes easier to understand what to do. But SEO has one unique aspect of improving your listing. Below, you’ll learn that unique aspect in this step-by-step optimization guide:
- Keyword research: When people find products on Amazon, they do so using keywords. Finding out those keywords requires research, which is a unique aspect to optimizing for search engines. Because it’s an involved process, you’ll learn more about this step in our next section.
- Title: Optimizing your title refers to using your primary keyword (the most important one) and making the title appealing for product page visitors. Take inspiration from other product titles for it, following a format like this: brand, what the product is, and features/details of the product. When using keywords in the title, make sure they’re natural.
- Product description and features: The product description starts with a list of key features (under the first “about this item” header) and a more detailed product description when you scroll further down. Your job is to provide readers with all the reasons they want your product, using keywords throughout to help your product get found through Amazon’s search engine.
- Images: High-quality product pictures will often do the job of selling the product for you. Like the title and description, take inspiration from other images to see what works, trying to emulate those for your images. The first image needs to be a completely white background, only showing a picture of your product. Secondary images can include pictures of the product in use and infographics.
- Backend keywords: For all the keywords you can fit into your title and description, Amazon includes a “backend keywords” section on Seller Central. Insert the remaining keywords as long as they appropriately describe your product.
- Price: Optimizing your price typically means matching it to your competitors. If your price is too high, Amazon will prefer your competitors most of the time. So it’s important for you to find high-margin products.
Going back to our step one, optimization begins with keyword research. Our next section will provide a more detailed process for finding keywords.
How to do keyword research for Amazon products
Going back to our definition, keyword research is doing research on the keywords your customers used to find similar products. Below, you’ll learn about some of the more popular methods you can use to find these keywords:
- Amazon Suggest: When you search for a product on Amazon, the auto-fill dropdown provides related keywords. This is called “Amazon Suggest” and it’s a great way to get ideas for your target keyword list.
- Competitor Research: Also known as “spying,” competitor research is when you look at competitors’ listings and find out what keywords they’re using. Look for common words or phrases found across these listings.
- Google Keyword Planner: If it’s popular on Amazon, you can find it on Google. Google’s Keyword Planner is free (requires an AdWords account) and gives you some indirect information when finding popular products.
- Social Media Listening: Social media listening is another way to get ideas for keywords. You can either follow trending topics on sites like Twitter (X) or use social media listening tools like Hootsuite or Buzzsumo.
- Third-Party Tools: Third party keyword research tools, like AMZScout’s Keyword Tools, can save you time by providing extensive keyword reports.
These five methods are some of the most popular ways to do keyword research for Amazon SEO. You can even use them to help find products to sell on Amazon.
Conclusion
Besides being a good seller, these Amazon SEO tips can help you save money on advertising fees and use a free channel to earn more sales. Using these techniques, you can start yourself on the path of overcoming your competitors. Happy selling!
