Amazon SEO Tips : understand the Amazon search algorithm
To increase your Amazon sales, you need to understand the Amazon search engine
As Amazon constantly makes changes to test what makes shoppers buy more, frequent and unpredictable updates can be frustrating for many sellers.
The A9 Amazon algorithm factors in:
- Keywords
- Impressions
- Internal sales, e.g. from “frequently bought with” items
- Organic sales
- Paid-per-click (PPC) sales
- Click-through rate (CTR)
- Conversion rate to sales
- Product price
- Product images and their quality
- Seller authority
- Sales history
- Customer reviews
- Off-site sales.
Amazon SEO & sales velocity
When it comes to Amazon SEO, an important metric is sales velocity: the number of items sold within a determined amount of time. Sales velocity reflects how fast a product sells.
The number of sales influences Amazon’s Best Sellers Rank (BSR) in a given category. BSR, which is updated hourly, helps you figure out how well a product performs. The better the BSR, the more sales it has accumulated.
It’s important to aim for a better sales velocity and BSR than your competitors, i.e. sell more units per hour.
Consider this example. When a new book is released, it’ll rise to the top of the best-seller list. Its ranking will fluctuate each hour, not day. The longer a book has been out, the more it’ll descend the bestseller list.
You can boost your sales velocity with external traffic, e.g. combine your PPC spend with traffic from outside Amazon.
The 3 essential things you need to optimize are visibility, relevance and conversions. In short, make shoppers see, click and buy your product.
To do this, you need to take care of a few important elements in your listings, such as listing title, product description, bullet points or images.
Amazon selling tip: research keywords
Your Amazon listings must have the search terms that consumers look for. Keywords appearing in your name can also improve your rankings.
Amazon uses a method of Artificial Intelligence called Natural Language Processing to combine relevant words into popular phrases. So, if, let’s say, you have “sweater” in your title, “for women” in your bullets and “pullover” in your backend keywords: you will index for “pullover sweater for women”, but also for “pullover sweater” and “sweaters for women”.
To research Amazon keywords, consider using:
Amazon Search Bar (type in the search term and see what suggestions) & keyword tools for Amazon sellers.
- Keyword Inspector (an “Extensive Reverse ASIN” search on your top competitor)
- Helium 10 Scribbles Tool
- Jungle Scout
- Magnet
- Sellics
- com
Other sources of potential keywords include competitor pages, similar products section, data from Amazon PPC (which terms help listings convert) and popular keywords on Google, these are some of the best sources which can help you find potential keywords to optimize your listings, post finalizing the product, this is the sound most important aspect which will help you boost your initial sales hence pick keywords with minimum 5000 search volume and optimize well to get the best results.