What is the first thing customers browsing Amazon look for?
The product listing!
It’s kind of a no-brainer why an Amazon product listing is so crucial.
Nearly half of Americans (46.7%) start their product search on Amazon.
And what’s more helpful when shopping online than a product listing?
So if you’re already selling products on Amazon, you should know that having the best possible product listing is critical for success.
This means understanding how to optimize your Amazon listing.
Amazon listing optimization comes down to two main areas: optimizing for Amazon SEO, and optimizing for conversions.
The first of these is important to rank your products on Amazon, and therefore bring visitors to your listing.
The second Amazon optimization technique is essential for turning those visitors to actual sales.
If you are able to do both, well you’ve basically discovered the recipe for the secret sauce of Amazon advertising success.
Learning how to optimize an Amazon listing is by no means easy.
However, by following certain tactics you will be able to optimize your product listing in both respects.
These top 5 tips to optimize an Amazon product listing will help you to increase sales and grow your Amazon business exponentially.
They include focusing on copy and title, using keywords, optimizing for mobile, and using digital marketing to complement your Amazon listing optimization efforts.
Have Strong Copy When Selling Products on Amazon
The great thing about Amazon listing optimization is that even though you have two main areas to worry about, they both essentially come back to the same thing: making sales!
One of the key areas that Amazon’s algorithm looks for when ranking products is a strong sales record.
This makes sense when you consider that they make money from your listing when you make sales.
So, they want to promote products which are most likely to sell.
Therefore, boosting sales conversions also helps your SEO on Amazon.
In turn this helps you to make more sales – it’s a win, win, win!
One of the most important areas of Amazon optimization for increasing conversions and pushing sales is your listing’s copy.
You must make sure you have copy that sells, from your product description and bullet points to the listing title.
Use persuasive wording and employ sales tactics throughout your copy to maximize conversion rates.
To get started, you can use an Amazon product listing template.
Create an Eye-Catching and Optimized Amazon Product Listing Title
Your product’s title is one of the most important parts of the listing.
The three top factors influencing a customer’s decision to buy on Amazon are:
- Product title
- Price
- Images
A strong title will encourage the user to click through, so that the rest of the listing can do its work.
For SEO purposes when selling products on Amazon, you want to make sure that your product title contains as many keywords as possible.
Select those with the highest search volumes that are most relevant to your product.
Having relevant keywords will assist with conversions, too .
When you optimize your Amazon listing with the right keywords, they tell your customers that your product is what they are looking for.
However, for this Amazon optimization tactic to work, you want to avoid keyword “stuffing”.
Essentially, this refers to overcrowding your title with a jumble of keywords which don’t make sense.
So, balance is key.
Other crucial factors to include in your Amazon product listing title are:
- Mention the brand of your product (especially if it is your own brand)
- Keep to the Amazon limit of characters, which was 200 characters or less at the time of writing
- Use pipes and dashes to break up keywords and improve readability
- Have persuasive text which will “win the click”
Amazon Optimization Relies on Strategic Use of Keywords
Just like when trying to rank a website on Google, ranking an Amazon product listing comes down to the keywords.
It’s not the only factor for Amazon listing optimization success, but it is one of the main ones.
The keywords which you want to include in your listing are the all the words relevant to your product and that have high search volumes on Amazon.
Amazon keyword research tools like Viral Launch and Helium10 can help you to find out what these keywords are.
You can even use them to spy on Amazon competitors and determine what your rivals are ranking for.
Once research is complete, it’s time to optimize your Amazon listing with them.
Include as many of these in your product listing – specifically in the product title and bullet points.
Let’s say you run keyword research on the general term, “water bottle”.
A quick search on Amazon for the same search term yields these top results for products:
Notice how many include some of these top keywords.
If you click into the first result (Simple Modern), you’ll notice these top keywords scattered throughout the bullet points below the title.
The same can be said for their product description section, which targets even more long-tail keywords for a fully optimized Amazon product listing.
Keep in mind that like Google keywords, you need to continue to track and monitor your keyword positions on Amazon.
Things can shift quickly when it comes to Amazon optimization as customer search preferences change.
Use you research tool to regularly track keyword positions and adjust your listings as necessary.
Optimize Your Amazon Listing For Mobile
Don’t forget about the power of mobile devices!
Since 2015, more people have been shopping on Amazon using a smartphone compared to desktop.
These percentages have only continued to skew even more to mobile in the past few years.
This means that when you optimize your Amazon listing you need to consider not just what it looks like on a laptop or PC but also on tablet or smartphone screens.
Because you will be creating and editing your listing on a computer, be sure to always preview changes on mobile before committing to them.
Check for how the images translate, the layout, how the copy reads on the smaller screen, and the overall look.
Drive Organic Traffic To Your Optimized Amazon Listing With Marketing
Organic traffic is also a part of this picture because it influences both Amazon rankings and sales conversions.
Bringing traffic to your listing has obvious benefits for your ROI as the more people who visit, the higher the chance they’ll make a purchase.
Organic traffic is also one of the Amazon optimization factors that the e-commerce site looks for when ranking your product.
Advertising on Amazon can be highly effective in bringing more traffic to your listing, though it does require some investment.
You can also promote your products outside of Amazon to bring yet more organic traffic to your listing.
A cross-platform strategy can be just as effective for Amazon as with any other platform.
Social media remains one of the biggest digital marketing tools around, and this is not showing signs of changing anytime soon.
With 42% of the global population actively using social media, it’s an influential place for marketers.
By establishing a social media presence for your business, you can gain an organic following through posting great content.
Then, you can run ads or create organic posts that directly send your followers to your Amazon product listings.
What to Do Now That You Know How to Optimize an Amazon Listing
As with any marketing campaign, constant performance tracking and tweaking is key.
Even if you follow the best Amazon listing optimization techniques to the T, you need to adjust for your specific business.
Often, these adjustments will need to be made over time as your business grows, your audience changes, and how customers shop on Amazon continues to shift.
In general, though, applying these tactics above to optimize your Amazon listings will lead to significant improvement in the number of visitors to your listings.
As a result, you can expect the proportion of visitors who purchase to increase.
For your business, this means more sales, more revenue, and more success!
About the author:
Tom Buckland is the founder of Amazon SEO Consultant & HQ SEO – An organic marketing agency helping businesses grow through the Amazon channel.
