#Splitly Amazon Split Testing

[digitalmarketingstrategie]

Splitly Review: An All-in-One Amazon Split Testing Tool, But Is It Worth It? (An Honest Review From User)

If one overriding theme has arisen in our reviews of the best Amazon seller tools, it’s that an all-in-one tool such as Sellics or CashCowPro is never going to be able to manage keyword rankings like an all-in-one, a specialized tool like KeyworX could.

It’s with high expectations and bated breath, then, that we come to analyze Splitly, the highly-regarded all-in-one Amazon A/B testing tool.

Is it the undeniable standout in its field similar to KeyworX, near the top of the game like FeedbackFive, or just another competitor that fails to stand out amongst the crowd at all?

Let’s take a look at the software in detail:

What is Splitly & What Can It Do For You?

Splitly is an Amazon A/B testing (or split testing) tool that allows Amazon sellers to:

Test selling prices against each other and automatically set the price that will provide the most profit

Use an AI-driven split testing algorithm to do the same for product titles, descriptions, images, etc, in order to quickly and scientifically ascertain the most effective product listing possible

Track keyword ranking positions based on the above changes and instantly see how each change affects your business

Sounds good right?

But how well do these features actually work, and can you get the same functionality elsewhere for cheaper?

We’ll answer this and more, but first, let’s break down the individual features to see how well they work:

Splitly Features

Algorithmic Split Testing

This section stands out immediately because it isn’t just a standard A/B testing tool that lets you run two things at once, see the conversion or engagement rates for each, and decide which one to continue with.

No, the split testing function in Splitly uses artificial intelligence to do this for you, running different images, titles, descriptions, and prices, rotating them out without your input, and recording the customer behavior caused by each.

Once it has enough data to know which listing is the most effective, it will continue to run that one, maximizing your business, sales, and traffic.

You can then run new tests within the context of the results of the last one in order to find the next step of optimization development and any potential other ways to improve your listing.

Even better?

We did this for the first time just a few short minutes after signing up — it really is unbelievably easy.

In our opinion, this is a highly impressive offering and earns Splitly a spot at the top of the list when it comes to split testing tools.

After all, very few competing tools use complex algorithms to evaluate the results and make decisions on them, instead preferring to simply display the results and let you do the rest.

This is the most intelligent way to approach optimization and A/B testing because it ensures you never rest on your laurels or get too satisfied with a listing that can still be improved.

And let’s be honest, any listing can still be improved! Optimizing is an ongoing journey where you build off of what you’ve learned previously and find new ways to take it.

Doing this manually can range from being a nightmare to being impossible since you can’t be expected to remember everything you’ve ever tried and the associated statistics.

With Splitly, you don’t need to — and that’s a huge bonus for any Amazon seller.

Automated Pricing Optimization (Profit Peak)

Even if you get to a stage where you’re happy with your listing and decide not to run the split testing anymore, you’ll probably still want to keep the price management function running.

This is because it ensures your prices are always in the right spot to be as attractive to customers as possible while also ensuring your profits are as healthy as they can be.

It’s also simply because, once you experience never having to worry about tweaking your pricing again and knowing it’s always handled, you won’t be able to go back.

Profit Peak can also help with inventory management since it automatically takes supply and demand into account, increasing prices slightly if you (and sellers of similar products) are low on stock but demand stays the same, for example.

Profit Peak is super easy to use and another powerful benefit for any Amazon seller. Personally, we would recommend any Splitly user keeping it running 24/7.

Failing to do so will likely lose you some money pretty quickly.

This means that no matter whether you’re sleeping, working, socializing, or vacationing, Splitly is keeping an eye on everything and making sure your prices are at the ideal level, so you don’t need to.

Keyword Rank Tracking

Splitly also offers a keyword rank tracking solution.

It updates you daily with accurate keyword rankings for your products and those of your competitors. Historical reports help you to track your ranking over time and see what events have had the biggest impact.

It is best used alongside the above features to measure how your listing optimizations affect your rank since this has a major effect on your sales volume.

For example, what if you test two listings against each other, and Splitly tells you one is more effective, so you apply it permanently which then causes your rank to increase?

This tells you that the new listing is not only an all-round improvement on the old one in terms of customer engagement metrics, but Amazon’s algorithm prefers it too — which is exactly what we’re looking for,

In other words, this listing is your new gold standard, and while you can certainly continue to test new tweaks and improve it further, you should keep what you’ve learned and never roll back any improvements or go back to how things were previously.

You can continue to do this over time, boosting your conversion rates and your Amazon ranking, but you can also track the rank increases and decreases that happen to your competitor’s listings, then check those listings for the alterations or optimizations that caused the rank changes too.

Through combining these two strategies, you can learn from every change that happens within your niche, and well, it’s difficult for anybody to compete with that!

Very difficult.

If keyword ranking is the main thing you’re looking for, KeyworX does that a lot better and is a lot cheaper — don’t forget that.

But, if you want both keyword ranking and split testing in a high-quality package that allows both of these functions to work together to the benefit of your listings, you will struggle to do better than Splitly, and for some, especially some larger Amazon businesses, that is likely to be worth the extra cost.

Speaking of value and pricing, how much does Splitly cost anyway?

Splitly Pricing

At first glance, it seems that the number of keywords you can track and the number of concurrent tests you can run are the main differences, but be sure to also note that you don’t get Profit Peak, the price optimization tool, in the smallest package.

The biggest (Enterprise) package is a beast at 100 concurrent tests and 5,000 keywords — even we struggled to reach the maximum for this package with our wide range of clients selling on Amazon, so chances are that this will be more than enough for most of the biggest Amazon sellers.

What about customer service?

As part of the JungleScout umbrella, Splitly has an excellent customer service team who are quick to respond and happy to explain any part of the tool you are struggling with.

What about data and privacy? Is Splitly secure?

Splitly and JungleScout work closely with Amazon Web Services to securely read data from Amazon. They also use OpenSSL AES 256-bit encryption (government/bank-level encryption).

You can read up on their privacy policy here.

Which marketplaces does Splitly support?

How much can it change my pricing? What if it messes up?

On first use of Profit Peak, it will make very minor changes as the algorithm continues to learn. This stage typically involves gravitating towards the price point that will give you the most profit, before other factors come in and potentially change this slightly.

The algorithm behind Profit Peak is very intelligent and we find it extremely unlikely you’ll get any bad results, but you do have the ability to set a minimum and maximum price to keep it under control if that makes you feel safer.

Can I manually edit my listings while testing is ongoing?

No — doing this will cancel the test, although we don’t know why you would need to. If you have ideas that might be better than the test you’re currently running, note them down and give them a chance in the next test.

Final Breakdown

A huge standout in the Amazon A/B testing niche

Smart AI decisions create a scientific testing environment

Maximise your listing for conversions

Maximise your price for profits

Well-designed and intuitive to use

Saves you hours per week of careful tweaks

Offers keyword tracking for related insights

The keyword tracking is beaten out by KeyworX, but then keyword tracking isn’t the main objective of Splitly

Nothing else significant enough to be worth mentioning!

Conclusion

For those who waste a lot of time every week tweaking their listings and trying to figure out what works best, Splitly is an absolute must-have.

Even if you do have a lot of experience and knowledge around Amazon product listing optimization, you can still benefit a lot from the testing Splitly provides.

The combination of proven, data-driven insights on which listing features work and easily trackable changes in keyword ranking make boosting your Amazon sales and profits as easy as it is likely to be any time in the near future.

At the end of the day, your product listing is your shop window, and you can’t expect to build and scale a successful business without maximizing your listings.

Splitly makes this not just manageable, but laughably easy, and for that, it earns a strong recommendation for any Amazon seller or business.

summary:

It’s with high expectations and bated breath, that the authors come to analyze Splitly, the highly-regarded all-in-one Amazon A/B testing tool.

Use an AI-driven split testing algorithm to do the same for product titles, descriptions, images, etc, in order to quickly and scientifically ascertain the most effective product listing possible

The split testing function in Splitly uses artificial intelligence to do this for you, running different images, titles, descriptions, and prices, rotating them out without your input, and recording the customer behavior caused by each.

This is a highly impressive offering and earns Splitly a spot at the top of the list when it comes to split testing tools.

Even if you get to a stage where you’re happy with your listing and decide not to run the split testing anymore, you’ll probably still want to keep the price management function running.

Offers a keyword rank tracking solution.

What if you test two listings against each other, and Splitly tells you one is more effective, so you apply it permanently which causes your rank to increase?

You can continue to do this over time, boosting your conversion rates and your Amazon ranking, but you can track the rank increases and decreases that happen to your competitor’s listings, check those listings for the alterations or optimizations that caused the rank changes too.

If you want both keyword ranking and split testing in a high-quality package that allows both of these functions to work together to the benefit of your listings, you will struggle to do better than Splitly, and for some, especially some larger Amazon businesses, that is likely to be worth the extra cost.

It seems that the number of keywords you can track and the number of concurrent tests you can run are the main differences, but be sure to note that you don’t get Profit Peak, the price optimization tool, in the smallest package.

For those who waste a lot of time every week tweaking their listings and trying to figure out what works best, Splitly is an absolute must-have.

Even if you do have a lot of experience and knowledge around Amazon product listing optimization, you can still benefit a lot from the testing Splitly provides.

The combination of proven, data-driven insights on which listing features work and trackable changes in keyword ranking make boosting your Amazon sales and profits as easy as it is likely to be any time in the near future.

To learn more about how the authors can offer results and rank positions that nobody else can, take a look at the case studies to see the results the authors have already achieved for the clients with the unique, self-developed Amazon ranking process

[michaelsumit542-blog]

Splitly Amazon Split Testing

Splitly Amazon Split Testing, permitting dealers to play out A/B split testing on item postings. Look at this Splitly audit and see whether.

In the event that one superseding topic has emerged in our surveys of Splitly Amazon Split Testing, it's that an across the board instrument, for example, Sellics or CashCowPro is never going to have the option to oversee catchphrase rankings like an across the board, a specific device like KeyworX could. It's with exclusive standards and bated breath, at that point, that we come to break down Splitly, the exceptionally respected across the board Amazon A/B testing instrument.

1. Test selling costs against one another and naturally set the value that will give the most benefit. 2. Utilize an AI-driven split testing calculation to do likewise for item titles, portrayals, pictures and so forth, so as to rapidly and experimentally find out the best item posting conceivable. 3. Track watchword positioning positions dependent on the above changes and in a flash perceive how each change influences your business.

[kinhnghiemsovn]

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.

Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.

Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.

Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. 

Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.

Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.

Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.

Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. 

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.

Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.

Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.

Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.

And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.

Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.

Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.

Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.

Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.

Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.

Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.

Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

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[infolearn]

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world. As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US. Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it."  Enter the power of SEO. When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to; “Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year. In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to: “Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user. On one hand, we have Google who asks the question: “What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?” Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know: “What product is the searcher most likely to buy?” On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell. With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search. Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace. With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace. There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way. At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP. On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.  

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page. Conversion rate Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page. Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings. Optimize pricing Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance. Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins. However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends. Create listings that sell As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition. Title Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert. Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions. Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line. Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product. For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros. AB test images Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact. Amazon sponsored ads The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance. Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically. External traffic External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products. While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible. With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO. While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none. Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach. Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon: Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product. Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords. Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io. Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on. Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember: Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name. Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions. Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms. Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings. Customer satisfaction Account health Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners. On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. Customer reviews Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars. On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important. Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products. Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon: Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review. Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon. Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration. Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange. And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business. Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews. Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second. Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product. Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim. Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test. Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience. Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products. What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below! Read the full article

[lindarifenews]

SEMrush expands to Amazon with Sellerly for product page testing

SEMrush is a popular competitive intelligence platform used by search marketers. The company, recently infused with $40 million in funding to expand beyond Google, Bing and Yahoo insights, has launched a new product called Sellerly specifically for Amazon sellers.

What is Sellerly? Announced Monday, Sellerly designed to give Amazon sellers the ability to split test product detail pages.

“By introducing Sellerly as a seller’s buddy in Amazon marketing, we hope to improve hundreds of existing Amazon sellers’ strategies,”said SEMrush Chief Strategy Officer Eugene Levin in a statement. “Sellerly split testing is only the first step here. We’ve already started to build a community around the new product, which is very important to us. We believe that by combining feedback from users with our leading technology and 10 years of SEO software experience, we will be able to build something truly exceptional for Amazon sellers.”

How does it work? Sellerly is currently free to use. Amazon sellers connect their Amazon accounts to the tool in order to manage their product pages. Sellers can make changes to product detail pages to test against the controls. Sellerly collects data in real time and sellers can then choose winners based on views and conversions.

Sellers can run an unlimited number of tests.

Why we should care. Optimized product detail pages on Amazon is a critical aspect of success on the platform. As Amazon continues to generate an increasing share of e-commerce sales for merchants big and small, and competition only increases, product page optimization becomes even more critical. Amazon does not support AB testing natively. Sellerly is not the first split test product for Amazon product pages to market. Splitly (paid), Listing Dojo (free) are two others that offer similar split testing services.

The post SEMrush expands to Amazon with Sellerly for product page testing appeared first on Search Engine Land.

SEMrush expands to Amazon with Sellerly for product page testing published first on https://likesfollowersclub.tumblr.com/

[andreacaskey]

SEMrush expands to Amazon with Sellerly for product page testing

SEMrush is a popular competitive intelligence platform used by search marketers. The company, recently infused with $40 million in funding to expand beyond Google, Bing and Yahoo insights, has launched a new product called Sellerly specifically for Amazon sellers.

What is Sellerly? Announced Monday, Sellerly designed to give Amazon sellers the ability to split test product detail pages.

“By introducing Sellerly as a seller’s buddy in Amazon marketing, we hope to improve hundreds of existing Amazon sellers’ strategies,”said SEMrush Chief Strategy Officer Eugene Levin in a statement. “Sellerly split testing is only the first step here. We’ve already started to build a community around the new product, which is very important to us. We believe that by combining feedback from users with our leading technology and 10 years of SEO software experience, we will be able to build something truly exceptional for Amazon sellers.”

How does it work? Sellerly is currently free to use. Amazon sellers connect their Amazon accounts to the tool in order to manage their product pages. Sellers can make changes to product detail pages to test against the controls. Sellerly collects data in real time and sellers can then choose winners based on views and conversions.

Sellers can run an unlimited number of tests.

Why we should care. Optimized product detail pages on Amazon is a critical aspect of success on the platform. As Amazon continues to generate an increasing share of e-commerce sales for merchants big and small, and competition only increases, product page optimization becomes even more critical. Amazon does not support AB testing natively. Sellerly is not the first split test product for Amazon product pages to market. Splitly (paid), Listing Dojo (free) are two others that offer similar split testing services.

The post SEMrush expands to Amazon with Sellerly for product page testing appeared first on Search Engine Land.

SEMrush expands to Amazon with Sellerly for product page testing published first on https://likesandfollowersclub.weebly.com/

[mindthump]

Amazon Pricing: Long-Term Strategies For Increased Sales http://ift.tt/2su1MM3

Pricing strategies are so important for Amazon sellers, no matter which Amazon business model you are using. Often, a strong pricing strategy is the missing key to success, because the power of pricing is underestimated and not managed correctly. We asked Seamus from RepricerExpress to shed some light on long-term pricing strategies for maximum profits, taking into account the data they have from their repricing tool for Amazon sellers competing for the Buy Box. 

_____

  I remember some time ago looking at our Google Analytics account to see how traffic to our website was performing—it was relatively steady but over the last two days we had experienced a small dip. Of course, we delved a little deeper to check that everything was fine and indeed it was, but my boss got in touch to ask what was going on and what we should do about it. My reaction was to simply explain that it was a blip and that we should do nothing just yet—other than keep an eye on things.

That was the same month my friend emailed, laughing, and telling me that some stock he had bought the previous year had come good and made a nice little profit. He had emailed me specifically because I joked with him three months earlier about how that stock had seen a sudden dip in share price and how he might lose a lot of money. Was he going to sell quickly or hold his nerve and ride it out?

Amazon pricing decisions 🤔

When those two events happened at the same time, a funny thing dawned on me about the Amazon sellers who use our software. Many of the newer sellers would often watch their prices daily or during short periods of time to gauge how well they were doing. Some would email our support team asking why their product wasn’t selling, or why it had suddenly moved price. They would make decisions about their pricing from those isolated incidents and continue to react to events on Amazon in a similar fashion.

Here's the thing, Amazon pricing can decisions should be made over a longer period of time. Otherwise, you may be making harmful decisions that will impact you later on.

  Experienced sellers have long-term pricing strategies

I noticed that our more experienced sellers would only log into RepricerExpress occasionally. When I asked a number of them why that was, it became apparent that they were basing their pricing strategies on much longer time periods and market conditions. A dip or spike in sales on one day wouldn’t have them changing prices frantically, just like I didn’t panic about our dip in traffic over two days, or like my friend didn’t panic when his share price dipped for a short period.

Whether you’re looking to build a solid business on Amazon, increase your traffic to your website, or increase your stock portfolio’s value, you’ve got to take a long-term approach. Your decisions must consider where you’re trying to take your Amazon business, what strategies you’re going to use to get more visibility, increase seller metrics and product reviews, and ultimately increase your sales and profits with pricing that’s sensible and delivers a good margin.

  The strategy of a successful Amazon seller

Recently, an Amazon seller using our software was kind enough to share his pricing strategy for selling on Amazon with us. Kev Blackburn of LifeSuccessEngineer has over 750 products and 4,000 units in stock. With sales of more than £60,000 in the last 30 days, Kev is definitely doing something right! Here's an insight into Kev's strategy:

“We have the same common strategy for all types of stock. We work on a minimum 30% return on investment. We will hold our prices at 30% or higher and only adjust after three months of having that stock.”

  Pretty simple, right?

Well yes, but many sellers just won’t trust in this approach. They often don’t realize that setting their Minimum and Maximum prices offers them huge flexibility for adjusting price over the long term.

For example: Kev sets his minimum floor price to 30% above his cost price plus fees. That pretty much guarantees him 30% margin on every sale he makes, and if market conditions are favorable, he could sell at much higher margins when RepricerExpress detects that his competition are out of stock or have inferior seller metrics to him.

  How does this work for Private Label sellers?

Kev is selling products using the Wholesale method, so he knows that winning the Buy Box is crucial, but also that price is only one piece of the puzzle.

For private label sellers out there who are not competing for the Buy Box, the same story still applies. If you are selling private label and have no pricing strategy at all, then you are definitely leaving money on the table.

  However, when you use software like Splitly, to split test, or even better, automate your pricing using machine learning with Profit Peak, you are implementing a long-term pricing strategy that has the flexibility to adapt to market conditions, competition and all of the variable moving parts on Amazon.

  What if my products just aren’t selling?

Okay, remember that three-month period Kev mentioned? You could have a similar period set for reviewing how sales are progressing on your stock. When products haven’t sold within a certain period, move them to a more aggressive repricing rule. In RepricerExpress, that’s really simple to set up with our Automations functionality, allowing you to auto-detect when this happens.

  Tip: Use Profit Peak to automate private label repricing, so you always have the best known price for maximum profits, whilst maintaining your Rank (BSR).

  Here’s another example:

Twice per year Amazon charges you fees for the stock you hold in its fulfillment centers, on 15 February and 15 August. So for many sellers, they have decisions to make about whether to pay those fees, try to sell off their stock before the deadline or remove their stock from the fulfillment centre.

With a long-term pricing strategy, many sellers using our tools will have an Automation set which looks something like this:

If FBA Long-Term Storage Fees are due,

And stock is older than 4 months,

And sales are less than X dollars,

Then move them to a more aggressive pricing rule.

They will know that even by selling the stock off at a lower margin, it’s more profitable than holding on to it and paying further FBA storage fees.

  Then there are different times of the year

Of course, most Amazon sellers will know which of their stock will sell at higher margins at certain times of the year. You may have a certain toy that you’re going to sell at Max in November and December because people are less motivated by price in such instances, and simply have to have the toy.

Again, with a great repricing tool, this should be relatively simple to set up and automate for those times of the year you want to adjust your repricing strategy for.

Some questions to ask yourself include:

When you have those 100 new pairs of sneakers back in stock, consider a longer term view of the sell price:

What’s the minimum price I want to sell at in the first X days?

When do I need to have this stock sold by?

What strategy will I employ if sales are much slower than expected?

What strategy will I employ if sales are going too well and stock is running out?

What times of the year might I be able to sell at a much higher margin?

What’s my breakeven point on the stock as one lot?

  These aren’t a finite list of questions you should consider, as every seller has different mixes of stock, different overheads and different goals, but they do move the focus to a long-term approach to selling on Amazon. As we’ve witnessed, the more experienced sellers who are still doing business and making money on the marketplace always adopt a long-term pricing strategy.

  Conclusion

It’s difficult, but not impossible, to take a long-term approach to your pricing on Amazon manually. A manual approach would involve checking so many metrics constantly. However, if you are competing for the Buy Box, using an automated solution such as RepricerExpress will free up your time and do all the heavy lifting automatically. Uniquely, it can check lots of historical data, such as sales, stock and sales rank daily, and automatically move SKUs on to the right repricing rule at the right time.

It’s super easy to set up and works across Amazon and eBay. There is also a free 15-day trial for you to try out and see if it works for your business.

If you have any further repricing queries, get in touch via profit@repricerexpress.com and one of our great customer support team will get back to you asap.

  About the author

Seamus Breslin is the design and marketing manager at

RepricerExpress

– a tool that helps Amazon and eBay sellers with instant repricing and specifically helps Amazon sellers to win the Buy Box more often.

When she's not being an SEO geek or crafting content, Kym can be found making friends with cats, taking photographs, cycling and traveling.

Latest posts by Kym Ellis (see all)

[amazon-seller-blog-tips-blog]

How to Do A/B Testing: A Checklist You'll Want to Bookmark

I put my link if you want to do like me and get the solution to be the best seller on AMAZON ON TWO WEEKS

Planning to run an A/B test? Bookmark this checklist for what to do before, during, and after to get the best results.

When marketers like us create landing pages, write email copy, or design call-to-action buttons, it can be tempting to use our intuition to predict what will make people click and convert.

But basing marketing decisions off of a "feeling" can be pretty detrimental to results. Rather than relying on guesses or assumptions to make these decisions, you're much better off running an A/B test — sometimes called a split test.

A/B testing can be valuable because different audiences behave, well, differently. Something that works for one company may not necessarily work for another. In fact, conversion rate optimization (CRO) experts hate the term "best practices" because it may not actually be the best practice for you.

But A/B tests can also be complex. If you're not careful, you could make incorrect assumptions about what people like and what makes them click — decisions that could easily misinform other parts of your strategy.

Keep reading about this method to learn how to do A/B testing before, during, and after data collection so you can make the best decisions from your results.

But as a seller on amazon you will not have enough of time to do all this work by yoursel if Amazon use artificiel intelligence you also you have to use it to increase your sales and there is a lot of compagnies who give this plausibility and with lowcost.

This the solution that i have spent many years to find it and i am satisfied.

If you want more and you are seller you can use this opportunity .youbhave this link to make like us and increase your sales on amazon with the AI

[kjt-lawyers]

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.

Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.

Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.

Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. 

Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.

Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.

Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.

Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. 

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.

Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.

Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.

Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.

And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.

Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.

Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.

Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.

Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.

Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.

Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.

Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[gamebazu]

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.

Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.

Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.

Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. 

Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.

Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.

Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.

Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. 

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.

Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.

Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.

Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.

And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.

Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.

Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.

Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.

Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.

Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.

Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.

Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

https://ift.tt/34lfkxp

[localwebmgmt]

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.

Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.

Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.

Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. 

Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.

Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.

Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.

Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. 

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.

Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.

Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.

Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.

And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.

Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.

Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.

Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.

Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.

Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.

Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.

Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[lakelandseo]

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it��s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.

Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.

Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.

Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. 

Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.

Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.

Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.

Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. 

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.

Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.

Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.

Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.

And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.

Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.

Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.

Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.

Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.

Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.

Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.

Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[thanhtuandoan89]

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.

Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.

Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.

Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. 

Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.

Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.

Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.

Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. 

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.

Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.

Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.

Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.

And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.

Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.

Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.

Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.

Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.

Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.

Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.

Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[paulineberry]

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.

Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.

Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.

Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. 

Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.

Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.

Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.

Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. 

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.

Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.

Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.

Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.

And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.

Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.

Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.

Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.

Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.

Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.

Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.

Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[drummcarpentry]

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.

Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.

Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.

Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. 

Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.

Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.

Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.

Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. 

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.

Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.

Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.

Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.

And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.

Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.

Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.

Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.

Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.

Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.

Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.

Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[nutrifami]

Amazon vs. Google: Decoding the World's Largest E-commerce Search Engine

Posted by Lorna_Franklin

A lot of people forget that Amazon is a search engine, let alone the largest search engine for e-commerce. With 54 percent of product searches now taking place on Amazon, it’s time to take it seriously as the world’s largest search engine for e-commerce. In fact, if we exclude YouTube as part of Google, Amazon is technically the second largest search engine in the world.

As real estate on Google becomes increasingly difficult to maintain, moving beyond a website-centric e-commerce strategy is a no brainer. With 54% of shoppers choosing to shop on e-commerce marketplaces, it’s no surprise that online marketplaces are the number one most important digital marketing channel in the US, according to a 2018 study by the Digital Marketing Institute. While marketplaces like Etsy and Walmart are growing fast, Amazon maintains its dominance of e-commerce market share owning 47 percent of online sales, and 5 percent of all retail sales in the US.

Considering that there are currently over 500 million products listed on Amazon.com, and more than two-thirds of clicks happen on the first page of Amazon’s search results—selling products on Amazon is no longer as easy as "set it and forget it." 

Enter the power of SEO.

When we think of SEO, many of us are aware of the basics of how Google’s algorithm works, but not many of us are up to speed with SEO on Amazon. Before we delve into Amazon’s algorithm, it’s important to note how Google and Amazon’s starkly different business models are key to what drives their algorithms and ultimately how we approach SEO on the two platforms.

The academic vs. The stockbroker

Google was born in 1998 through a Ph.D. project by Lawrence Page and Sergey Brin. It was the first search engine of its kind designed to crawl and index the web more efficiently than any existing systems at the time.

Google was built on a foundation of scientific research and academia, with a mission to;

“Organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — Google

Now, answering 5.6 billion queries every day, Google’s mission is becoming increasingly difficult — which is why their algorithm is designed as the most complex search engine in the world, continuously refined through hundreds of updates every year.

In contrast to Brin and Page, Jeff Bezos began his career on Wall Street in a series of jobs before starting Amazon in 1994 after reading that the web was growing at 2,300 percent. Determined to take advantage of this, he made a list of the top products most likely to sell online and settled with books because of their low cost and high demand. Amazon was built on a revenue model, with a mission to:

“Be the Earth’s most customer-centric company, where customers can find and discover anything they might want to buy online, and endeavors to offer its customers the lowest possible prices.” — Amazon

Amazon doesn’t have searcher intent issues

When it comes to SEO, the contrasting business models of these two companies lead the search engines to ask very different questions in order to deliver the right results to the user.

On one hand, we have Google who asks the question:

“What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”

Amazon, on the other hand, wants to know:

“What product is the searcher most likely to buy?”

On Amazon, people aren’t asking questions, they’re searching for products—and what’s more, they’re ready to buy. So, while Google is busy honing an algorithm that aims to understand the nuances of human language, Amazon’s search engine serves one purpose—to understand searches just enough to rank products based on their propensity to sell.

With this in mind, working to increase organic rankings on Amazon becomes a lot less daunting.

Amazon’s A9 algorithm: The secret ingredient

Amazon may dominate e-commerce search, but many people haven’t heard of the A9 algorithm. Which might seem unusual, but the reason Amazon isn’t keen on pushing their algorithm through the lens of a large scale search engine is simply that Amazon isn’t in the business of search.

Amazon’s business model is a well-oiled revenue-driving machine — designed first and foremost to sell as many products as possible through its online platform. While Amazon’s advertising platform is growing rapidly, and AWS continues as their fastest-growing revenue source — Amazon still makes a large portion of revenue through goods sold through the marketplace.

With this in mind, the secret ingredient behind Amazon’s A9 algorithm is, in fact: Sales Velocity

What is sales velocity, you ask? It’s essentially the speed and volume at which your products sell on Amazon’s marketplace.

There are lots of factors which Amazon SEO’s refer to as "direct" and "indirect" ranking factors, but ultimately every single one of them ties back to sales velocity in some way.

At Wolfgang Digital, we approach SEO on Google based on three core pillars — Technology, Relevance, and Authority.

Evidently, Google’s ranking pillars are all based on optimizing a website in order to drive click through on the SERP.

On the other hand, Amazon’s core ranking pillars are tied back to driving revenue through sales velocity — Conversion Rate, Keyword Relevance and of course, Customer Satisfaction.

Without further ado, let’s take a look at the key factors behind each of these pillars, and what you can optimize to increase your chances of ranking on Amazon’s coveted first page.

Conversion rate

Conversion rates on Amazon have a direct impact on where your product will rank because this tells Amazon’s algorithm which products are most likely to sell like hotcakes once they hit the first page.

Of all variables to monitor as an Amazon marketer, working to increase conversion rates is your golden ticket to higher organic rankings.

Optimize pricing

Amazon’s algorithm is designed to predict which products are most likely to convert. This is why the price has such a huge impact on where your products rank in search results. If you add a new product to Amazon at a cheaper price than the average competitor, your product is inclined to soar to the top-ranking results, at least until it gathers enough sales history to determine the actual sales performance.

Even if you’re confident that you have a supplier advantage, it’s worth checking your top-selling products and optimizing pricing where possible. If you have a lot of products, repricing software is a great way to automate pricing adjustments based on the competition while still maintaining your margins.

However, Amazon knows that price isn’t the only factor that drives sales, which is why Amazon’s first page isn’t simply an ordered list of items priced low to high. See the below Amazon UK search results for “lavender essential oil:”

Excluding the sponsored ads, we can still see that not all of the cheap products are ranked high and the more expensive ones lower down the page. So, if you’ve always maintained the idea that selling on Amazon is a race to the bottom on price, read on my friends.

Create listings that sell

As we discussed earlier, Amazon is no longer a “set it and forget” platform, which is why you should treat each of your product listings as you would a product page on your website. Creating listings that convert takes time, which is why not many sellers do it well, so it’s an essential tactic to steal conversions from the competition.

Title

Make your titles user-friendly, include the most important keywords at the front, and provide just enough information to entice clicks. Gone are the days of keyword stuffing titles on Amazon, in fact, it may even hinder your rankings by reducing clicks and therefore conversions.

Bullet points

These are the first thing your customer sees, so make sure to highlight the best features of your product using a succinct sentence in language designed to convert.

Improve the power of your bullet points by including information that your top competitors don’t provide. A great way to do this is to analyze the “answered questions” for some of your top competitors.

Do you see any trending questions that you could answer in your bullet points to help shorten the buyer journey and drive conversions to your product?

Product descriptions

Given that over 50 percent of Amazon shoppers said they always read the full description when they are considering purchasing a product, a well-written product description can have a huge impact on conversions.

Your description is likely to be the last thing a customer will read before they choose to buy your product over a competitor, so give these your time and care, reiterating points made in your bullet points and highlighting any other key features or benefits likely to push conversions over the line.

Taking advantage of A+ content for some of your best selling products is a great way to craft a visually engaging description, like this example from Safavieh.

Of course, A+ content requires additional design costs which may not be feasible for everyone. If you opt for text-only descriptions, make sure your content is easy to read while still highlighting the best features of your product.

For an in-depth breakdown on creating a beautifully crafted Amazon listing, I highly recommend this post from Startup Bros.

AB test images

Images are incredibly powerful when it comes to increasing conversions, so if you haven’t tried split testing different image versions on Amazon, you could be pleasantly surprised. One of the most popular tools for Amazon AB testing is Splitly — it’s really simple to use, and affordable with plans starting at $47 per month.

Depending on your product type, it may be worth investing the time into taking your own pictures rather than using the generic supplier provided images. Images that tend to have the biggest impact on conversions are the feature images (the one you see in search results) and close up images, so try testing a few different versions to see which has the biggest impact.

Amazon sponsored ads

The best thing about Amazon SEO is that your performance on other marketing channels can help support your organic performance.

Unlike on Google, where advertising has no impact on organic rankings, if your product performs well on Amazon ads, it may help boost organic rankings. This is because if a product is selling through ads, Amazon’s algorithm may see this as a product that users should also see organically.

A well-executed ad campaign is particularly important for new products, in order to boost their sales velocity in the beginning and build up the sales history needed to rank better organically.

External traffic

External traffic involves driving traffic from social media, email, or other sources to your Amazon products.

While external sources of traffic are a great way to gain more brand exposure and increase customer reach, a well-executed external traffic strategy also impacts your organic rankings because of its role in increasing sales and driving up conversion rates.

Before you start driving traffic straight to your Amazon listing, you may want to consider using a landing page tool like Landing Cube in order to protect your conversion rate as much as possible.

With a landing page tool, you drive traffic to a landing page where customers get a special offer code to use on your product listing page—this way, you only drive traffic which is guaranteed to convert.

Keyword relevance

A9 still relies heavily on keyword matching to determine the relevance of a product to searcher’s query, which is why this is a core pillar of Amazon SEO.

While your title, bullet points, and descriptions are essential for converting customers, if you don’t include the relevant keywords, your chances of driving traffic to convert are slim to none.

Every single keyword incorporated in your Amazon listing will impact your rankings, so it’s important to deploy a strategic approach.

Steps for targeting the right keywords on Amazon:

Brainstorm as many search terms you think someone would use to find your product.

Analyze 3–5 competitors with the most reviews to identify their target keywords.

Validate the top keywords for your product using an Amazon keyword tool such as Magnet, Ahrefs, or Keywordtool.io.

Download the keyword lists into Excel, and filter out any duplicate or irrelevant keywords. 

Prioritize search terms with the highest search volume, bearing in mind that broad terms will be harder to rank for. Depending on the competition, it may make more sense to focus on lower volume terms with lower competition—but this can always be tested later on.

Once you have refined the keywords you want to rank for, here are some things to remember:

Include your most important keywords at the start of the title, after your brand name.

Use long-tail terms and synonyms throughout your bullets points and descriptions.

Use your backend search terms wisely — these are a great place for including some common misspellings, different measurement versions e.g. metric or imperial, color shades and descriptive terms.

Most importantly — don’t repeat keywords. If you’ve included a search term once in your listing i.e. the title, you don’t need to include it in your backend search terms. Repeating a keyword, or keyword stuffing will not improve your rankings.

Customer satisfaction

Account health

Part of Amazon’s mission statement is “to be the Earth’s most customer-centric company.” This relentless focus on the customer is what drives Amazon’s astounding customer retention, with 85 percent of Prime shoppers visiting the marketplace at least once a week and 56% of non-Prime members reporting the same. A focus on the customer is at the core of Amazon’s success, which is why stringent customer satisfaction metrics are a key component to selling on Amazon.

Your account health metrics are the bread and butter of your success as an Amazon seller, which is why they’re part of Amazon’s core ranking algorithm. Customer experience is so important to Amazon that, if you fail to meet the minimum performance requirements, you risk getting suspended as a seller—and they take no prisoners.

On the other hand, if you are meeting your minimum requirements but other sellers are performing better than you by exceeding theirs, they could be at a ranking advantage. 

Customer reviews

Customer reviews are one of the most important Amazon ranking factors — not only do they tell Amazon how customers feel about your product, but they are one of the most impactful conversion factors in e-commerce. Almost 95 percent of online shoppers read reviews before buying a product, and over 60 percent of Amazon customers say they wouldn’t purchase a product with less than 4.5 stars.

On Amazon, reviews help to drive both conversion rate and keyword relevance, particularly for long-tail terms. In short, they’re very important.

Increasing reviews for your key products on Amazon was historically a lot easier, through acquiring incentivized reviews. However, in 2018, Amazon banned sellers from incentivizing reviews which makes it even more difficult to actively build reviews, especially for new products.

Tips for building positive reviews on Amazon:

Maintain consistent communication throughout the purchase process using Amazon email marketing software. Following up to thank someone for their order and notify when the order if fulfilled, creates a seamless buying experience which leaves customers more likely to give a positive review.

Adding branded package inserts to thank customers for their purchase makes the buying experience personal, differentiating you as a brand rather than a nameless Amazon seller. Including a friendly reminder to leave a review in a nice delivery note will have better response rates than the generic email they receive from Amazon.

Providing upfront returns information without a customer having to ask for it shows customers you are confident in the quality of your product. If a customer isn’t happy with your product, adding fuel to the fire with a clunky or difficult returns process is more likely to result in negative reviews through sheer frustration.

Follow up with helpful content related to your products such as instructions, decor inspiration, or recipe ideas, including a polite reminder to provide a review in exchange.

And of course, deliver an amazing customer experience from start to finish.

Key takeaways for improving Amazon SEO

As a marketer well versed in the world of Google, venturing onto Amazon can seem like a culture shock — but mastering the basic principles of Amazon SEO could be the difference between getting lost in a sea of competitors and driving a successful Amazon business.

Focus on driving sales velocity through increasing conversion rate, improving keyword relevance, nailing customer satisfaction and actively building reviews.

Craft product listings for customers first, search engines second.

Don’t neglect product descriptions in the belief that no one reads them—over 50% of Amazon shoppers report reading the full description before buying a product.

Keywords carry a lot of weight. If you don’t include a keyword in your listing, your chances of ranking for it are slim.

Images are powerful. Take your own photos instead of using generic supplier images and be sure to test, test, and test.

Actively build positive reviews by delivering an amazing customer experience.

Invest in PPC and driving external traffic to support organic performance, especially for new products.

What other SEO tips or tactics do you apply on Amazon? Tell me in the comments below!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!