Note: Following is an edited transcript of this video, featuring Josh Eberly, 5K | Formerly Conklin Media’s chief operating officer and SEO wizard.
Have you been wondering how to optimize products on Amazon? Well, you have come to the right place! I’m going to talk about Amazon listing optimization and how to position yourself on Amazon for success in 2021.
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic happening over the last year, Amazon’s growth has exploded out of the gate. Although Amazon has experienced significant growth over the past couple of years, it’s been even crazier on the Amazon end since COVID started. Because of this, if you have a product that you don’t currently sell on Amazon—or maybe you are underutilizing Amazon as a platform—I would highly suggest that you get your business set up on Amazon.
Amazon has many unique tweaks that can help you make more money on your products. I’m going to give you a detailed walkthrough of one of the brands that we work with, AutoFloorGuard. I hope this article helps you with your Amazon optimization and understanding of Amazon optimization tools. Let’s get started!
Understanding Amazon SEO Optimization
To begin, I’m going to look at Amazon from the perspective of a user. I’ll then walk you through some areas that you really want to focus on when you optimize Amazon. In addition to revealing Amazon advertising optimization tips, I’ll also give you a glimpse of Amazon’s back end for Amazon account optimization.
The first thing you need to understand is that you want to dominate the search engine results for specific keywords. This can be done through Amazon search engine optimization. Similar to Google Adwords, it’s important that your business dominates search engine results and has appealing ads.
For example, if I type in garage containment mats, which is a really big keyword term for us, I’ll see a list of brand ads come up. What’s great is that our products are positioned really well. We have an ad near the top, an organic listing ranking well, and our brand is the top overall recommended product. Furthermore, as I scroll down, I see more of our products scattered throughout the page. The only other thing I’d love to see here is the brand ad up top. We are actively bidding on this. (Also, check out “How to Create Facebook Ads That Capture Attention.”)
Amazon Title Optimization
So what exactly makes a good Amazon product listing? The No. 1 mistake I see a lot of companies make is that they don’t invest time or money into optimizing the little things on Amazon.
Amazon is a lot different from some of the other marketing channels on the internet. In contrast to platforms like Google AdWords, Amazon doesn’t give you the ability to create an organic listing title for an SEO reason and then change that title for a pay-per-click (PPC) reason. Instead, you have to choose a standardized listing product title. Which is a really important step.
For our product listings, we include the brand name, as well as the SKU number, the product dimensions, the product color, the size, and any other keywords that would help make the listing rank well. Including the brand name is very important, as it gets you ranked for brand search, which is going to be your highest converting offer.
A lot of our competitors include keywords such as containment mat, snow, ice, water, mud, and garage floor mat. That’s because their strategy is to get these keywords in their listing. On our listing, however, we’re going more for the branded approach in which we have product size, color, and more. We also include the words “heavy duty.”
Amazon Product Listing Optimization
The first thing you’ll notice when I click on this listing is the image. The featured image shows a car parked on the garage floor mat. This car is the exact-sized car for which the product is advertised. One important thing to remember is that you want to show what your product does. For example, if a product is for humans, you’ll want to show a human using it. Or if the product is a type of eco-friendly pest control, you’ll want to show the product in a field or with a human applying it. The more relatable the image is, the better.
On our listing, you’ll also see that we have other images to the side of the featured image. We recommend having at least four to five images for product listings. These images not only give customers a better idea of the mat’s dimensions, but they also reveal our product’s two-year warranty and how thick the mat is on the sides. In addition to the images, we have a video that further explains the features of the garage floor mat.
A lot of the time, people only put up one product image and think it’s great. But that is actually one of the worst things to do. We’ve tested our listing’s image, which is just a generic-looking mat with the car, and found that the car actually outperforms the mat. Because of this, we switched the car to be the featured image. That is really important to note.
How to Optimize an Amazon Listing
There are many tips for optimizing your Amazon listing. One important thing to keep in mind is that the more ratings your product receives, the better your organic positioning is. People rate your product for its quality as well as the customer service. Another thing you’ll want to do is answer customers’ questions. Once again, answering customers’ questions helps rank your product higher.
The next step to an Amazon listing is writing an informative description. All too often people don’t fill out the product’s description. Without a description, customers won’t know the benefits of buying your product. On our product description, we used bullet points for listing the product’s features and benefits.
Amazon Conversion Rate Optimization
Another thing you always want to ensure you have on your product’s listing is the buy box. The reason it’s called the buy box is because I can literally buy this product right now at a click of a button or I can add to my cart. Having the buy box on your product makes the conversion rate skyrocket.
To get the buy box, you need to have the lowest price or the best-quality listing on Amazon at the time. Getting the buy box will instantly help with your conversions and will really skyrocket your sale. There’s a whole section in the back end of Amazon seller central where you can do pricing and automate your rules. I’m not going to get in that today, but it’s really important to ensure you have the buy box at all times.
So all that’s really the front end of the listing. The front end is basically getting your product description optimized as best as possible, advertising with great imagery and great video creative, having good pricing and the buy box, and writing detailed descriptions. All that’s important in the front end. Now let’s talk about the back end of how you can make your Amazon listings successful.
Amazon Advertising Optimization
The first thing I’m going to do is explain to you about Amazon advertising optimization and how it’s important. What a lot of people don’t realize is that Amazon actually offers advertising for your products. For example, I’m going back to the mid-size SUV floor mat listing. If I scroll down, I notice that the best sellers rank in the advertising section. Now if I click on this, our product is second in line. We are the second-best-selling parking mat, behind the Armor All garage floor mat listing.
If you’re just starting out and are trying to get higher in the sales rank, the best way to do that is to use Amazon advertising. Amazon advertising is similar to Google AdWords in that you can bid on specific keywords and targets in the back end. The difference is that I’ve found Amazon advertising to be much cheaper than AdWords advertising. In fact, it’s more aligned with Facebook advertising than with AdWords advertising. And because it’s in a platform that you know people will buy on, you can really maximize your return in sales.
So you can see our ACoS, or is advertising cost of sale. This is the percentage of sales you spend on advertising. You divide your spend by your sales and get the percentage. So some people flip on the other side and go to ROAS, which is return on ad spend. You can see we’re averaging 12 ROAS for this Amazon product here. This is crazy good. So if you have a 12 ROAS, this is going to be hard to beat on AdWords just because, with AdWords, you’re traditionally advertising on Google, and it takes you to a website, and then prospective customers have to go through your website funnel and all those things whereas, with Amazon, it’s one funnel, so you’re advertising on Amazon, your prospective customers stay on Amazon and buy on Amazon. There’s credibility there, and so your return on that spend can even be better in some cases on Amazon than it is on AdWords.
How Does Amazon Prime Work for Amazon Product Page Optimization?
One question that a lot of people ask is, “How does Amazon Prime work?” You may notice that some competitors have Prime and some don’t. Normally, we recommend having Amazon Prime simply because you’re going to increase conversion rates and don’t have to worry about shipping. Basically, how Amazon Prime works is you send the products to them, and they ship it out for you. In other words, Amazon Prime takes care of all the headaches. It’s a really great relationship, but take note that Amazon takes a percentage of profits when you use Prime.
Why Now Is the Best Time For Amazon Optimization
Earlier I mentioned how now is the best time to get started with Amazon advertising. Now, why is that? Due to COVID and how much inventory is being moved, Amazon has placed limits on the number of units you can send them. In our case, we can send them approximately 200 units at a time. We’re already selling over 100 units a day, however, so it’s not really beneficial for us to ship all these products to Prime, pay all those fees, and then have them sell out in two days.
The benefit of that is that everybody, including all of our competitors, is also dealing with these problems. As a result, a lot of people are losing their Prime status and going off Prime. We actually went off Prime and have seen extremely good results on our products while keeping more of our profit margin.
Because fewer companies are advertising with Prime, now is the best time to get started with Amazon. In the past, if customers saw that five of the six products on Amazon had Prime, they’d probably choose one of the Amazon Prime products. But now that only one or maybe none of the products in the category are Prime, you really can compete with everybody else on a price and quality level.
In Conclusion: Amazon Listing Optimization
In summary, there’s no better time than now to get started with Amazon listing optimization. As you can see, there are many possibilities on Amazon for ranking high and increasing your conversion rates. I hope this information helps you understand the benefits of Amazon account optimization and how to optimize keywords on Amazon for 2021. If you’re in need of an Amazon listing optimization service, we are happy to help you get started with your Amazon listings. Contact us to learn more about Amazon optimization tips and advice.
