Posted by Craig Maloney | November 3, 2017 | Filed under: Marketing
With the holiday season quickly approaching, there’s no time like the present to invest in online visibility for your company’s retail products. Pretty soon, customers all over the country will be shopping for gifts, and it’s imperative that they find your merchandise wherever it is they’re looking. And more likely than not, the place they’ll be looking is Amazon.com
Listing products on an Amazon store is an important first step toward capitalizing on the 2017 holiday shopping season—but it’s by no means the only step. Search engine optimization is critical—and not Google optimization, but Amazon optimization. The retail giant has its own built-in search platform, called A9, and you’ll only get good product rankings if you engage in some A9-centered Amazon SEO efforts.
But what does that look like, exactly? We’ll offer a few proven Amazon SEO strategies below.
Amazon SEO Strategies for the 2017 Holiday Season
There’s one simple rule that should guide all your A9 optimization efforts, and that rule is this: Amazon.com is a store, and all it cares about is buyers, and sellers being able to sell to those buyers. If you can keep this simple mission in your head, the rest is all pretty intuitive: If you want your products to rank well in Amazon searches, it’s really just a matter of putting the buyer’s needs first and helping Amazon fulfill its mission to sell.
Basically every question you’ll face in your Amazon SEO endeavors can be answered by this rule. What kind of price should you offer? Should you include more pictures of your product? What sort of information should you include in your product title? Again: Think in terms of the buyer. Think about what would help them. That’s always the motivating concern.
Let’s unpack some of the specific Amazon SEO functions a bit more, focusing on product listing optimization.
Product Titles
When it comes to optimizing product titles, there are a few pieces of information you should pretty much always include. Amazon recommends that product titles denote:
- Brand
- Product line
- Material/key features
- Product type
- Color
- Size
- Packaging/quantity
In addition, we’d recommend including some target keywords in your product titles. You should always include the most relevant or important keywords at the beginning of your title, because in some displays your titles may be abbreviated. On a mobile device, Amazon search engine users may only see 50 characters or so of your title, so you’ve got to front-load it with the really key terms.
One more note: Don’t keyword-stuff your titles. Remember what we said about providing value to the buyer. That means offering them ample information, but also ensuring your titles flow well and are easy to read. A jumble of randomly-related keywords won’t do that.
Bullet Points
In addition to product titles, you’ll also have an opportunity to list some bullet points about your product.
While these won’t directly impact rankings, they might impact product relevance and conversion rates. Again, what we recommend is putting yourself in the buyer’s shoes. Use bullet points to list the features or benefits of your product that buyers are most likely to find helpful/enticing.
Your bullet points are also a good place to work in whatever keywords you couldn’t fit into your product title!
Product Description
Our comments here are much the same as before: Your product description won’t directly impact rankings, but it will impact product relevance and conversion rates. You can use this space to include still more features, still more keywords, and still more persuasive sales copy to entice buyers.
Backend Search Terms
Also make note of the Backend Search Terms area, where you actually can just dump a bunch of keywords that the end users will never see. Here’s where you can tell A9 everything you couldn’t say elsewhere. You might even include some misspellings of common search terms, some Spanish-language terms, and any other keywords you haven’t used already. It doesn’t need to make sense. It just needs to offer up plenty of SEO fodder.
Amazon SEO Won’t Happen By Accident
Before the holidays come, it’s wise to set up product listings on Amazon. But don’t stop there. Make sure those product listings are fully optimized to be found by Amazon shoppers.
That’s something that will take a rigorous strategy and an expert digital marketing approach. EverythingOnline can deliver on both fronts. Reach out to us today to ask us about our Amazon SEO expertise!
