Top Of The Search Results – Optimising Your Amazon Listings

In order to buy your products from Amazon, customers need to be able to find your products on Amazon and sometimes, this is harder than you’d like. We’ve put together some top tips to help you understand Amazon, your potential customers and Amazon’s hidden keywords, in order to increase your chances of discovery. 

The Journey Of Discovery

From thinking “I must remember to buy that” to clicking ‘buy now’, your potential customers go through a journey of searching, matching and discovering: facilitated by Amazon but influenced by you.

Searching

For those customers beginning their search within Amazon, they’ll be faced with the Amazon search bar:

Here they’ll enter their key search terms. These might be really specific (blue cotton socks size 7) or really vague (socks). They will be the keywords that your customers most associate with the product they want to buy and typically will include:

– A description
– A purpose
– A colour

Matching

From these very important words, Amazon will begin a process of matching the search term(s) against all of the product information it holds. That’s every product on Amazon – including yours.

Results

Amazon will then present the enquiring online shopper with, what Amazon thinks, are the best-matched results and users can opt to sort these in accordance with relevance, price, average customer reviews or newest.

Increasing Your Chances of a Match

Complete and relevant product information is a must. It helps you know what you’re selling, helps your customers know what you’re selling and it helps Amazon know what you’re selling.

Understand Your Products

Your product might have a really fancy technical name but if that’s not what your customers are calling it, then that’s not what they are going to be searching for. The best way to understand? Research. Go out there and find out.

Product Title

This is your first impression and it counts. Ensure that it makes sense but also that each word within the title is searchable itself. Beng descriptive helps and try to include:

– Product type and brand
– Description
– Line
– Material/key ingredient
– Color/size
– Quantity
– Manufacturer part number

Hidden Key Words

These are words that you can provide to Amazon to boost your discoverability. Find them in the Seller Centre Inventory tab and complete up to five fields of 250 words.

Amazon specifies that these keywords should be:

–  Generic – Do not include product identifiers, like brand names.
–  Unique – Do not repeat what is already covered in the product name.
–  True – Do not put false or misleading information.
–  Logical – What word order are customer likely to use (pink fluffy socks, or sock pink fluffy?)
–  Neutral – Customers aren’t typing “amazing” this and “excellent quality” that – They expect that to go without typing.

Try to use all five fields and avoid words already in the title but leave common misspellings and variants of punctuation, capitalisation and pluralisation for Amazon to sort out.

Test

The best way to see if something is working is to test it. Trial different keywords to see what brings you the most visitors and, more importantly, the most sales.

Other Ways To Increase Your Amazon Search Ranking

A Great Selling History

This includes fast response to correspondence, resolving problems, quick shipping, accurate inventory and a low order defect rate.

Increased Sales

Catch-22 but the more you sell, the higher you will likely be ranked by Amazon. Be wary of your prices and uniqueness and ensure plenty of reviews, excellent images and detailed responses to questions.

Positive Customer Reviews

Positive customer reviews increase your chances of topping the Amazon search results and rightly so. Outstanding customer service and good-quality, well-described products will see you achieve more than just Amazon’s search results.

Amazon Buy Box

Don’t forget about the Amazon Buy Box – that little box on a product information page that shows which sellers offer the product. Check out our blog here on how to win that sweet spot.

But It’s So Time Consuming?

Multichannel management software, such as Expandly, allow you to create and edit your product information easily and across all of your sales channel(s).

 

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About Expandly

Expandly is multichannel management software that allows you to manage your Amazon account, alongside your eBay and Etsy Accounts and shopping cart, all from one central location.

Find out how easy it really is with a demo