Linking Amazon SEO and Amazon PPC

February 10, 2021
By The Badger

Like we said at the very start of this SEO saga, your Amazon SEO and Amazon PPC are meant to be together. Coordinating your efforts in both to complement each other rather than treating them as two different marketing functions does you a world of good.

Your Amazon SEO and Amazon PPC constantly interact with each other. When they’re strong, they lift each other up; when they’re not, they drag each other down. Keep them in balance so they can reach their true potential.

The Amazon SEO / Amazon PPC Ratio

You can find the number of organic keywords where you index and the PPC keywords where you advertise with pretty much any keyword tool. Pay attention to these numbers.

You should have twice as many indexed SEO keywords as advertised PPC keywords. If you have too few keywords in your PPC, you don’t have enough ad budget to get as many conversions as possible. If you have too few keywords in your SEO, you don’t have enough organic juice to give your PPC campaigns the maximum possible support.

Your Amazon SEO Budget

There’s also an ideal ratio for Amazon SEO spend to Amazon PPC spend. The concept of paying for your Amazon SEO may seem counterintuitive at first, but the truth is that earned media isn’t “free.” When optimizing your Amazon SEO, whether by yourself or through someone else, that costs time and money. It’s important to pay attention to how you allocate resources between your Amazon SEO and Amazon PPC to get the best ROI for both.

Before we get into that ratio, however, let’s talk a little bit about TACOS, or ACOTS.

Your Total Advertising Cost of Sales, or Advertising Cost of Total Sales, is your ad spend divided by all sales, paid and organic. You can play around with this ratio, but we recommend that you spend at least 10% of your gross sales on advertising. If it’s below 10%, you’re leaving sales on the table, and if it’s below 7%, your business is likely shrinking.

Because this ratio is by its very nature focused on PPC, let’s create a new metric for Amazon SEO and call it SEO Cost of Total Sales, or SCoTS.

We recommend a SCoTS of about 3%. Most people spend a fixed amount on their SEO – say, $100 – and balk at the idea of spending more on it. There are a number of reasons to invest a decent amount in your SEO.

If you’ve been in the Amazon PPC game for a while, you’ve no doubt noticed that PPC prices are increasing. The more people advertise on Amazon, the more advertising costs increase. That trend is going to continue indefinitely, so investing in your organic marketing is a sound strategy. Fewer people regularly invest in their Amazon SEO, so it can create a sizable advantage.

Earned media leads to valuable long-term growth. Because it requires long-term investment, it gives you a sizable advantage over your competitors. Plus, if you continue to invest in your earned media, you can maintain that advantage even as your competitors invest in their own earned media.

No matter how good your Amazon PPC strategy is, the majority of your sales will be organic. As a result, SEO deserves to have some resources thrown its way so that it can bring in as many of those organic conversions as possible.

How to Grow Amazon SEO and Amazon PPC

Last week, we talked about the Amazon SEO strike zone. Part of the strike zone strategy to get your listings to page 1 is to spend money on PPC for those keywords. For this, you need PPC campaigns specifically dedicated to propping up your SEO.

Don’t worry about your ACOS for these campaigns. Instead, section them off in their own little portfolio so any high ACOS they accrue doesn’t seep into your other campaigns.

When you convert on a keyword for PPC, it helps your SEO metrics for that keyword. Regardless of how much money you throw at a keyword, you will never get to the top of search results if you can’t regularly convert for that keyword. Optimizing your conversion-based ranking factors is absolutely key for earning Amazon PPC and SEO success.

A major way SEO helps improve your PPC is by giving you new ideas for PPC keywords. Simply perform a reverse ASIN lookup on your own product and you’ll be able to see your organic keywords and where they rank to find high-potential keywords where you should bid to boost your organic ranking.

Combining Amazon PPC and Amazon SEO

Amazon PPC and SEO definitely get along with each other, but can they exist side by side? Should you advertise on a keyword when you already rank first in the SEO results?

YES.

Amazon PPC and SEO on the same keyword don’t compete against each other, but boost each other up.

Firstly, if you rank well on a keyword but don’t advertise on it, you leave the door wide open for your competitors to swoop in and steal your sales.

Secondly, when your customer sees your PPC ad close to your organic results, it positions you as a major industry player in their mind. This makes your product appear more legit, increasing your overall chances of a conversion.

You can’t profitably advertise on all of your SEO keywords. On broader keywords, you could end up with lots of clicks without conversions if you use PPC, but they would be phenomenal if they had high organic rankings. Combine your PPC and SEO where you have a solid conversion rate.

Amazon doesn’t give you a list of converting terms for SEO, but it does for PPC. If you have a PPC team, have them send a list of all converting and non-converting terms to your SEO team on a monthly basis. That can help inform the SEO team as to where to direct their efforts.

Key Takeaways

Your Amazon PPC and Amazon SEO are two peas in a pod, so treat them as such. Keeping your PPC and SEO strategies aligned will reap major rewards.

The ideal ratio of SEO keywords to PPC keywords is 2:1. If that ratio’s too high, your ad spend is too low; if it’s too low, your PPC isn’t getting as much organic juice as it could be.

You should spend about 3% of your total sales revenue on Amazon SEO. While SEO is earned media, it still takes effort and money to extract that organic goodness. Continuous investment in your Amazon SEO helps you create and maintain a strong competitive advantage.

Amazon PPC is a great way to grow Amazon SEO and vice versa. By investing in specialized PPC campaigns for your strike zone keywords, you increase your chances of ranking high in organic search results. On the flip side, SEO can help you find new keywords for PPC through the power of reverse ASIN lookup.

For both, conversion is key, so make absolutely sure you can convert for your keywords by tweaking your conversion-based ranking factors. Conversions allow you to rank well with SEO and prevent your PPC efforts from getting throttled.

Don’t be afraid to use Amazon PPC and SEO on the same keyword. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. It both blocks your competitors from stealing your sales and positions you as a major category player.

Thank you for coming with us on this Amazon SEO journey. Now go forth and crush those organic sales!