Amazon SEO: How to Optimize Your Organic Product Listings

August 19, 2020
By The Badger

Amazon Advertising is the most sure-fire method for getting your products at the top of an Amazon SERP (search engine results page), but paying for those top spots isn’t the only way to have your products catch a potential customer’s eye.

We recently sat down with the Amazon SEO geniuses at ZonGuru and discussed how sellers who are PPC-centric can use tools they are familiar with to optimize their listings for organic traffic.

How Does Amazon SEO Work?

When most marketers think SEO, only one name comes to mind: Google. Similar to how Google finds the most relevant pages for specific keywords, Amazon also uses an algorithm to help customers find the best products for a particular search.

While the basic premise of the Google and Amazon search engines are similar, there’s also a key difference that changes how the two engines work. For Google, relevance is the most important factor, but Amazon isn’t incentivized to show you the best product. Instead, Amazon wants to show you the product you’re most likely to buy.

Amazon’s A10 algorithm ranks products based on the likelihood of a purchase, and while we don’t know exactly what factors the algorithm uses, there are areas where sellers can set their products apart.

How Does Amazon Determine the Likelihood of a Purchase?

When looking at what makes someone likely to purchase a product, we have to first look at the product listing.

A product listing is essentially the individual page your product has on Amazon’s website. Each product has one, and sellers have control over everything pertaining to their product on that page.

There are a few key areas of the product listing that are very important when trying to optimize your Amazon product ranking:

Product Title
Product Description
Product Images

For organically ranking on Amazon, you must be very clear about your product. Put your most important keywords in your product title. When looking at the product description, make sure you have a bulleted list of features written out. This list is essential if you want to win the buy box.

Amazon also wants your images to be compatible with its zoom feature. Aim for 1,000 X 1,000 pixels or larger. On top of that, make your images the highest quality possible.

Your Business Practices and Amazon SEO

It’s always a good idea for sellers who are just starting to pay attention to their SEO to start with their product listing. Why? It’s very easy for a seller to change the title and description of a product or change an image. It’s much harder to change how your business is run, which Amazon values (maybe even prefers) when ranking products.

When looking at the areas of your business that Amazon values the most, there’s nothing that seems to be more important than conversion rate. As we mentioned earlier, Amazon is incentivized to promote products with high conversion rates so they make more on commission.

Next, take a look at how you stack up against your competitors when it comes to reviews. Products with higher reviews and more reviews are deemed to be better products by Amazon.

Take a look at these two rows of products. It’s very rare to see Amazon give priority to a product with a low number of reviews and products with few reviews usually have to pay to rank high on a SERP.

The final area of your business that we’re going to touch on is inventory management. Amazon won’t show a product that a customer can’t buy, so not having inventory is the fastest way to disappear from Amazon’s SERPs.

How to Fix an Underperforming Account

We’ve always believed that Amazon values momentum. Let’s say you’re a seller who is just getting crushed when it comes to organic traffic. You aren’t ranking high, you’re not converting, and (most important) you’re losing money.

How do you start moving your Amazon advertising account in the right direction?

Find an easy way to win and build momentum. Not only does the inclusion of keywords matter in your product listing, but the positioning also serves as a gauge for Amazon on what’s the most relevant keyword to your product. To build momentum, find a keyword with some traffic (not tons) and put this keyword in your title.

As your product wins for this keyword, find another one, and then repeat until you find that you’ve got so much SEO “juice” that you’re competing for high volume keywords.

Keep in mind that, even though you aren’t optimizing for high volume keywords while getting the SEO “juice,” you still want the high volume keywords in your listing.

How to Find Quality Keywords with Low Competition

It can be tough for sellers who are new to Amazon SEO to find keywords that are high quality with low competition. That’s essentially the goal for any SEO, but with Amazon the amount of tools at a seller’s disposal is significantly lower than a platform such as Google.

While finding these keywords would be difficult if you are only trying to rank organically, and essentially guessing which keywords to use, using an automatic campaign in Seller Central can make the process much easier by removing the guesswork.

Automatic campaigns give sellers everything they need to know about how their products convert for certain keywords. Plus, you will see keywords in an automatic campaign that you never even thought about trying to rank for.

Once you’ve found these quality keywords, optimize your listing and try to rank for the keyword organically.

Key Takeaways

Amazon SEO is probably the most underutilized tool for sellers who rely heavily on their PPC campaigns. Sure, we want to optimize for conversions on our product listing, but optimizing your listing to rank and convert requires more nuance.

Apart from your listing, Amazon puts a ton of stock into the quality of your product and your business. If you have sound business practices and show that you can make Amazon money (via commission) then you already have a leg up on your competition.

Finally, if you are just getting started with Amazon SEO, turn to something that is in your wheelhouse and use an automatic campaign to find keywords you convert for that don’t have tough competition.