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Amazon SEO’s Midgame

Amazon SEO's Midgame

So you’ve followed our advice for getting started with Amazon SEO, your search term field and title are in tip-top shape, and your listings have been created with the various types of ranking factors in mind. Now that you’ve cleared the runway, how do you build on the momentum you’ve created and raise your ranking power?

If you index for at least 1,000 keywords– meaning you’re within the first 300 results for that keyword– after 30 days, you’re all set to move into Phase 2 of your Amazon SEO. To double-check your number of organic ranks, perform a reverse ASIN lookup on your own product.

The goal of the midgame is incremental indexing. What this means is that in phase 1 the goal was just getting as many organic keywords as possible, but now it’s all about looking at where there are gaps in your SEO and filling them in to maximize your organic power.

Amazon SEO’s Pink Word Update

Like we said before, the search term field isn’t talked about much in the world of Amazon SEO, but it really packs a punch. The pink word update allows you to continually update your search term field. It’s like the Amazon SEO version of maintaining that new car smell.

If you go into Seller Central and go to your Brand dashboard, you can go into the Search Term section and analyze what Amazon considers to be non-valuable keywords. How they determine this is that they find words that are in your listing title or bullet points. Because they already have a front-end presence in your listing, there’s no reason they need to be in your search term field as well.

Amazon SEO showing pink words that should be removed from the search term field.

If it’s in the pink, remove it and replace it with other search terms from your keyword research tool but couldn’t fit in the search term field initially. You can also use some of the hacks we talked about last week, such as misspellings.

If you’re wondering why you should pay any attention to this, it’s because once you get the traffic you want, you need to hone in on conversions. Think of it like writing a first draft vs. a second draft. On the first draft, your job is just to get everything on paper, then you go back and tweak on your second draft. There’s data to prove that following this order of operations allows you to index for the maximum number of keywords.

By putting things in your search term field and taking them back out again, you’re essentially rotating your search term field to index for the maximum number of keywords.

Parentage

For the unacquainted, parentage is the practice of creating related (or “child”) listings that relate to the main (or “parent”) listing in some way. These listings all show up grouped together under one organic listing in the SERP.

Proper parentage is super important in your Amazon SEO midgame because if you don’t do it correctly or you don’t stay on top of Amazon’s shifting compliance policies, your product listing could get pulled and you could get slammed with a warning that stays on your account for six months.

The safest way to break up is by color, followed by quantity. You don’t want to use size or style names as the differentiating factor because Amazon could break your listing.

 

An example of parentage being used to improve Amazon SEO.

When you create parentage for your listings, Amazon creates what’s known as a parent SKU. This is an SKU for a product that doesn’t actually exist but instead serves to link together the parent and child listings.

Parentage helps your Amazon SEO because a parent SKU combines all of the keywords where the children are ranked and shares them with the parent listing. This brings into view the main advantage of parentage: that you boost the SEO power of all of the child listings for a given parent listing all at once since they share the same keywords.

A communist Bugs Bunny saying

That being said, parentage does come with one significant drawback. If you have multiple products that are really powerful converters, only one of them will appear in search results. If you have multiple listings that are high converters and you want them to show up in organic results, parentage might not be for you.

When setting up parentage or adding new child listings, be sure you work off of templates. You never want to edit the parent directly. If you do, you could find yourself unable to change your title and bullet points. If that happens, you have to put in a couple of requests to Amazon to be able to change it, and it’s ultimately a lot of extra time and red tape to get your child listing set up the way you intended.

You always want to make sure that the content of the product listing is high-quality and relevant to the child product.

A+ Content for Amazon Listings

The #1 quickest and easiest way to improve your A+ content is to add alt text to your images. A lot of sellers leave their alt text blank or have alt text that has been set by a designer and doesn’t actually benefit their Amazon SEO. You want that alt text to be chock-full of valuable keywords to help you organically rank on those keywords.

The best A+ content also has tons of copy. It can be a hard fight to win if you’re up against a design team, especially if your organization favors conversions over traffic, but all of that copy will make your listing much healthier. It’s way easier to double your traffic than it is to double your conversion rate.

 

Key Takeaways

Phase 1 of your Amazon SEO journey was all about getting everything set up. Phase 2 is about refining what you currently have and ensuring that you index for as many keywords as you can and move up in the rankings.

Check your search term field for “pink words” flagged by Amazon on a regular basis. They waste precious search term field space that would be better filled by some of the organic keywords you found using your keyword research tool back in Phase 1. Regularly rotating your search terms allows you to index for as many relevant organic keywords as possible.

You have to be careful of Amazon’s policies around parentage, but if wielded in the right way, it’s a super-fast method of increasing the ranking power of multiple listings all in one go. If you have multiple top-converting listings that you want to appear in search results, parentage may not be the best strategy for you.

To get A+ results, you need A+ content. Make sure your alt text is populated with relevant keywords and that you have as much well-written copy as possible.

Once you’re really picking up steam and becoming one of the big Amazon SEO movers and shakers in your category, then you can move on to the late game. What does that look like? Tune in next week to find out!

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Discover Us on our PPC Den Podcast

If you enjoy supplementing your long reads with audio, we cover this topic on our podcast as well. 

Listen to it in the episode below or find us on your favorite streaming platform, like Apple, Google, Spotify, and more!

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Watch The PPC Den on YouTube

If you enjoy supplementing your long reads with video, well, hot diggity dog, you’re in luck! We cover this topic on our YouTube channel too. 

Watch it below and please don’t forget to ‘like’ and subscribe!