SEO – How to rank number one in Amazon

What is Amazon SEO?

Amazon SEO is the process of optimising your product listing in order to rank higher in Amazon search results under relevant keywords.

While Google is used for a wide range of searches, most of which are informational, Amazon searches are almost always transactional. Therefore, Amazon’s aim is to create an algorithm that maximises the number of transactions. In other words, everything they do is with the aim of generating the maximum number of sales. In order to do so, the product most likely to be bought by a customer will be placed in rank 1, the second most likely on rank 2, and so on.

The question then is how does Amazon figure out which product is most likely to be purchased by a customer? Amazon’s search algorithm, or A10, does this job and it is based primarily on two factors: relevance and performance.

Relevance

WHAT IS RELEVANCE IN REGARDS TO AMAZON SEO?

Relevance really comes down to amazon trying to avoid selling wallets when someone looks up an iPhone. They want to make sure they are showing the right product for the right search. The question then is how do you make sure your products are the best fit?

I'm going to go over the major points here but if you want a full breakdown of listing optimisation then check out our blog post here

Your product title

A crucial aspect of Amazon SEO is the relevance of keywords within your product title. In order to maximise relevancy of your product title it is important to:

Include a clear description of your product. What is it, what does it do?
Specify colour/size/material of the product

At the same time, it is important to avoid using too many keywords as this can decrease the readability of your title and can negatively impact Click Through Rate (CTR).

Here are two titles, tell me which one is more descriptive and shows exactly what it is relevant for.

"Double Bifold wallet"

"Real Leather Mens Bifold Wallet RFID Blocking Slim Minimalist Front Pocket - Thin & Stylish with ID Window (Crazy Horse, Coffee)"

I think it's pretty obvious why the second one is ranking in the top 5 for men's wallet and the first is on page 5

Keywords are great but you do want to avoid being spammy like this

"Slim Wallet for Men-Leather Money Clip Mens Wallets-RFID Blocking Front Pocket Bifold Wallet-Minimalist Credit Card Holder with Gift Box"

Your Amazon product description

It is important to be detailed in your product description to persuade the buyer to purchase your product. Explain the benefits and features of your product and include any important information.
Your product description should read well and sound natural but it is important in contains all your major keywords.

Backend keywords in Amazon

Backend keywords are hidden keywords that only Amazon sellers can see. They are a means of telling Amazon’s algorithm that a specific keyword is relevant to your product. They are crucial for helping your product rank for other important keywords without trying to cram them all into your listing, helping keep your listing clean while still ranking for useful keywords.

There are five fields your can fill out with backend keywords, each line having a 50-character limit.

It is therefore important not to repeat keywords and to avoid extra punctuation that will add to your character count (other than commas which are ignored).

Now, we look at the second impacting factor – which is…

Performance

Now, from my experience, when thinking about SEO, most sellers tend to focus way too much on relevance and way too little on performance. This is the wrong way around. At the end of the day Amazon wants to make the most money and give the customer the best experience, and higher performing products are the best indication of this, so if you are going to focus your time somewhere, focus it here.

There are three major factors on the performance side.

Shipping Speed

How fast you ship your product is a major factor in ranking, I would estimate it may actually be the single largest factor out of everything so pay attention.. It is very common to see prime products with less reviews, higher prices, and less sales outrank other products because Amazon know this is a great customer experience and it’s likely customers will be happy and return for more purchases.

“Products that switch from FBM to FBA on average see a 50-100% increase in sales”

Can you think of any other single factor within your account that can do this? I don't think so, so if you're not in FBA send a shipment in right now

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Sales

This is 100% the next biggest factor after shipping speed. This does of course make sense, amazon are going to want to push best-selling products to the top as they are likely to perform better and continue to bring in sales.

We can actually break down sales into two different factors. Overall sales volume and specific sales volume. Let's go through overall sales volume first.

Overall sales volume, quite simply, is the amount of units you are selling. If you are selling 1000 units a month and you start selling 5000 units a month, it's a good sign that people like the product and your ranking will improve. There are many different ways to influence this but by far the simplest is with amazon ads. Now the type of ad is irrelevant in this case, whether it's product or keyword, sponsored product, brand or display, it really makes no difference, it's simply selling more units that is going to help. If you're unfamiliar with all the ad types stay tuned as I'll have a post explaining all of that very soon.

“Simply put, selling more units is a clear signal your product is successful and amazon will push you higher in the rankings. This is why we almost always see ad sales and organic sales correlate directly.

The second factor to sales is specific sales volume. Now this is a little different so think about it this way. Let's say you have two men's wallets both selling 1000 units per month that are trying to rank for the keyword men's leather wallet. One of them get's 800 sales a month from the term men's leather wallet and the other only get's 50, who do you think is going to rank better for that keyword?

Obviously the first one. Clearly when people search that specific term they prefer that product therefore it's a big ranking factor. Now the way we can influence this is by using keyword targeting on the specific terms we can see we have potential to rank for and giving them a big push through increased bids or top-of-search placements.

Your Amazon conversion rate

Since Amazon updated from A9 to A10 as their ranking algorithm conversion rate has become a much larger factor in ranking highly. Again, this makes sense logically, if a product converts at 20% compared to 10% then Amazon will sell twice as many products and clearly it fits the market better.

Unfortunately, it is difficult to compare your conversion rate with competitors, without access to Amazon analytics but here are some rough benchmarks to follow.

<$20 - 20%

$20-50 - 15%

$50-100 - 10%

>$100 - 5%

These are general numbers and products like supplements can be far higher with conversion rates into the 30-40% range due to brand loyalty but this gives you something to aim at and if you're significantly off of these targets you need to work on this. We go into this in far more depth on our listing optimisation post which you can check out here. But the biggest factors will always be images, price, reviews and title.

Summary of Amazon SEO – How to rank number one in Amazon

In short, ranking highly on Amazon comes down to understanding how the Amazon algorithm works. Although a product page can be optimised in many ways, it is important to remember that there are two main factors which affect rank: relevance and performance.
By optimising your listings with these two factors of relevance and performance in mind, you should expect to see a gradual improvement to your conversion rate, organic ranking and therefore overall sales.
The most important point to understand is that Amazon are always looking to maximise sales b providing the product most likely to be purchased in the top spot. The one with the most sales is likely to be that.