Many lazy sellers just create Amazon product listing with the title and a mediocre picture and then wonder why their product never sells. Would you buy a product with just a name and a picture?
If you want successful and profitable products on Amazon, you must know How to Rank Products on Amazon. The first step in ranking products on Amazon SEO is to understand how Amazon’s search algorithm called A9, works. Most sellers are equipped with SEO knowledge that is specific to Google, but Amazon’s internal search engine operates differently.
I am going to shock you now – Amazon has three times more search volume of products than Google.
When you want to sell something, where would you like to be ranked well, Amazon or Google?
Ask yourself a couple of questions…
Where do people go to find a good deal for their new shoes? Where do people go to compare prices? Who has 66 million paying Prime members? Amazon!
So, forget about google and their SEO, in order to make more money focus all your energy and resources on Amazon ranking whether you sell needles, garlic presses, meat claws, yoga mats, fruit peelers, selfie sticks… Btw, do not, I repeat, do not jump into those mentioned products unless you want to burn your money. These are products that were once used as an example by an Amazon FBA “gurus” and people actually took them seriously, saturating the entire product category, turning it into a D-day Omaha beach battlefield and losing a lot of money for many of the people involved.
Before we get started, you should know (or YSK for Redditors) some basics about the Amazon search engine algorithm.
On Amazon, there is only one goal: Buying! Users want to buy, sellers want to sell and Amazon wants to collect sales provisions and FBA fees.
- Amazon, as opposed to Google, Uses No External Forces To Rank Products
- The Amazon search engine wants shoppers to find their desired products quickly
- Unlike on Google, people don’t type questions on Amazon
- Amazon Works With Individual Keywords, Not Key Phrases
- Keyword Location is Considered in Amazon Ranking
On the whole, Amazon is practically the opposite of Google and ranking on Amazon is more uncomplicated, simple and straightforward than Google. Amazon doesn’t care about your backlinks, social indicators, history, authority, etc. They only use their own internal factors to rank your products. That being said, you should focus only on Amazon listing and have in mind three crucial rules of the A9 algorithm.
Ok, enough introduction, let’s get to the point and start talking about on How to Rank Products on Amazon.
These are crucial rules you should know for successeful product ranking on Amazon – you should read them several times.
Contents
- Sales is the largest ranking factor
- The fulfillment type matters
- Conversion rate is everything
- Reviews are KING
- Categorization
- Pricing
- Keywords, Keywords
- Backend keywords
- Description and features (Bullets)
- Overstock
- Main image
- Answered questions
- Customer videos and images
- Advertising
- Quality of Reviews
- Wish, gift and shopping list
- Showing up under “similar products”, “customers also buy”, “frequently bought together”….
- HOW DO I RANK PRODUCTS ON AMAZON
Sales is the largest ranking factor
The winner takes it all… Okay, this is obvious. Strong sales help you rank for a really wide range of terms as well and that’s the way advertising on Amazon has an indirect benefit to organic ranking.
The fulfillment type matters
If you can’t beat them, join them!
Sell your product with “Fulfilled by Amazon”. Prime products will always, always outrank any merchant fulfilled product.
Conversion rate is everything
The Amazon ranking algorithm is designed to maximize profits, higher conversion, more money for Amazon. If your product has the highest conversion on a page full of other similar products, you’re the winner. Your ranking goes up with every sale. The higher-ranked product sells better, and continued sales keep that product ranking high. It’s like a self-perpetuating loop. It’s so simple and obvious.
Reviews are KING
Despite reviews don’t have anything with Amazon search engine, they have a huge impact on conversion. They do drive SEO on Amazon, but only indirectly as something that boosts sales through a better conversion rate. Without them, your conversion rate will be a disaster and sales rank even worse than a disaster. There are some opinions that reviews are the second biggest ranking factor behind sales rank.
Reviews are an integral part of Amazon business, so FeedbackGenius app is a definite must have. It sends auto-feedback pop-ups to thousands of orders on a daily basis. Trust me, this is absolutely essential.
NOTE: negative reviews have more impact, like a negative review will hurt you quite a bit more than a positive review will help you.
Categorization
Assign your products to the most relevant category, as this will be most helpful for potential buyers. Choosing the wrong category can completely rule you out of search results and show is over for your products. In this case, no matter what you do, you’ve already lost the game before it even began.
Pricing
Typically, I set my prices to match my competitors, or slightly higher, but not too much higher. I gauge what other sellers are doing with their pricing, and you try to stay aligned. If your product is priced higher than your competitors, Amazon will predict a lower conversion rate and rank your product lower. If you go too low your competitors will buy you out of the market rather than match your price. I don’t see any reason to undercut your competition by $10 unless you think their price is so unreasonable it will never sell.
NOTE: At start drop your selling price. That should boost your sales and increase your PPC conversion %.
Keywords, Keywords
The simplest way to rank at least page 3 (in some niches) is to get the most important keywords in the title and place the absolute most relevant keywords first. Keywords in the product title are a ranking factor. Keep product titles below 74 characters (break point for the Amazon’s mobile app truncating the title). E.g. Baby Feeding Soft Silicone Spoons for Infant BPA Free – all words in the title are keywords and search terms.
For keyword research I suggest Keyword Inspector, tool that allows you to see your competitors keywords.
NOTE: Using the wrong keywords in the title, your listing will be shown in the irrelevant search which will lead to lower CTR, conversion and at the end of a day to lower sales rank. E.g. Baby Feeding Soft Silicone Spoons for Infant BPA Free with designer handle – handle is wrong, we should remove it from the title if we don’t have an overwhelming masochistic wish to place our baby spoons on page 5 of cabinet & furniture pulls.
Backend keywords
Add as many keywords as they can per field and don’t repeat words. You can add them in order to have long tail keywords. E.g. Field 1: Selfie stick pole mount GoPro handheld Field 2: etc. Keywords can only contain letters, numbers or spaces. Punctuation or special characters such as a pound sign, comma, or apostrophe are not permitted. If you want to spy on your competitors and see what keywords they are ranking for, you can do it with Keyword Inspector.
NOTE: unlike with Google there is no benefit to having a keyword appear multiple times on the product page
Description and features (Bullets)
Write it for a human, don’t use keywords, write about features instead – this is a must if you want to increase conversion rate. Be concise (nobody reads long stuff anyways) and no ridiculous characters, stars, smileys… It just makes your product look trashy…
In the case of simple products such are spoons, no one will read your description, even if it’s written by Ernest Hemingway but for electronic devices, this is a must. The customer will read the description (basically extended features), some of them will read several times before they make a purchase, especially for high-end products.
Overstock
Take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve noticed that my sales peaks are when I do a re-stock in Amazon FBA warehouses. If you are able, you can try it – if you have 150 units available already, just put in another 150 units.
There’s simple explanation behind it. You have more inventory that could be distributed to fulfillment centers and be closer to potential customers.
Main image
Many people won’t even get past your main photo. Make sure it’s perfect. Image pixel dimensions of at least 1000 or larger in either height or width preferred. The image must be the cover art or a professional photograph, the product must be in focus, photographed with professionally lite, with realistic color, and smooth edges.
Note: the great main image will increase your CTR, conversion rate and boosted sales rank is a logical extension.
Answered questions
Like reviews, they don’t have anything with Amazon search engine, they have a huge impact on conversion. They do boost sales rank but indirectly as something that boosts sales through a better conversion rate.
Customer videos and images
Once again, they don’t have any direct correlation with sales rank but those are the most valuable things you can have on the listing. After video uploaded by the customer, your conversion rate will be on steroids. You can’t upload product video, but the customer can but you can’t “play the game” – it’s human filtered.
Advertising
Pay to play. Take this with a grain of salt, but I’ve noticed that my BSR jumps for some 8 positions with PPC turned on.
Quality of Reviews
Long quality reviews that help people to convert are indirect sales rank booster.
Wish, gift and shopping list
Adding your product to different lists will increase your Amazon page rank. This method is actually used by many Amazon SEO companies, but don’t waste your money on bots that will add your product to their wishlist.
You will get more organic views to your listing as your product will be featured on the “Most-Wished”-List. But I would neglect the effect as not worth the effort in terms of time spent. I’ve seen dozens of sellers artificially boost their ranks only to fall back down and fail. Suspension or a ban waiting for you just around the corner.
Showing up under “similar products”, “customers also buy”, “frequently bought together”….
Competition is a good thing… Competition out of stock tanked my sales down. Apparently, their listing drive traffic to mine and when they are gone, traffic and sales of one of my products sinking.
HOW DO I RANK PRODUCTS ON AMAZON
As I already said, sales are the largest ranking factor. By selling high volume quickly, I put my product on the front of the relevant results list.
How do I gain huge sales quickly?
Here is my general strategy: I make sure I have optimized listing, excellent product pictures, decent bullets and description. I get reviews on the product anyway I can, then I drop the price below the competition to drive rank and run PPC. At the start, I sell products on Amazon very cheaply, so I can gain sales right away. When I get these my organic ranking will be higher so I can then go back to a normal price.
Do I have loses? No… I look at this as an investment.
I can spend $300 on Facebook ads and target people that won’t be my customer…therefore I prefer to spend those $300 solely on my exact customers that would buy and come back in the future again.
Peter is a serial entrepreneur and founder of DollarSanity blog who created and run a variety of businesses. You can learn more about him at the DollarSanity About me page.
“Backend keywords
Add as many keywords as they can per field and don’t repeat words.”
Don’t repeat words that are in what specific area? Title? Bullets? Description? All areas?
You are right but don’t provide inaccurate, misleading, or irrelevant information such as competitor product, brand or author name, wrong gender, etc. Providing misleading or irrelevant information is against Amazon policy; your listing will be removed and your account will be suspended . Moreover, your product might end up in a wrong browse node and your sales might get affected.
Thanks but the question is still there:
You said “Add as many keywords as they can per field and don’t repeat words.”
My question is don’t repeat words in your back end that are in what specific areas? Title? Bullets? Description? All areas? Seems like there’s a nuance to this and I’d love to get clarity.
Keyword repetition across multiple fields (title, bullets, backend) does not improve search result rankings. Since entering keywords repeatedly in different keyword fields does not improve a product’s ranking, you should not waste the limited space but rather try to find as many unique keywords as possible to make sure your product can be listed for as many search terms as possible.
Here is the answer of Amazon rep. on the same question: Amazon advises that sellers not provide redundant information in the keywords fields that is already captured in other fields such as title, author, product description, bullet points, brand, etc. as this won’t improve your product placement in search results. You can, however, include words in your product description that are included the product title, as this can still assist in describing the product to buyers.
Excellent and well written article. Down to earth and very useful practical info shared! kudos.
Thanks 🙂
That is a very good tip especially to those fresh to the blogosphere. Short but very accurate information… Thanks for sharing this one. A must read article!
Hi
Thank you for sharing !
This is very helpful; I have seen some PL FBA using video on their product page… why are you saying that “You can’t upload product video, but the customer can …”
The ability to use A+ content (info-graphics, mp3s, videos) in detail pages is limited to items sold and shipped by Amazon.com and approved vendors through Vendor Express program (vendor central). More than three years ago, 3rd party sellers could upload a video with the images now it’s part of what Amazon calls A+ content.
Still, it is allowed to customers to upload a video as a part if review but it is much harder now because there doesn’t seem to be a proper way to ‘incentives’ the reviewers.
Love your blog, thanks for all the info it has been very helpful!
Great information..thank you for sharing! I have a question. I’m just starting research and
I see there are some people that buy products at discount stores and resell on Amazon.
Would that be a way to get a start selling? What are the key advantantages or disadvantages of selling that way? Thank you for any thoughts or advice. Chris
Retail arbitrage is a great entry point into selling on Amazon.
Here are the Pro’s: low cost, upfront investment and low risk of losing lots of money. Good way to get your feet wet, learn the process and test some product or niche. You can do as much or as little work as you feel like: You are your own boss 100%.
Con’s: You spend a lot of time driving around, spending time and gas. Heavy competition for the Buy Box, some brand name items are not allowed to be sold on Amazon without manufacturer approval first. You will need to become adept at managing multiple loyalty type programs at all sorts of retain chains.
Hope this helps…
Great info!
Great article I have never seen.