Everyone talks about optimizing your site for search engines like Google and Yahoo, but what about optimizing for Amazon? It’s the largest product search engine out there, and it is still a search engine because it uses an algorithm to rank results. If you’re a company (or even just a personal producer) selling things on Amazon, there are several things you can do to optimize your products to ensure you’re getting the most eyeballs from consumers including:
1. Understand the differences between Google and Amazon.
We could write an entire article about the differences (and they did here), but the general takeaways are pretty simple. For starters, Google is a search engine designed to get you to your desired result as soon as possible. Timing is an important factor for them, as evidenced by the time marker they keep track of for each search:
That timing is part of what helps people come back to Google time and time again. Amazon, however, isn’t necessarily worried about how fast they get a consumer to a product. They care more about getting the right product for each consumer at a fair price. That’s what helps people come back to Amazon to shop again.
This disparity between the two also means there’s a disparity between how they rank sites/companies. When optimizing for Amazon, you want to aim to get a higher conversion rate, meaning people don’t just come look at your product, but they buy it too. It’s not about backlinks or how many social media follows you have.
2. Choose your keywords wisely.
This is true in any sort of optimization, but it’s especially true with Amazon, a site that puts a lot of weight on keywords given that most consumers find products based on a search. For example, if you’re looking for a specific genre of book, you can type in “mystery” and get hundreds of thousands of results. But if you type in “sports mystery” or “baseball mystery,” you whittle down the number of results pretty easily. If you worked at a publishing company that published a fictional book about a mystery on a baseball team (can’t imagine there are too many), using all of those as keywords helps your product rank higher on Amazon and thus, a possible match somebody searching for a baseball mystery book. Specificity is a good thing with Amazon.
3. Focus on your product title.
Keywords aren’t the only thing that matters when listing your product. Focusing on the title is just as important. You want to get some of the main keywords in there where applicable, but you also want to make sure and get information such as brand name, quantity, size, color, materials/ingredients, etc. If you don’t have room for all of these in your title, toss them in your description, too.
4. Speaking of your description…
You absolutely need have a good description of your product. It’s not only to provide consumers with information, but also because Amazon needs the information to determine where to place your product on search results. Use your keywords here to help the Amazon bots understand what your page is all about.
5. Selling, and price, matter.
Better-selling items rank higher on Amazon. That stands to reason, obviously. It kind of goes hand in hand – selling better means higher ranking, and a higher ranking means better sales. But getting ranked higher on Amazon depends on price, availability, selection and sales history of both the item and your company. Do what you can to improve in those areas and you should see better rankings on Amazon.
6. Improve/obtain product reviews.
Just like with anything, reviews are beneficial in optimizing your site/products, so naturally, it’d be the same on Amazon, too. Negative reviews will sink your product listings and a lack of reviews definitely won’t help you. But positive reviews could be a major boon for your company, so do what you can to elicit positive reviews from consumers who have been satisfied with your product.
7. Sponsor your product.
You can get your product sponsored on Amazon if you wanted to provide some marketing/advertising for it. They are currently offering a promotion of $50 in free clicks:
It’s really the easiest way to improve your company’s standing on Amazon searches, but of course, not every company wants to shell out the money for this. And that’s totally acceptable, when there are plenty of free options out there to help optimize your site for Amazon, too.
What other tips do you have for optimizing your site for Amazon? Let us know in the comments section below.