Whether you’ve been listing products on Amazon for years or you’ve just begun, you might want to improve your product listings so you can rank higher in people’s search results. Although you might be an SEO whiz when it comes to search engines like Google and Bing, Amazon runs a little differently. Learn how to maximize your ranking for Amazon’s search engine below.
Follow Amazon’s Rules
To have a good ranking, you first need to ensure that your listing shows up in the search results and doesn’t get deleted by Amazon’s team. Amazon has a number of rules that sellers are required to follow or else they risk having their listing deleted or their seller’s account restricted.
Amazon is concerned with two main items when deciding page rankings: performance and relevance. To help sellers maximize their products’ potential, Amazon has a style guide. Here’s why each piece is important:
Title
A title can help with both the relevance and performance aspects of ranking. If a title is effective and doesn’t look spammy, a buyer is more likely to click on the listing. In addition to following Amazon’s title case guidelines, here are some important aspects of their style guide.
Ensure that your listing’s title has fewer than 200 characters but is descriptive enough to give buyers the information they need, such as the number of items, the color, and the size. You may also want to include the material of your product along with anything else that buyers might want to know so that, if they do click on your listing, they won’t click away right after because you don’t have what they need.
The title should also contain enough keywords to help the search engine know its relevance to the buyer’s search, but it should still read naturally so potential buyers don’t think it’s spam. If you want to optimize for more keywords than you can naturally include in the title, take advantage of the backend keywords you can add in your Amazon seller’s account.
Product Images
The images you use for your product can have a huge impact on click-through ratings and buys. Each image should be high-quality and should follow some other guidelines so potential buyers can accurately judge the listing’s legitimacy.
Amazon asks that product images have a pure white background and have at least 1,000 dpi (dots per inch). This will help the image look clean and will allow potential buyers to zoom in on the photo without sacrificing quality. Additionally, the image should only include what the customer will receive in its entirety, and it should take up at least 80% of the image area.
If a product image doesn’t follow these guidelines, Amazon may place a quality alert on your listing, which will decrease your ratings because the listing likely won’t perform as well.
Features and Description
The key features should include the top five features in bullet points to highlight important points the reader might be looking for. It might include the dimensions, material, age appropriateness or target age, and any warranty information. Make sure these bullet points include specific features that might be relevant to the customer, and make them easy to skim.
In the product description, you can go more into depth. While the key features should be fragments, the description should use full sentences and correct grammar and punctuation. You should include any applicable care instructions, and you might want to reiterate some of the key features, like what the product’s dimensions are and how to use the warranty if necessary.
Get a Buy Box
More than 80% of Amazon’s sales go through the Buy Box, which means if you want your listing to perform well, you need to have a Buy Box. In addition to the basics like having a professional seller account and following the style guide to the letter, you should do a couple more things.
Seller Eligibility
First, you should ensure that you’re eligible for a buy box. This may differ for different items, so you’ll want to check each one separately. To become eligible if you’re not already, you need to sell new items, keep your items in stock, and make sure your listings perform as well as possible. You might also want to consider selling items as Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) or Seller-Fulfilled Prime (SFP) instead of Fulfilled by Merchant (FBM).
Seller Performance
If your product is eligible for a Buy Box but you haven’t won it yet, that means you’re still competing against other sellers for it. To increase demand for your item over another seller’s, you might need to adjust your prices, ship faster, and respond to customers quickly.
Amazon also takes other things into account that are less in your control, but you may be able to affect them. For example, the more customers that give you feedback and the higher their rating is, the better your listing will do. Also, the more recent the feedback is, the better. You should also do your best to ensure that your orders are delivered on time and with full tracking information.
If you’re following the guidelines Amazon has set out, you can naturally increase your page rankings and, hopefully, your products’ performance. To learn more about how to evaluate your SEO, whether it’s for Google, Amazon, or another search engine, contact Grow Team.