A Guide to Listing Optimization
May 13, 2022
Amazon listing optimization is an essential part to the success of a seller’s business. Having an optimized product detail page helps increase sales, decrease ad spend, improve conversion rates, and enhance net revenue.
Brand Consistency
The first step of optimizing Amazon listings is establishing brand guidelines that will be used on all product detail pages. Branding creates strong, positive awareness around a seller’s brand and products and helps build customer recognition, trust, and loyalty. Effective branding on Amazon can be established by using the same writing and image styles on all product listings, as well as by ensuring that the brand’s website and social media pages provide the same consistency.
Keyword Research
Using relevant, highly searched keywords within a listing will help it to organically rank higher within the search results page. Amazon’s A9 algorithm provides the most relevant listings to customers based on their search terms and the front- and back-end keywords within sellers’ listings.
Front-end keywords are those that are visible within an Amazon product detail page in the title, bullets, and product description, while back-end keywords are found in the product listing setup within Seller Central and are hidden from customers. Though customers won’t see back-end keywords, they are exceptionally important to product ranking when Amazon’s A9 algorithm audits them to determine a listing’s relevancy.
To identify the most relevant keywords, Amazon sellers should consider leveraging keyword research tools, such as Helium10 and Keywordtool.io. These valuable tools use a process called “reverse ASIN lookup” to identify which keywords competitors are using within their product listings and the overall effectiveness of those keywords on Amazon.
Content
Title
The product title is one of the most important pieces of SEO “real estate” on the detail page. Amazon’s algorithm weights the keywords present in the title more heavily for SEO than other sections of the listing. Therefore, you should utilize the allotted title space carefully. Conducting extensive keyword research and including the most relevant terms is a good way to begin building an optimized title. Additionally, ensuring your title reads well and makes sense to a browsing customer is important. ”Keyword stuffing” – cramming as many keywords into a space as possible with little regard to the sensibility of the content – is a practice highly frowned upon, and can damage the credibility of your listing.
Bullets
Bullet points should be used to provide customers with important product features and benefits, demonstrate product differentiators, and include relevant product keywords for additional SEO effectiveness. Writing clear, concise bullet points that anticipate the questions or concerns a customer may have is an important part of a polished listing.
A useful practice for discovering key pain points or benefits associated with your product is to read reviews on competitor listings selling similar products. You may find particular problems a competitor’s product has that your version solves, or you may discover a common user error that you can mitigate up front by providing clear directives. On the other hand, you may find a particular benefit that customers enjoy that should be emphasized in your content. The bullet points are a great place to provide these types of details.
Enhanced Brand Content (EBC) and Product Description
Sellers have the ability to create either a basic text product description or utilize Amazon’s Enhanced Brand Content, also known as A+ Content.
The basic text product description is available to all sellers and allows you to provide information about your products in block-text format. While this area provides a good place for adding product copy that was not included in the bullet points or title, its limited formatting capabilities can make product descriptions cumbersome to read. If you have the ability to do so, utilizing EBC for a more visually- appealing version of the product description section is ideal.
Enhanced Brand Content, or A+ Content, is a powerful feature available to brands enrolled in Amazon Brand Registry. This content type allows sellers to create modular displays with text and images to visually demonstrate the product’s selling points and features. Since the bullet point and title sections have a small character count allowance, the EBC section is a great way to showcase features or benefits pertaining to your product in much more detail. According to Amazon, using EBC can help increase sales by 3-10%.
Images
High-quality imagery is not only an Amazon requirement, but it can also significantly influence customers’ buying decisions. Amazon allows for up to nine product images per listing, which gives sellers an important opportunity to visually describe their product’s features and benefits and highlight key differentiators.
According to one study, over 75% of consumers are inspired to make a purchase through visual content. Applying this statistic to your Amazon listings, a significant portion of your resources should be allocated to aesthetic, professional-quality graphics. Capturing your audience’s attention and visually describing your product’s selling points are key to a well-optimized listing.
Customer Questions and Answers
This section of the listing provides sellers with the opportunity to directly connect with their potential customers. By providing quick, concise, and accurate answers to common customer questions, a seller can increase a customer’s brand trust while addressing and mitigating concerns pre-purchase.
The ZQUARED Advantage
ZQUARED helps Brand Partners ensure that product listings are set up properly, meet Amazon’s policies, and remain relevant in their niche. We provide our clients with custom Amazon branding guidelines that drive brand optimization through marketing and strategy execution, and we ensure all content is highly optimized across all product listings.
Our teams leverage the experience of our dedicated experts to create, monitor, and audit product descriptions to ensure compliance, as well as effective keywording and product positioning.
To learn how ZQUARED can help you stay ahead in the Amazon game, request a comprehensive assessment of your Amazon channel from our Amazon Investment Partnership Team. You will receive audit results focused on your listings, category, competitors, reseller landscape and more with an individually-tailored strategic plan designed to capitalize on opportunities.
About ZQUARED
ZQUARED invests in brands who sell on Amazon and are poised and ready for growth. Born from a service mindset, our passion is partnering with your team to help you navigate the online retail space in a way never imagined. With more than a decade of industry-leading experience selling on Amazon, we form relationships rooted in collaboration to maximize value and achieve results.
Our Amazon Investment Partnership Team will perform a comprehensive audit of your Amazon channel strengths and weaknesses. You will receive audit results focused on your listings, category, competitors, reseller landscape and more with an individually-tailored strategic plan designed to capitalize on opportunities.
For more information about how ZQUARED can enhance your Amazon selling capabilities, request an assessment of your Amazon channel, or send an email to partners@zquared.com.