Last updated on June 17th, 2020 at 09:28 am
What parts of the listing affect sales and your ranking & in what ways?
What needs refining & tweaking to increase your click-through rates & get more people onto your listing?
What can you improve to increase your conversion rate, so more people on your listing actually buy your products?
This post in an overview of the structure, what to really focus on, & the mechanics of of Amazon SEO / Listing Optimization.
OPTIMIZING CLICK THROUGH RATE (CTR) – SEARCH RESULTS & COMPETITOR LISTINGS
Let’s start with the search results page, customers type in a search phrase & see a bunch of products.
Here we need to focus on the click-through rate, AKA getting more people to click on your listing so they can potentially buy your product.
One more click onto your listing is one less click to a competitor’s.
OPTIMIZE MAIN IMAGE – LOWEST HANGING FRUIT
The biggest leverage point for CTR is definitely the main image. This is the first thing people see on the search results & they can judge your entire product based on it.
- Make it take up the most space possible & stand out. Amazon only gives you a very small space for your main image on the search results page, make the most of it to make your product more eye catching.
- We want it to be really well lit. The lighting must look professional or else it’s very noticeable against a pure white background.
- -Use an attractive angle. Generally a 15 degree angle looks really good, and a direct top down angle doesn’t.
- Making the main image really attractive sells the click, and increases your Click Through Rate (CTR).
OPTIMIZE FIRST PART OF TITLE
The other thing a lot of people don’t think about is the title. They keyword stuff the heck out of it & it looks terrible & unreadable.
The first bit of the title should match what the customer is searching for as closely as possible.
If they type something into the search bar that’s subconsciously what their brain is scanning for on the search results.
SECOND PART OF TITLE
The second little bit of your title should be your most important describing information.
People are scanning search results trying to find the product perfect for them.
They don’t want to waste time clicking on lots of products. They’re only going to click on products they’re reasonably sure are the thing they’re looking for.
So optimizing the title and image, super important.
The other two factors for Click Through Rate are review rate and price. But those require an entire article in themselves.
STEAL TRAFFIC FROM COMPETITOR LISTINGS
According to some data sources, more than 50% of Amazon sales don’t come from the search results page.
They come from people clicking off other listings to land on yours.
Amazon has many sections on every listing to direct shoppers to other products that may be more suitable to them.
- customers who bought this item also bought
- product display ads
- frequently bought together
The main image and the title optimization are even MORE important here because you’re stealing a click directly from a competitor’s listing.
It’s free traffic Amazon’s giving you from other listings.
OPTIMIZING CONVERSION RATE – YOUR PRODUCT LISTING
Now onto your Amazon listing, the product detail page. Here we need to optimize conversion rate (CVR) to convert visitors to buyers. (calculated as visitors divided by buyers)
Amazing & well-crafted photos are what sell the product. So many Amazon customers, especially on mobile and will look at the photos and make their buying decision based on that, the price and the reviews. They don’t even read the rest of it.
It’s still important to have well written bullet points and description as customers who are less visual will always read them, but for the most part images are more important.
If your photos suck, that’s the main thing to fix first. A lot of people do this wrong. I have a really good blog post about this here.
There’s a video. It goes through all of the how to’s on that in the description below so check that out.
BULLET POINTS FOR HIGHER CONVERSION RATE
The other thing to optimize for CVR is the bullet points. A lot of people try to keyword stuff the bullet points, making it unreadable.
Amazon’s formatting makes long bullet points look like a giant block of text… & people usually skip right over those.
Make them short, concise and just about the main benefits.
Each one should be about one benefit only so readers can get a clear picture of the main benefits of this product over other products.
It’s a good opportunity to communicate more info than you can in the pictures. Putting too much text on your images makes them too busy and people really can’t read it on small screens.
OPTIMIZING ENHANCED BRAND CONTENT
If you’re one of the lucky people to have a registered trademark, and you have Amazon brand registry for your brand, then the EBC description is a must do.
You can put a lot of pictures and graphics in there that really show off your product a lot more attractively than Amazon’s normal description.
A lot of people won’t read the regular description. It’s just regular text kind of chunked in the middle of the listing, but it’s much harder to scroll straight over a well done enhanced brand content description without stopping.
With professionally done images with graphics & really relevant text, It can increase your conversion rate by anywhere from 2 to 9% based on what we’ve seen with our clients.
I made a comprehensive guide to Amazon Enhanced Brand Content here.
KEY INFORMATION NEEDED TO MAKE A SALE
Another thing I see all the time is people leaving important information out. You should include all of the information a customer needs in order to make a purchase.
That’s often sizing, maybe they need to know if it works for a queen sized bed, what material it’s made of etc. You’d be surprised how many sellers are leaving the super important information out, you’ll notice how shoppers ask about it in the Q & A section of the listing.
Personally when I’m shopping online, I’m always looking for something really specific. I can already picture it in my head I just need to find the product that matches.
Often I have one question like, “hey is this gonna work for a windows PC?” or “is this BPA Free?”
Danny Carlson
I’m scrolling through the listing and if I can’t find it pretty quickly, I’m gone. I’ll find someone else’s listing.
Amazon makes it very easy to do that with all these sections on every Amazon listing!
USE THE RIGHT KEYWORDS, NOT THE HIGHEST VOLUME
And the last thing to kind of bring it full circle is using the right keywords. If you don’t have the right keyword phrases that match with what your target customers are actually searching, you’re not going show up in the search results in the first place.
That’s important for keyword ranking so if you need a guide on how Keywords on Amazon Work, check our my post on that here.
THESE ARE JUST THE BASIC FACTORS
There’s other factors of course. You need sales velocity. You need reviews.
Pricing needs to be reasonable for your product compared to other options. Your product actually has to be good & not a piece of garbage.
This is just going over the basic structure of listing optimization, so you can understand what affects what, and what you should be focusing on.
If you want to learn more about this stuff, I’ve got a really in-depth photo blog post full guide.
I got another one on copywriting and keyword research, a full guide a bunch of free tools in there.
You guys can do it all yourself, everything you need to know about that.
If you implement some of these changes, shoot me a message and let me know how it went 😊
