Syncing Your Amazon SEO Strategy with Amazon Advertising

The Amazon search results page is one of the most important placements for any brand that sells goods online. Being ranked on the second page of a high-volume search result is almost like not existing at all. Because of the competition this brings, brands are looking to generate SEO-ready content that can be deployed on their product’s PDPs. But, SEO should only be one part of a brand’s Amazon strategy. In order to achieve even better results, brands should have a plan to sync their Amazon SEO strategy with Amazon Advertising.

In this blog, we’ll review some of the basics around Amazon SEO along with some integration strategies to integrate Amazon Advertising and boost your Amazon success.

Generating A Strong Base with Amazon Organic

To start, Amazon SEO essentially means that your content must be fresh and in a format where (1) users can easily glean why they should buy your product and (2) Amazon’s search engine can best understand how your product fits into its larger product mix.

Reviews

One of the most important features of any marketplace style content is reviews, i.e. how do we take an Amazon shopper doing research and turn them into a customer? Our answer: It starts with reviews. At the base level, Rise recommends generating at least 15 reviews with an average rating of 3.5 stars, however, we know that reviews really start to improve conversion rates at around 100+.

Keyword Research

Like Google, finding the right keywords with the highest volume is key to generating the right SEO strategy. Unlike Google, brands don’t have to relegate certain keywords to certain pages since the same keyword can be used across a suite of products to try and generate ranking.

To do some base-level keyword research, Rise recommends brands use a variety of different platforms to determine what the most important keywords are for your products:

• Sponsored Ad Search Term Reports
• Amazon Retail Analytics Premium Search Term Reports
• Google Keyword Planner (to determine other keyword ideas that Amazon’s reporting may have missed)

 

There are more tools that Rise uses along with a prioritization score that helps us make better decisions, but I’m not about to share all of our secret sauce here. You’ll have to submit a request to learn more!

Base Content and Taxonomy

We now have our keywords and we know which products we want to map them to. Now, the next question is: what’s needed to create the best page? Please see below for some general guidelines that we’ve seen work best:

• Title Taxonomy: Brand - Product Name/Description - Count
• Bullet Length List: ~5 bullets per product
• Content Description: ~200 characters

 

That said, it is always wise to check a few things before moving forward too fast:

• Review top products within a category to determine how their features are being described
• See if there’s an Amazon-owned product that you can duplicate to better align with how Amazon is talking about the product

 

A+ Content, Images, and Videos

Your ASIN’s PDP pages should be up-to-date with the most recent image and video collateral to improve your page’s overall ranking and help improve conversion rates. Our general rule of thumb when it comes to images and video is as follows:

• A+ Content: In order to succeed on Amazon, A+ content needs to be an integral part of your strategy as we know that the search algorithm scores you favorably if A+ content exists. Conversion rates also tend to increase by ~15% when A+ content is present, so it’s a win from a customer acquisition perspective as well. Couple the above with the fact that basic A+ content is free, then there’s no excuse why your PDPs aren’t using it!
• Images: At least (6) images with at least (1) being a “lifestyle” image which shows the product being used. A lifestyle image should evoke an emotion and convince your customer as to why they need to buy this product. Diversity in your chosen content can make a huge difference as users scroll down your PDP pages!
• Video: At least (1) video reviewing your product’s key features. If you find that your product may require some tutorial or instructional help, it would be beneficial to generate a video detailing that as well. To note: At the time of this writing, Amazon only allows (1) video per ASIN, so finding ways to bring together features and instructions makes for an interesting challenge.

 

Syncing Your Amazon SEO Strategy with Amazon Advertising

No media channel exists within a vacuum and this is especially true for SEO and Amazon’s Sponsored Ads solution. Syncing your Amazon SEO strategies with data and insights from Sponsored Ads can help you best identify the next best steps forward. Here’s a few introductory tasks that can be accomplished by integrating your Amazon SEO strategy with Amazon Advertising:

Search Term Mining and Trends

There are two core ideas in using quality search terms in Amazon Sponsored Ads. The first idea we actually touched on earlier in this blog—completing initial keyword research—and while I can go in more depth here, it makes more sense to see how we can take this static idea and transform into something iterative and dynamic.

First, let’s back up and set expectations. No matter how much we want it to be, Search is not static. It evolves over time with our ever-changing lexicon. This means there is enormous value in understanding and identifying how high volume and/or top converting search terms are trending and changing over time.

By revisiting your keyword research and identifying these trends early, you can find yourself in a position to catch and ride a trend which can lead to some easy revenue opportunities.

Testing Your Optimized Content

Ok, we completed our keyword research, generated new content and assets, and implemented across all of our ASINS. Congrats! But, are we any better at making a visitor a purchaser?

To understand this step, we need to know how our conversion rates change period over period. Calculating conversion rates and pre/post changes can be easy as an Amazon Seller. Afterall, Amazon provides the actual hard count of glance views and orders. This data, unfortunately, is not easily available for Vendors. Without having accurate data to understand the impacts of your content updates, you won’t have much to go off of.

Here’s where Amazon Advertising can help us understand the impacts of our efforts. By measuring your core traffic KPIs over statistically similar time periods, you will be able to identify whether or not your new content is significantly helping your visitors become customers.

Fueling the Flywheel

Amazon treasures relevancy against all other organic ranking metrics, and what’s more relevant than actual sales? For new or existing low ranked products, it is possible to teach Amazon what queries your product converts best on to help you improve your organic ranking.

This means: if your product is just below first page results or looking to gain a few more organic positions, it is possible to use Amazon Advertising to temporarily boost your rank. And, if you’re feeling aggressive and the revenue gains outweigh the ad costs, this can be a permanent “always-on” strategy. By generating a fully fleshed out Amazon SEO strategy, you can find your product sales start to increase as your products themselves are able to be in better positions to convert.

To learn more about how to improve your organic rank or how to integrate Amazon SEO with Amazon Advertising, reach out to Rise!