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Last updated on June 5th, 2023
Written by Himanshi Raj
When a young Jeff Bezos founded Amazon in 1994, it was merely an online marketplace for people to buy books online. Today, Amazon has transformed itself into the world's largest online marketplace and one of the most valuable brands in modern history. The Amazon Marketplace now has more than 2.5 million sellers on its platform, 25,000 of which earn $1 million in sales. If you're thinking of becoming an online merchant someday, you came to the right place.
Every aspiring entrepreneur knows how important Amazon search engine optimization is to drive sales. Proper Amazon product SEO management maximizes your profits. It builds credibility to your company brand, so it's only essential to maximize Amazon product SEO as much as you can.
Despite this seemingly common knowledge, however, a huge percentage of Amazon sellers continue to make mistakes and are unaware of the consequences they bring to their online businesses. This article talks about the four most common Amazon product SEO mistakes and some tips to fix them from average product descriptions to low-quality photos and wrong keyword usage.
Before we officially dive into it, we want to remind you that making these mistakes is completely normal. You're reading this either a first-timer or a semi-seasoned Amazon seller who made mistakes in the past. No one expects you to suddenly know everything about Amazon product SEO at the launch of your product(s), so it's okay to come into this with little knowledge even without any knowledge. What everyone expects you to do, though, is to do your research and keep an open mind to learn more about how the industry works.
Amazon marketing’s best practices take time to learn and would require effort from your end. It's a lot better to read up now than wait until you've committed too many mistakes, and it's too late to fix them!
The first-ever mistake that any Amazon seller can make is a lackluster, or even non-existent, product description. You don't have to be an Amazon SEO expert to know this.
Like any other e-commerce website, an Amazon product description is a space that allows sellers to make their sales pitch to customers. Despite the number of people who are keen on buying products from an extremely competitive platform, we continue to see lots of sellers who place average descriptions (or even have no descriptions). The rule is pretty much straightforward: good product descriptions make for better sales.
Subsequently, well-written product descriptions increase your products' chances of being placed higher on Amazon search engine queries. The Amazon algorithm prioritizes products with quality descriptive content. It places them at least on the first ten pages of its search engine results, so placing a mediocre description significantly depletes your sales margins.
Fixing this problem requires your time and effort, but it's doable. Below are some recommendations on how you can optimize your product descriptions:
You have to start with the mindset that all your product descriptions need to appeal to customers as much as they appeal to you.So, make sure you focus your write-up on your products' benefits.
If they are written well enough to attract customers at first glance, your product descriptions must be effective.
How will you focus your products' benefits if you don't know your customer base? Most amateur Amazon sellers forget this crucial factor and end up writing very general product descriptions that don't benefit anyone.
Identifying a target market is important to know who your customers are, what they need, and why they need them. It's important to do your research.
Superlatives like "the best," "most amazing," or "top-quality" are tempting to use, but relying solely on these words will not bring much weight to your product descriptions. Customers are smart enough to know if someone oversells their product, so we recommend avoiding superlative words altogether.
Customers are looking for products with real benefits, so it's better to back your product descriptions with real data instead.
Most first-time sellers don't put much effort into product reviews to optimize their Amazon SEO experience. Some think that purposely increasing the number of reviews for a product is impossible. Others think product reviews aren't that important at all.
What they don't know is that 70% of customers on the Amazon platform look at reviews before deciding to buy a product. Product reviews are considered the lifeblood of a page: the more reviews there are, the more "alive" the page is. Customers are inclined to take precautionary steps to understand a product and review a seller's credibility and overall trustworthiness.
Since Amazon proclaims itself as a "customer-first" company, review pages are also much easier to top than sales pages. If you put the right amount of effort into giving your customers a voice and keeping your pages alive, you will likely land higher on the Amazon platform. Here are some strategic ways you can do it:
We're not telling you to offer free products in exchange for reviews because Amazon has already prohibited this. Instead, we're telling you to start running decent promotions or offering coupons for your products to increase sales and customer engagement. All these tactics combined will, in turn, lead to a significant increase in reviews.
A surefire way to increase the number of reviews on your page is to enroll your products in the Amazon Vine Program. Amazon introduced this feature for registered brands with less than 30 reviews, which, after enrollment, will be asked to send in some free product samples for authorized people to review.
The Vine Program is widely recognized as a Kickstarter for businesses looking to reinforce their product reviews.
The Amazon Early Reviewer Program is another feature introduced on the platform for businesses with little to no reviews. In this program, however, customers are simply encouraged to leave reviews for products in exchange for a $5 Amazon gift card.
There is no denying that customers on Amazon's ecosystem look at product photos first before even reading through the product description. If you see that your products have low-quality images, you shouldn't be too surprised to simply take a pass on you and end up buying from another seller instead.
Whether you're a first-time Amazon seller or looking to improve your conversion rates on the platform, attempting to optimize your product photos will give you a better chance of appearing higher on Amazon's algorithm. This naturally leads to a significant edge over your competitors. Below are some ways you can start fixing your product images:
Before you attempt to optimize your product photos, you should be aware that Amazon enforces some strict rules for all images being shown on its platform. These include very specific requirements for product image sizes, image frames and backgrounds, and file formats. Amazon e-commerce vendors who don't adhere to the guidelines will either have their photos rejected or get in further trouble with Amazon.
You wouldn't want to be at odds with the platform you're trying to make money from, so make sure you carefully read these requirements.
A great way to enhance photos is to show every angle of your product that you can, both inside and out. As an online seller, it's your duty to give customers an in-depth look into your products, since they have no means to see or touch them physically.
Exhibit your product as much as you can, and you will reap the benefits.
This recommendation may be a simple follow-up to the one above, but it's just as important. Amazon sellers are given the freedom to use up to nine photos for each product listing, so make sure to utilize all the available slots and give your users as many visuals as possible.
Once you've chosen the photos that you're going to upload, you should also assign which ones will appear first. Make sure you arrange them in the most rational way possible.
There are other tips we can give so you can fully optimize your Amazon product photos:
Mastering the art of keyword usage has truly evolved into a significant part of the Amazon product SEO process. To begin with, keywords are one of the foundational concepts of basic SEO: they are words or phrases that you include in your web content so people can find you online. On the Amazon platform, product listings with well-optimized keywords will naturally appear more on a customer's web page.
Amazon sellers tend to forget how to formulate the most effective keyword strategies for their products. Some sellers just go for the most expensive keywords and expect loads of consumer traffic to come their way; others even simply randomize their product keywords. Both these actions show poor planning and knowledge of how Amazon works, which will lead to your business, eventually failing in the future.
Here are some key recommendations we can provide to help you improve your skills with keywords:
Proper research is always essential for any planning process, and it's not much different when you're trying to create a proper keyword strategy. Before buying keywords, you need to be able to identify which ones are the best and most appropriate to use for your product listing.
Upon launch, you also need to ensure that you adjust your keyword usage depending on your product's performance. It will take time before you fully know whether the keywords you chose were indeed effective, so we recommend that you wait it out a bit.
As we have previously mentioned in the introductory paragraph of this section, we highly discourage depending only on expensive keywords. After all, putting all your eggs in a single basket of expensive keywords doesn't automatically mean you will get the best results.
A key technique is to try out different keywords and assess which ones will be the most relevant for your products.
Low-volume keywords produce as much damage as over expensive keywords, for the reason that both of them fail to convert traffic into sales. During your research process, you would likely encounter thousands of keywords that sound appropriate for your products but aren't necessarily in-demand on the platform.
If you fail to remove low-volume keywords from your list, you are essentially decreasing your searchability rates on Amazon.
Amazon product SEO management may be a stressful, time-consuming, and difficult process to learn, especially if you're only a beginner. What ultimately defines a successful Amazon business, however, is how much planning and attention to detail you've got to have to be able to minimize your mistakes. This article doesn't assure you that you'll automatically become a bonafide Amazon SEO expert, but we hope these four common mistakes help you get on the right track.
If you are interested in hiring a proper Amazon SEO consultant to kickstart your e-commerce business, we at Seller Interactive can help you out. You may schedule a call with us by sending an email to [email protected]. Book an appointment today!
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