The potential of Amazon
Amazon is the biggest e-commerce store (or sales platform) in the world. In last year, its revenues amounted to almost $120,000 million. As you can see, this is a very potent market which offers huge prospects of profit. However, if you don’t want to get lost among the abundance of products available on Jeff Bezos’s platform, you need to find out how it works and how to effectively reach customers. Let’s start with some cold facts. Amazon offers a huge amount of products. Although these products are categorized, users usually browse the site with the use of the built-in search engine. This search engine displays from a few to a few thousands of results and generally, statistical users with a lot of time on their hands maybe will get to the end of the second page. If they still don’t find the products they need, they’ll simply enter a new query into the search bar. This means that you won’t sell anything or earn any money on Amazon, unless your products are displayed high in the ranking. But don’t worry, we’re here to do something about it!How does Amazon sales rank work?
There are three main parties in Jeff Bezos’s service: a customer, a seller and an agent, meaning Amazon itself. And each of them wants to make as many transactions as possible. Customers enter the site to get (un)necessary products, sellers publish their offers to make money and Amazon also collects its share from each transaction or bid (depending on the applicable model) as, obviously, it’s not a charity. As you can guess, Amazon gets its share only when customers find offers meeting their expectations. [caption id="attachment_22305" align="aligncenter" width="750"]Amazon’s A9 product ranking algorithm
A special algorithm, A9 is responsible for ensuring that the three parties of the process are satisfied. When users enter a search query, A9 ranks products, it has plenty of work and a little time to do it. So how does it handle it? The process of ranking the products has two stages. Firstly, the algorithm filters products which correspond to the search query. Then, it sorts the obtained results in a way that products which are the most likely to be bought are at the top of the list. Keywords are the most important during the first stage of the filtering process. With their use, the A9 algorithm decides whether given products match customers’ preferences. However, it also takes into account synonyms and different meanings of words, therefore, if you enter “a phone” into the search bar, it’ll also display products described as “iPhone” or “smartphone”. The decision which products are considered as those meeting customers’ expectations is made on the basis of factors taken into account during the second stage.Critical factors - CTR, conversion and sales
The sorting is supposed to provide users with products that are the most likely to be bought. The algorithm takes into account individual results of given products over time. It concerns behavioral factors such as CTR (click through rate informing about the number of users who clicked on given products in the search results), CR (conversion rate which means actions such as adding a product to the shopping cart) and, more importantly, sales. The better a given product sells, the higher it’s ranked. As you’ve probably noticed, it can create a virtuous circle - good sales results lead to products being ranked higher which consequently improves CTR, CR and sales. But what if you don’t have any sales results to boast about? Well, then you need to use SEO.Step 1: Choose appropriate keywords
Amazon SEO, as every SEO process should begin with finding out how users search for products on this platform. Apart from adapting to the principles of A9 algorithm, a proper keywords analysis will allow you to encourage people to take advantage of your offer.Techniques and tools for keyword analysis
There are a few ways to check the queries entered by Amazon users. One of the most basic methods is using auto-fill. As in the case of Google, after typing in the beginning of the search phrase, you’ll see suggestions and products most frequently looked for by other customers. [caption id="attachment_22307" align="aligncenter" width="941"]Key phrases in product descriptions
If you’ve already selected keywords, now you’re probably wondering where to put them. There are a few content fields. The brand name, product name (title), attributes (bullet points), description, backend keywords or product information fields. All these elements are taken into consideration by the algorithm so if they’re connected to the search query entered by the user, then your products will be incorporated in the ranking. However, Amazon doesn’t count the so-called Enhanced Brand Content and A+ Content which are available only to the owners of premium accounts. You need to pay attention to two aspects. First of all, indexed fields are even. This means that the algorithm doesn’t really care whether you put the keyword in the title or description of your product. Even though it’s important for users and affects your CTR and conversion, the algorithm is satisfied when the needed key phrase appears anywhere. The size of particular elements is the other aspect. While some components have clear restrictions, others are indexed only to a certain length. The size is given not in the number of characters but in bytes. For standard characters available on the keyboard 1B = 1 character, however, diacritical characters take up two bytes. This restriction applies mainly to attributes and the "keywords" fields. Remember that keywords should sound and look natural. A9 algorithm recognizes the plural and the singular forms, with the exception of long, complex words in German. It also spots typos. Compound words, meaning expressions that can be written together or separately, should be separated by dashes.Content is king - how to describe products?
When keywords are already prepared, you can move on to creating, or optimizing, content concerning your products. To be precise, it’s about:- Product name - title,
- Attribute - description in a form of a list with bullet points,
- Product description
- “Additional information” field,
- Enhanced Brand Content and A+ Content for owners of premium accounts.
Content guidelines
There are numerous guidelines determining what specific parts of your Amazon content should look like:- Product name - the title should include the most important pieces of information, assets and unique features of the product. A good title improves CTR and conversion. Mobile devices display product names which are about 70 characters long, therefore, you need to include here only essential facts.
- Attribute - a description in the form of a bullet point list needs to describe the most important features and applications of the product. It also improves conversion. It’s advisable to limit the length of a single point to 200 characters to keep everything aesthetic. You’ve five points at your disposal - each should discuss one attribute. Mobile users will see only the first three.
- Product description - very often sellers mistakenly place here the same information as in attributes. If users reach this part, it can be assumed that they’ve already read about the features of the product. This is a place for additional pieces of information and brief storytelling. You can divide the text into paragraphs, add headings or bullet lists with the use of HTML tags.
- “Additional information” field - it contains different data depending on the product category, however, information here is always technical and concerns aspects such as size, colors or fabrics.