4 Tips to Optimize Your Amazon Product Listings

It’s no secret that you need compelling Amazon product listings if you want to turn shoppers into buyers. To do this, you must commit to a process of ongoing Amazon product listing optimization that resonates with both the Amazon search algorithm and human shoppers.

This continual optimization process entails incremental testing driven by these facts:

What worked yesterday is not guaranteed to work today, especially in the ever-changing Amazon Marketplace.
Amazon product listing optimization is an ongoing process and every listing can always be further optimized for better results.
If you try to change too much at once, you’ll be unable to determine which change drives which result.

To see the biggest gains, start your Amazon product listing optimization with high-traffic listings (lots of impressions and clicks) that have low conversion rates (actual sales). This is your low-hanging fruit in the sense that your product is getting found and receiving traffic, but something is breaking down before the sale. That indicates opportunity for revising the product detail page to good effect. Here are 4 tips to improve your Amazon product detail pages and boost conversions.

1. Review and Update Your Amazon Product Listing Fundamentals

Product Title

Titles are the first thing that a shopper reads about your product. If your product title isn’t descriptive and optimized, then you’re doing yourself a disservice by not playing to what resonates with the Amazon search algorithm and your audience. Without that on your side, your product won’t be as easily found or as highly ranked in search results and you’ve already created a barrier to the purchase path.

You only have 200 characters for your title, so use them wisely. Include brand name, what the product is, what it does, and other information shoppers will find helpful. Consider the increasing role of mobile shopping and that you need to strike a balance between inserting lots of information and keywords (using your full 200 characters) along with how that title renders in a smaller mobile display. That said, you want to put the most-important keywords first. Default title style to get you started is Brand + Model + Product Type + subsequent information such as material, purpose, size, quantity, color, etc. Read Amazon’s Product Title Requirements so that you can create the perfect title for your listing.

Images

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a product picture on Amazon is worth tens of thousands, if not millions, of words. Your product images are the single-most important assets you control on your Amazon product detail page, so be certain that they convey information while looking great. Make sure your best photo is your main image and use up to six more secondary photos to show all aspects of your product.

Key elements that ensure excellent Amazon product images include:

Professional-quality high-resolution large images for zoomability
Product shown on a white background
All important product elements shown: size/scale, accessories included, product from all angles, key features indicated, etc.
Product in use (lifestyle shots)

Bonus Resource: Amp Up Your Amazon Product Listings: Add 360-Degree Images and Livestreams.

Bullet Points

The bullet points section is where you can go into depth about the features and highlights of the product, and you should take advantage of all five available bullets. Make sure the keywords describe what your product does and also highlight the benefits of the product. Chances are that shoppers won’t scroll beyond your bullet points — so make them count. You have fewer than 1,000 characters to use over all five bullet points.

Make bullets easy to read, formatted in a consistent fashion, and full of pertinent keyword-rich information. This will help not only your ranking in search results but your conversion rate as bullets resonate with both the algorithm’s hunt for keywords and the shopper’s hunt for features and benefits.

Go the extra mile and anticipate questions shoppers may have. Answer those questions preemptively in your bullets. How so? If you get a lot of questions about how your cast-iron pan starts out and how it ages with use, make a bullet about it being pre-seasoned, rust-proof, and lasting for generations of cooks. If you stand by your product (and you should), include (and tout) a guarantee of some sort. Read Amazon’s bullet points overview for more information.

Product Description

Your product description is where you’ll want to double down on long-tail keywords and feature/benefit descriptions. Consider the questions you would have if you were researching a product like the one you sell. What would compel you to purchase it? Be honest, objective, and persuasive. Do not use this section for keyword stuffing and do not mention the competition or make claims that you cannot substantiate. It is a place to tell your story and make a connection with your buyer.

2. Use A+ Content for Amazon Product Listing Optimization That Speaks to Shoppers

A+ Content is where you can tell your brand’s story, but first and foremost, you must be enrolled in the Amazon Brand Registry program to take advantage of A+ Content. Before digging into the benefits of A+ Content, sellers need to know that A+ Content is not indexed by Amazon, which means that what you show there is not used for SEO purposes on Amazon or Google or any other search engine. A+ Content is not about discovery or traffic, it’s about interacting with the shopper and driving conversions.

While not indexed (huge bummer), A+ Content does offer some excellent opportunities when it comes to inspiring buyers to Add to Cart or Buy Now. Here are a few ways in which A+ Content can help you seal the sale.

Brand Boldly

A common elements you’ll see amongst the best A+ Content pages is strong branding at the top, typically shown through bold visuals. The point here is to communicate what your brand is about as quickly as possible. Hey, you have that logo for a reason, use it!

Communicate the Value Proposition

Just below the header image of the page, you’ll find the product and brand’s value proposition. This section is meant to inform the shopper about the main benefits the product has to offer. Don’t tell what the product does, show how it improves the buyer’s life or solves a problem the buyer may have.

Make It Real with Lifestyle Images

Images in A+ Content pages should be heavily focused on lifestyle rather than just product shots. This is your chance to highlight your product in its optimal use and real environment. These images are compelling because they put the shopper in the user’s position by helping the shopper identify with the person in the photo.

Demonstrate Use Cases and Key Features

The bottom of your A+ Content page is where you should talk about features. This is a good place to explain what your product does, what people should expect when using it, and key competitive differentiators.

3. Update Your Backend Keywords for Powerful Amazon Product Listing Optimization and SEO Gains

Backend keywords are words and phrases that you want Amazon to index but you don’t need shoppers to see (e.g., if you are selling headphones, your hidden keywords may contain synonyms such as “earphones” and “earbuds.”) Backend keywords should only include generic words that enhance the discoverability of your product. Amazon indexes only the first 249 characters in a product detail page’s backend keywords, so you have to be sparing and smart. That limited number means that finding strong keywords and leveraging those is more important than ever.

Finding Keywords with Scope

With Seller Labs Pro’s Scope tool, you can go to a product listing page on Amazon and see relevant keywords for that product. Using the Scope extension within the Amazon website, you’ll learn how a product ranks for a keyword, along with other helpful information such as estimated search volume, average CPC, number of sellers offering the product, sales rank, and more.

Tips and Tricks for Backend Keywords

Put the most-important keywords first.
Include popular abbreviations and alternative names.
Refrain from using irrelevant keywords.
Don’t repeat keywords.
Don’t stress over plurals, Amazon takes care of this.
Avoid duplicating keywords already in titles and bullets.

4. Understand the the Job of Amazon Product Listing Optimization Is Never Done

Taking a set-it-and-forget-it approach to Amazon product detail page optimization will result in diminishing returns over time. You need to always be testing your images, titles, bullet points, descriptions, keywords, and A+ Content. When testing variables, be sure to track the changes you make so you know which modifications drove which result. Also, this way if you don’t see improved results, you can switch back to what you had before.