Amazon A9 Optimization – How to Improve Your Listings

Posted on by Kyle Sanders

Amazon Optimization – Are You Findable?

Out of all marketplaces, Amazon holds–and requires that sellers adhere to–some of the highest retail standards on the web. When these standards and regulations are paired with the vast number of data fields, it can make navigating the 800lb retail-goliath quite difficult. Implement the points hit upon in this blog post, and you’ll see an increase in both sessions and conversions.

Amazon Search

Amazon’s proprietary A9 search engine is vastly different from that of Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Unlike the latter 3, Amazon doesn’t care how old your product listing is, nor are they concerned with the number of off-site links pointing on your page (this is an important factor for overall strategy, but not a ranking factor in A9); Amazon ranks product listings based on 3 core factors:

  • Total sales – aggregate number of units sold through Amazon.com
  • Customer reviews – average of internal customer ratings based on 5 star system
  • Product Name – relevancy of keyword search to product title

The number of data fields, both required, and optional, may seem daunting at first, but these should be seen as opportunities, not obstacles. Every piece of data that you can feed into your Amazon listing should be used to your advantage, assuming the data is available. Think of each data field as a potential keyword. Have you ever struggled to find a product and searched by the UPC or manufacturer’s code? It may be less frequent than several years ago, but it certainly still happens; never underestimate the determination of a frustrated online consumer.

Optimizing Amazon Titles

Unlike other search engines, Amazon’s A9 allows you to have 250 characters in your product title. Now, this doesn’t mean that you should over-stuff keywords into the product title. Amazon will eventually find you, fix the page for you, and send you a lovely little “Quality Alert” warning. That being said, you can and should take advantage of this extended limitation, provided you keep user experience in mind.

For example, if I was selling high-quality form of Vitamin B12 (which is methylcobalamin, in case you were wondering), my product title would look something like this:

Pure Vitamin B12 Methylcobalamin Supplement – Bioavailable Methylcobalamin Vitamin B12 Supplement

Does this look somewhat repetitive? Yes, but you need to take a closer look at how people search. Amazon’s A9 will pull a title like this for some of the following keywords (and more):

  • pure vitamin b12
  • vitamin b12
  • methylcobalamin
  • b12 supplement
  • vitamin b12 supplement
  • methylcobalamin supplement
  • pure methylcobalamin
  • And 20 other variations I don’t want to write on this page

Get the idea? Great. Now let’s move onto some general Amazon marketing tips.

Amazon Marketing Considerations

  • Leverage every relevant search term you can, for every listing you have
  • Arrange keywords based on logic, meaning high volume terms first, long tail searches near the end
  • Do not try to reuse keywords in the keyword fields. Keyword stacking does not work within Amazon A9
  • Be as descriptive and detailed as possible with Amazon product names
  • Avoid jargon, acronyms, and abbreviations unless they are highly relevant to your product
  • Don’t add intentionally misspelled keyword searches. A9 is smarter enough to handle typos
  • Do not add quotations to Amazon product titles or search keywords
  • Focus on quality and avoid irrelevant keywords

Amazon Descriptions

Amazon has internally tested and released the data that confirms that well-written, benefit-focused bullet points increase conversions. Remember, focus on benefits, not features. Bullet points should be at the top of descriptions, the rest of the description should be detail-oriented and ideally, contain each of your main keywords at least once, assuming it doesn’t detract from the overall readability. We recommend at least 250 words of written content in addition to bullet points. This is good for user experience and helps rank your Amazon page in Google and other search engines.

The Finer Details

For merchants selling physical products (not books/dvds/cds), the “Product Details” section should be filled out completely. There is no excuse for not having every data field in here filled out. It’s great for optimization, user experience, and may give you an edge over lazy competitors. If a consumer lands on your product page and is looking for a specific product detail and you don’t have it, they will find it elsewhere. If you don’t have all of the information to complete the product details section of a listing, search Google. You should be able to find it quickly.

Implement everything from this post and you should see a measurable increase in visitors/sessions, as well as conversions.

Want us to handle your Amazon optimization AND get in ranked in Google? Check out our Amazon marketing page for more details and contact us today.