3 Tips to Improve Your Amazon SEO

When it comes to improving product visibility on Amazon, it’s important to understand that customers have different search habits on Amazon compared to Google. On Amazon, a customer can only find your product if the customer’s search enquiry is matched (via Amazon’s A9 algorithm) to one of your product keywords.

This means if you’re relying on Google AdWords data for your keyword research, you risk building inaccurate keyword lists that are simply not relevant to the search queries of Amazon shoppers.

How Amazon’s A9 algorithm works

Amazon only cares about increasing purchasing likelihood, and consequently it’s A9 algorithm sorts the products displayed in search results by looking at two factors:

• Performance: A product with a strong sales history will rank higher in Amazon’s search results.
• Relevance: How well your product (via your chosen keywords) matches the search queries of the Amazon customer.

We will be focusing on the relevance factor, where building accurate keyword lists is critical to ensuring your product is ranking for the most relevant keywords on Amazon.

Tip 1: Sort Amazon keywords by search volume

Keywords are the main driver for your product’s visibility in Amazon’s search results. Your goal is to research as many relevant keywords as possible that could potentially match the search queries of the customer. If you forget to include a relevant keyword, you risk your product not showing up at all in Amazon’s search results for that customer search query.

You can use Sonar, our free Amazon keyword research tool, which pulls keywords directly from the real customer search terms used by Amazon shoppers. Sonar’s internal algorithm only looks at Amazon data, meaning sellers minimize the risk of bidding on potentially irrelevant keywords.

Importantly, with Sonar you can sort keywords by search volume, allowing you to identify the most relevant keywords for your product.

Sonar’s search volume indicator allows you to prioritize keywords by relevance, ranging from 0 (very low) to 5 bars (very high).

Tip 2: Research your competitor’s keywords (Reverse ASIN search)

When embarking on keyword research for a new product, another good starting point is to look at the keywords your competitors are trying to rank for, and then aim to grow and tweak that list.

Simply copy & paste the ASIN of any product into Sonar’s Reverse ASIN search bar, and you will immediately see a list of all the keywords a competitor’s product is ranking for. You will also be able to see if a product is running Amazon ads on any of the displayed keywords (indicated by the ‘PPC’ label).

Tip 3: Run Amazon PPC

You should run Amazon PPC to boost your product’s visibility and fast track initial sales. This will also help you generate customer reviews, and in turn the combination of increased sales and reviews will help improve your product’s organic ranking in Amazon’s search results.

This is because sales history is a very strong ranking factor for Amazon; if your product sells better, Amazon will place it higher up in its search results.

When starting out with Amazon PPC, we recommend sellers to invest in the time to learn how to correctly structure and maintain your advertising campaigns from the start. This becomes critical as your business on Amazon scales, and you quickly find yourself managing a rapidly growing set of ad campaigns.