Amazon can be a cut-throat e-commerce environment. The chances that you have a unique product that no other seller offers are slim to none, so there will always be at least a few other online retail businesses competing with you for the same customers.
Of course, it can help to cut your prices, so you’re the most cost-effective game in town, but there’s only so far you can take that. And if that’s your only path to scoring more sales, you’ll be left high and dry as soon as someone else lowers their prices more.
That’s why it’s so important to include other ways to make your Amazon store attractive to busy consumers. Excellent customer service makes a big difference, but one thing that often goes overlooked is the role played by search optimization.
Bear in mind that people also use Amazon differently today. While people used to come to the platform once they’d decided what to buy and were ready to make a purchase, now 63% of consumers say that they use Amazon and other similar marketplaces for initial product research. If your Amazon SEO is good enough, you could capture the attention of these still-searching shoppers and make a sale.
Now that we’ve convinced you that Amazon SEO deserves attention, here are five ways that you can up your game and drive more sales.
Answer customer questions
Invest time into writing your product descriptions and product detail bullet points so that they provide the information that customers most want to find. The more closely your content answers the most commonly-asked consumer questions about the product, the better your SEO and the higher you’ll rank.
Long-tail keywords are crucial in this regard. You’ll need to analyze Amazon user searches to identify the long-tail keywords and queries that are asked most often — it’s not enough to rely on the research you may have done for Google SEO because people will ask different queries on Amazon.
Encourage customer reviews
As online shopping skyrocketed during the COVID-19 pandemic, so did the importance of online ratings and reviews. When people can’t interact physically with a product, they have to rely even more on the experiences of those who came before them. In 2021, product reviews had the biggest impact on purchase decisions, outranking price, free shipping, and even recommendations from friends and family.
It’s best to set up an ongoing strategy for gathering reviews. Email customers after delivery to check that the purchase experience met their expectations and remind them to leave a review because recency matters for consumer reviews. Don’t be tempted to remove negative or one-star reviews, either; consumers distrust any seller with a perfect five-star score, and most of them want to read a negative review as well as positive ones.
Include Amazon product videos
Recently, Amazon added Amazon Product Videos as a feature that sellers can use to optimize their stores, and it would be foolish to ignore their potential. In e-commerce in general, video marketing is wildly successful at the moment, with 88% of consumers in 2021 saying they were convinced to buy a product after watching a video and 73% agreeing that they prefer to learn about a product by watching a video rather than by reading text.
Your video doesn’t have to be complex; simply demonstrating your product in use, or taking 360-degree video of the product from all angles, can be enough to give you an edge.
Keep track of your competition
SEO is always a competition — you’re struggling against other Amazon sellers for the best images and video, highest number of reviews, most optimized product descriptions, and more. But it’s hard to win any competition if you don’t know what you’re competing against.
Use SEO analysis tools to compare your conversion rates against your rivals. Benchmark metrics like time on page, what percentage of visitors watched the product video till the end, and overall conversion rates against other Amazon vendors, and then check back regularly to see if and how fast you’re improving. Compare yourself both against specific direct competitors and against the average for your product category.
Optimize your product title
Last but not least, your product title might be short, but it has huge power over your overall SEO success. Make sure to put the most important product keywords into the title but without overdoing it, as Amazon’s algorithm frowns on keyword stuffing. It’s also important to follow Amazon’s other best practice guidelines, like keeping titles to 50 characters or less and avoiding special characters.
Amazon SEO strategy could make or break sales in 2022
There are many moving parts that go into Amazon sales success, but SEO is one of the most important. By optimizing your product title and descriptions for customer queries, monitoring your competition, and maximizing reviews and video content, you can boost your revenue in 2022.