In 2018, global e-commerce revenues reached over $2.8 trillion dollars. To put this in perspective, if e-commerce was a country, its GDP would be the fifth largest in the world, outranking the UK.
One of the biggest, if not the biggest, platforms for e-commerce businesses is Amazon. This sheer size of transactions on Amazon represents an enormous potential for sellers. It also means there is a great deal of competition, meaning it is tougher than ever to stand out on Amazon and drive customers to your listings.
In this article, we will cover how to use Amazon’s platform to drive traffic to your listings, and open your business up to incredible increases in sales, revenue, and exponential growth.
What is the Number 1 Way to Drive Traffic To Your Amazon Listing?
In one word: rankings. There are many ways to drive more traffic to your Amazon listing, but how your product ranks on Amazon searches and in category filters is by far the most important. Ranking your product on page one of Amazon search results will see dramatically more traffic than if you are ranking on page two or three. The reason for this? Customers these days have exceptional short attention spans, and will rarely click past the first page of results.
Ranking your product comes down to Amazon SEO: yes, SEO isn’t limited to websites and Google! Amazon has its own version of SEO, which determines how products are ranked. How this works exactly, and Amazon’s algorithm, will be covered in the next sections.
How To Rank Your Product: The A9 Algorithm
A9 is Amazon’s algorithm, which it uses to rank products. When people hear about Amazon SEO, or Amazon’s algorithm, they tend to assume it is like Google’s algorithm. However, the two are very different.
Google’s primary goal is to find the results, which closely match the user’s search. Amazon’s aim is to find results, which match the user’s search terms, but importantly, are most likely to sell. After all, Amazon is a business and has a vested interest in promoting products which users are most likely to buy.
This means that keywords are important, because they help Amazon’s algorithm see whether your product is relevant to each search. However, even more important is sales rates, which demonstrates potential for future sales, and thus encourages Amazon to rank your product highly. So the logic is simple: rank higher, increase traffic, increase sales, meaning you will rank higher still.
Simple? Not quite. But if you know how, it can definitely be achieved. And how you do that is what we will cover next.
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Nuts and Bolts Part 1: Keywords
There is one area, which is common between SEO and Amazon SEO: keywords. Ranking your product on Amazon means using as many high volume, relevant keywords as possible. Use Amazon keyword tools such as Keyworx to research keywords, and then use on-page optimization to place these strategically in your listing so as to optimize for SEO as well as conversion (more on this below). Importantly, you should also track keywords through these same tools, to check for changes in keyword rankings, which can happen rapidly on Amazon, and adjust your listing as necessary. For optimum results, you should do this on a daily basis: luckily with the right tools you can automate this process.
Nuts and Bolts Part 2: On-Page Optimization
As mentioned above, ranking on Amazon is part of a reinforcing circle, whereby you make strong sales, causing you to rank highly, meaning you make more sales. The key to getting started with this cycle lies in the first seven days following the launch of your product on Amazon: this is the critical window you have to gain a strong foot-hold and secure a high Amazon ranking.
In order to do this, you must focus on on-page optimisation and have this well in place before you launch your product listing, meaning applying your keyword research to the parts of the listing which are relevant to Amazon SEO.
The six main elements of an Amazon listing which impact on Amazon SEO are:
- Product Listing Title
- Bullet Points
- Description or Enhanced Brand Content
- Back-end Search Terms
- Category
- Benefit Driven Imagery
Another key element is on-page optimization is making sure your listing is optimized for conversions, so that you turn all that traffic you are generating into actual sales. This is a whole subject in itself which we don’t have time to cover here: check this Amazon SEO guide for more on conversion rate optimisation on Amazon.
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Other Factors in Ranking Your Product on Amazon
In this critical first seven days of your product listing (and preferably beyond), you should also focus on other methods to drive organic traffic to your listing. This will allow you to maximize sales rates, helping you to rank your product. Amazon PPC advertising is one way to do this, but there are also external methods (meaning those outside of Amazon) to drive traffic to your listing.
These are essentially any of the digital marketing tools you might use to market any other product or business: social media, content marketing, link building, email list marketing, and so on. Just make sure that whatever marketing you put out includes a link to your product listing and encourages potential customers to visit your listing. These external marketing approaches can be especially effective because they drive quality traffic to your listing: customers who already know something about your product, so are more primed to buy.
The other major factor, which influences Amazon SEO and rankings, are reviews. Amazon favors products with a large number of positive reviews, so be sure to have a strategy in place to encourage your customers to leave reviews. In particular, carry out a pre- and post-launch push for reviews, through your existing network or customer base, for example.
By taking a researched and strategic approach to Amazon SEO, which incorporates the various factors influencing Amazon rankings, you will be able to rank your product, supporting more sales, and thus further strengthening your product ranking.
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