How To Optimize Your Amazon Listing for Growth

9 Ways to Optimize Your Amazon Listing

Selling the right products at the right price is only half the battle. To truly succeed in ecommerce, you need to draw in customers — and that means knowing how to optimize your Amazon listings. 

Store owners wouldn’t put their best sellers in a dusty back corner where no one can find them, would they? That’s the same as an online retailer using a suboptimal Amazon listing; no matter how good the product or deal is, very few shoppers are actually going to find it. 

Although Amazon listing optimization is a fairly involved field, we thought we’d help you out with some easy strategies to turn the tides to your favor. Below, we list 9 simple ways you can optimize your Amazon listing, to get your prized products at the top of customer searches. 

1. Identify the Problem

There’s a lot of moving parts in an Amazon listing, and you can simultaneously do some things perfectly while others not so much. Your first step in Amazon listing optimization should be identifying the problems, or just generally accessing the performance of your listing up until now, so you know what to change. (If you’re writing a new listing from scratch, feel free to move on to the next tip.)

The best way to evaluate an existing listing is to check the analytics, specifically the statistics for: 

• Session — the number of visitors to a page; your traffic
• Unit Sessions Percentage — sales conversion rate; of all the visitors, how many actually purchased

These two statistics tell you a lot. If your sessions are low but conversions (unit sessions percentage) are high, it means your product performs well but it’s not being seen — you need to upgrade your marketing, SEO, and advertising. 

If sessions are high but conversions are low, it means your marketing is fine, but something about the product is turning people away. You may need to find a new price point, add extra features, or remake your listing. 

While you’re at it, you also want to look at sales figures and reviews. Sales figures can help you find the perfect pricing point for individual products — a low-demand product can make up for poor sales with a higher price, as long as sales are consistent. Reviews play a major role in Amazon listing performance, too, but we’ll discuss those below. 

2. Discover the Best Keywords for Your Product

Want to know how to rank your product on page 1 of Amazon? A lot of it has to do with your SEO keywords. Amazon listing optimization requires both knowing which keywords to use, and then integrating them in the right places. 

First, you need to do some keyword research to reveal what words shoppers use when they search for products like yours. If you don’t want to pay for an SEO tool (or an Amazon service provider that uses one), you can try troubleshooting different potential keywords and see which ones come up with the best search results for you.

When deciding on keywords, consider both the competition and the costs of bids for PPC campaigns. For Amazon SEO, it’s not always about which keywords have the most searches, but which ones have the best balance between high search volumes and low competition. 

3. Choose Your Product Title Carefully

Above we mentioned that part of using Amazon keywords well is about knowing where to integrate them. The most important place to put keywords is your product title, but before you begin keyword spamming, remember that your product title also needs to be written for shoppers. Because of this dual-functionality, every word in your product title must be chosen with care. 

Usually, your SEO keywords will also be good descriptions of your product, so put the best keywords at the beginning of your title. Amazon’s search algorithm gives a higher priority to the words that start your title, so save the less important ones for the later. 

Shoppers also like to know the details like brand, size, color, etc., so feel free to add those to the end of the title. Don’t overload your product title, though — include only the necessary keywords and product details.

4. Upgrade Your Product Photography 

Product photography is essential to all ecommerce; because shoppers can’t pick up and examine products in person, they rely on product photography to gauge details like size, texture, and even usability. 

Your product photography should be the highest quality possible. High-quality photos show off more of your product’s details, which incentivizes people to buy and increases conversions. 

Photography requires a very different skill set than sales, so you may want to hire a professional to handle your pictures for the best results — we explain more on that below. AMZ One Step is known for Amazon photography in the FBA space. Check them out if you are considering working with professionals.

5. Frame the Narrative of Your Product Description

Just like your product title, the text of your Amazon listings serves the dual purposes of promoting SEO keywords and telling the shoppers what they need to know. In general you want to write your product descriptions briskly and succinctly, with all the necessary information your visitors want to see alongside your keywords. 

One of the most common mistakes for product descriptions, however, is how the narrative is framed. Avoid trying to explain why the shopper should buy the product in general — if someone is searching for the product on Amazon, they are already at the end stages of the sales funnel, which is to say, prepared to buy. In other words, they’ve already decided to buy the product, and are now trying to pick where to buy it. 

Instead, frame your product descriptions from an angle of why they should buy the product from you. You don’t want to mention your competitors by name, but be sure to point out what yours has that theirs doesn’t. 

6. Manage Negative Reviews

Amazon’s search algorithm doesn’t just look at keywords; it also factors in a listing’s performance, including sales, conversion rates, and of course reviews. That means to optimize your listings, you have to manage negative reviews on Amazon. 

Fixing bad reviews on Amazon requires finesse, patience, and flexibility. After June 2021, the only way to contact buyers after they left a bad review (1-3 stars) is through the Brand Dashboard on Seller Central. 

To persuade them to reconsider their review, sellers can send templated emails to either offer a refund or explain the problem. This feature, however, is only available to sellers signed up at the Amazon Brand Registry. 

Another approach is to bury negative reviews with plentiful positive reviews. You can elicit more reviews in general by following up on purchases and requesting reviews through Amazon-approved methods. Software like eComEngine’s Feedback Five can help with that. 

7. Drive Traffic with PPC Campaigns

As we said above, your Amazon listing’s performance plays a big role in how well you do in search results. Amazon wants to send customers to the pages most likely to satisfy them, so the more products you sell, the more Amazon lists you in search results. 

With that in mind, you can see how Amazon traffic is cumulative. More traffic yields even more traffic, so anything you can do to increase visitors is helpful. That’s why it pays to invest in PPC campaigns, Amazon’s internal advertising branch. 

Amazon PPC campaigns are paid advertisements where sellers bid on certain keywords and the winners earn an ad spot on search result pages. If that sounds expensive, the good news is that you only have to pay when users actually click on your ad (Pay Per Click). 

PPC campaigns rely on their own separate techniques, but they are essential to optimizing your Amazon listings. If you’d like to learn more, here’s all you need to know about Amazon PPC. 

8. Take Advantage of A+ Content

Formerly called Enhanced Brand Content (EBC), Amazon’s A+ Content is a special tool for registered Amazon brands that allows additional features for product descriptions. Specifically, A+ Content enables extras like: 

• Full-screen carousel image displays
• Unique image and text layouts
• Custom paragraph headers for descriptions
• Built-in product comparison charts
• Links to other products from your brand

Because it’s only for branded products, you first need to join the Amazon Brand Registry before using this feature. That means if you’re reselling another brand’s products, you are not eligible. 

However, for Amazon sellers with their own product lines, A+ Content can be a huge game-changer in Amazon listing optimization. Take a look at our complete guide to A+ content to learn more. 

9. Let a Professional Manage It

Between the research, maintenance, and upkeep, optimizing your Amazon listings is a full-time job. When you’re already focused on the sales side of your business, duties like product photography, SEO keyword research, and managing advertising campaigns might seem foreign to you. 

That’s why, if you have the resources, sometimes it pays to outsource these tasks to professionals. After all, who could make a better product video, an expert filmographer with thousands-of-dollars worth of equipment, or you with your iPhone? 

At AMZ One Step, we have a team of Amazon experts in a variety of fields, from photography to videography to PPC management to SEO keyword ranking. Our only job is to improve your sales, and we accomplish this by our technical expertise of how Amazon works. To see how we can help you specifically, schedule a free consultation now and we’ll answer any questions you have.