An expert view at increasing sales through Amazon listing service optimization

“How do I rank my Amazon listing so as to get them to the search’s first page?”

This question is often asked by new course members, group members, as well as our podcast fans almost every day. Reason for this, is the fact that it is a good question to say the very least.

We also tried to ask ourselves this very same question a while ago. What response did we give to this question? Was it more giveaways? Or did we suggest even more reviews? Or perhaps an Amazon listing service?

These might be true. But the truth is that focusing only on the above mentioned methods will not get you a long way. That is due to the fact that getting your product to the first page and making sure that it stays there are two entirely different things. You shouldn’t only place your focus on having an outstanding launch – paying attention to the landing as well will do you a lot of good.

The fact is that, a lot of sellers are not making use of this for their Amazon business currently. If you can take some time out to surf through Amazon catalogue, then you will certainly come across what I am trying to pass across. Amazon listings that drive traffic but have some very bad pictures accompanying them.

You will see titles that are made just by mumbling up some long stream of keywords and bullet points that do not even move the buyers.

And yet, you keep wondering why your product pops up for several keywords and why your conversion rates are low.

Therefore, it was not until we began to create amazing Amazon listings prior to the use of additional ranking and launching strategies that we began to observe consistency and high ranking above our competitors.

A multi-million dollar Amazon seller, creator of the PPC Blue print, Liran Hirschorn has agreed with this idea. He further stressed the importance of his decision to become an expert at Amazon Listing Optimization, and keyword research early in his private label career has contributed extensively to his Amazon success rates. In his own words.

“Early in the year 2016, I dived into a product niche that was mostly dominated by sellers from China. It was no news to me that words has been going around that the Chinese sellers are going to take over Amazon completely as their prices were actually lower than the normal. Even though I was aware of this fact, I decided to go into the niche due to the fact that it has not being saturated. There was also another thing that I noted about sellers in this niche. There listings were really bad! Let me just put it that almost all the sellers’ listings contained the phrase “Best Quality and Hot Sales” right in their product description or bullets. I did not just introduce a new high quality product, but I also ensured that there can be no reasonable comparison with other listings of the Chinese sellers. And just in 2017, I already generated revenue of more than $1 Million from this particular product. Note, this is just one of my brands.”

I’m quite sure you will be inquisitive about how he did it!

Reason for you to waste no further time in optimizing your Amazon Listing

Just like the popular search engine Google, Amazon also makes use of their own search engine algorithm which ranks the order in which the listings appear when a search query is made. Only that for Amazon, the exact search ranking formula is unknown, but what we do know is that the sales and sales history do play a very vital role. That is the reason why paying attention to the “launch” of your product is of paramount importance.

What a lot of sellers do not know is that if you fail to optimize your Amazon listing using the right keywords and images as well copy before launching, you are getting it all wrong.

The 2 major reasons why you might be missing out are:

1. First, for each time that a particular listing gets sales, the indexed keywords which are used for the listing gets some boost in rank strength. This is irrespective of the fact that the customer has bought that particular product without searching that specific keyword.
2. Second reason is due to the fact that even if your product comes first after introducing a giveaway launch, with a bad copy and listing image, you still won’t convert. If you fail to convert your sales, there is a high chance that you will lose out on the rank that you have so much worked for.
   So as to avoid that, let’s take a look at some 7 cool tips that you can utilize to optimize your Amazon listings and get the better of your competitors.

The tips and tricks that we employ to supercharge our Amazon listings

Tip #1: Use only Amazing photos

A picture they say is worth more than a thousand words. But when it comes to Amazon, it is even worth potentially more than a $1000! One of the best ways that you can make your product stand out uniquely is through the use of pictures. While the power of images to your listing is quite limited in driving traffic, they can be the deciding factor when it comes to the conversion of your customers. After spending quite a lot of time looking for the perfect product and even thousands of dollars bringing them to the market, I’m sure a hundred and fifty dollars on pictures won’t be too much for its role.

Let’s take a look at some of the protocols to follow around images and the ways in which you can stand out using great looking images.

Amazon Main Product Photo/Cover Photo

In accordance to Amazon’s TOS (Terms of Service), all main photos of your products should have plain white backgrounds, and be free of models and props. Only the image of the item which should be more than 80% of entire document that is currently for sale. However, it really constrains on what you can do as regards your main product image. Even though this restriction has being made, you should know that some images certainly stand out than others. Even though you might have come across a number of sellers with their badges, or texts attached to their main images, you should know that this is definitely not allowed on Amazon. What do you think will happen to these set of sellers? Well, they will only get their listings suppressed by Amazon until they can make amendments by providing the required image that meets their Terms of Service. If something worse happens, then you must have been a repeat offender.

Secondary Product Photo

A lot of sellers have the wrong believe that the secondary images photo also have the same limitation like the main image. For starters, the secondary images are the photos that you can only see in the product details page. It is clearly stated on Amazon’s Terms of Service that you can employ the use of infographic photo, product features, comparison chart, dimension/size guide, lifestyle images and texts on the secondary images as long as it is relevant and conveys accurate information of the product and does not confuse the buyers. This gives you much flexibility to explore.

Let’s see some cool ways by which you can make full advantage of your secondary images.

Infographic Photo-Highlight the product features of your product.

A good place where you can easily highlight the amazing features of your product is through the secondary product photo. It is no doubt that people prefer to look at a infographic graphic representation of a product feature than just reading them out on your listing.

Product Dimension-Product size.

A perfect dimension guide photo can describe your product more clearly, if your product has specific size variation then sure it would be a good idea to describe more about your product.

Comparison Chart- Show your product batter than competitors.

Show your product to customer why the item batter than others through a comparison chart. This is really cool technique to catch your customers at a time.

Lifestyle Photo- Show your product in action.

You will like to connect with your customers emotionally and make them see how it will feel like to make use of your product. So make it even more interesting for them by making use of photos with models using your products. It’s an amazing way to differentiate your product from that of your competitors. Some of your customers might not have had the opportunity to see the product in action and be ignorant of how it works, so if they can see it in action in a picture, it will hasten their decision making on the purchase of the product. You might be thinking of the cost implication of hiring a professional photographer and models to create the best scene for your product shoot. It does not have to be totally expensive as you can always resort to digitally enhancing your plain images so as to convert them to lifestyle images.

Amazon Image Spots.

It will be in your own personal interest to make use of all the available image spots that is provided to you by amazon. It is always saddening to see a private label listing on Amazon that has only a single or two images on it. A lot of potential customers prefer to assess the images of the product before making a final purchase or reading the texts on the listing. Amazon provides up to 7 image spots which can be easily seen on your product detail page. It will be in your best interest to fill up these spots with images.

Point out Promotions.

A good way to utilize images is by pointing out the available running promotions on your product listing. This can be in form of a public promotion that is running with a general coupon code.

Uniqueness on Holidays or Gift idea.

You do not have to limit this to Christmas only even though it works best during this end of the year holidays. You should try as much as you can to update some of your secondary images to the theme of the current sales period. This can also perform some magic for the different seasons of the year. There is nothing that can be compared to a professional shoot with models and great lifestyle settings. Even though they will cost you more, they are definitely worth the
cost. While there is no specific guide on the rights and wrongs for Amazon, launching your products with digitally enhanced photographs might do the trick till you are comfortable.

Tip #2: Creating a Title rich in Keyword with Benefits

When it comes to keyword, the title is unarguably the most important part of your product detail page. Although no one can claim to have a solid knowledge of how Amazon search algorithm works, we sure know that placing your keywords carefully in the title has a lot to play in ranking your product. Having said that, creating a great title does not come easy. We have created some guidelines to help you create great titles.

Guidelines for your Title.

To get started with, you should know that Amazon frowns on your stuffing your title with keywords. This involves the practice of putting together as many keywords into your title as possible even if it doesn’t make sense. You should try as much as you can to avoid that.

However, you should also know that you should always endeavor to include as many relevant keywords as you can into your title. How should your title look? We will first list some of the normal “guidelines” that Amazon includes in its Seller Central. Then we will look into our own personal recommendations for your title.

The guidelines from Seller Central are as listed below:

Capitalization:

• Ensure all words start with a capital letter
• NEVER should you use ALL CAPS for any word.
• Do not capitalize conjunctions and articles such as “and”, “the”, “for” etc
• Never capitalize prepositions that do not reach five letters. Examples are “over”, “on” etc.

Symbols and Numbers:

• Employ the use of numerals (5 in place of five)
• Write out measurements in full (for instance 4 inches not 4”)
• Never include type 1 high ascii characters such as ©
• Avoid symbols like $ * ! ¬

Information on your product:

• Avoid the use of promotional messages like “free shipping” or “sales”
• Do not include price
• Put in the color and size in “child” ASINs so as to show variation
• Avoid the use of commentary, like “Best Seller” or “Hot sales”
• Only include merchant name if your product is a private label. Otherwise you should not include it.

Maximizing Limits of Characters

Sticking to the guidelines above will get you started to coming up with a great title. A lot of people still ask a very common question. “What should be the length of a good title?” The answer is not that straightforward. Amazon suggests a general rule of a maximum character length of just 50 characters. To be really honest with you, it is quite short. Amazon generally allows up to 200 characters limit for the title while some categories have even less. We usually prefer to fill up the space by explaining as plain as possible what the product does with relevant keywords. It is not uncommon to see that an Amazon listing services will give you a title that will max out the character spaces that are available for you.

Fill in Benefits that are missing in others

While we have seen how relevant keywords can bring traffic to your listing by including them in your title. However, what happens when the customer finally comes across your product and reads through your title? This is exactly where a lot of Amazon sellers are failing. You should know for a fact that your product title is often the best place to expose the best feature about your product.

Tip #3: Customizing your title for Mobile

According a recent study, in 2015 alone, it was estimated that more than 69% of holiday online shopping took place on a mobile device. You can surely guess that the number will have shoot up pretty much since then. This is not only true for the holidays, but throughout the years. You should also know that a lot of mobile users scroll through contents quite rapidly!

What is the implication of this for your business? From the viewpoint of an Amazon customer and shopper myself, if the title coming up does not match what I need, you can be sure that I am not clicking on that title to see what it contains. In comparing the mobile view with the desktop view, you will note that even though the mobile views show a good amount of information, you will want them to see those important keywords up there.

Tip #4: Product Bullets that drive sales

The listed highlights of a listing are usually where a lot of customers go so as to get the needed details of a listing. What do you think that means for you? It means that you should work on them! Here is another area that a lot of sellers are missing out a lot and fail to maximize to its fullest potential. You do not just want to bore the reader with some unnecessary information. Here is a good place where you can creatively combine the power of relevant keywords and good sales copy. For starters you can consider the following:

Benefits and Features

Among the most effective ways of making use of the bullet points, listing out the features then making the benefits follow is a great way. How do you take the best out of this technique? There is a little trick that really worked out for me. Always immediately include the words “so that” in the bullet just after writing the particular feature. Yes, you heard that right! Those little 2 words will help you a lot when writing out the highlights of your products.

For instance:

“These fishing lines have been provided with gloves so that you can easily have a firm grip on them!”

A lot of sellers do not encounter problem in writing out the features of their listings. Where the problem lies is actually writing the benefits which are usually skipped. Taking note and including the words “so that” helps you to remember to explain why the customer needs such feature! People are not just interested in the things that the product can do, but they will like to know how it will help them.

Details Vs. Skimmers

Whether you are a skimmer or a detail reader, you will get the two types of readers as your customers. So how about you take care of these two group of readers? One good way that you can achieve this is through the listing of the important features of your product in a bullet so that they can stand out.

A way that several sellers do this is by including the feature of every bullet in front of them and making them all caps. A good example is this:

FREE GLOVE INCLUDED – The fishing line comes with some handy gloves so that they will help you to provide those firm grips without slipping.

Doing this will ensure that skimmers get the main feature by just skimming through the contents and people who like to read word for word will also get something to feed their eyes on. That’s a win-win situation.

Your Call to Action

Having a call to Action helps you to tell your buyer to purchase your product. Are you in the habit of missing this important part of your listing out? You should start trying to include them. They can look like this:

“Buy your fishing line now to begin experiencing a whole new fishing experience!”

In order to carry the mobile viewers along in your call to action, always try to include them early in your bullet points. When viewing on mobile, it is usually only the first 3 bullet points that gets listed out, except the shopper clicks on it to see more product details. You will definitely like to include your most precious information within these three bullets.

Tip #5: No Guarantee or A Lifetime Guarantee?

The phrase “Life guarantee” sure sounds pretty strong and like a very long time. A lot of sellers refuse to include this in their listing because of the long time that it promises. So, it is common for you to come across products with “30 days guarantee!” which in fact is the minimum default set by Amazon or even “10 months guarantee!” The problem that comes with putting a limited guarantee is that the customers tend to associate the amount of guarantee to how long the product will last when they buy one.

Don’t you think they are right? All those products with warranty tends to get spoilt only when the warranty period expires.

That is the reason why adding the phrase “lifetime guarantee” on your product listing can help you to instil more confidence in customers to help increase the conversion of your product. Also, how many customers do you think will keep in mind that their new purchased product has a lifetime warranty even just a few months after purchase? In case your product is of inferior quality and may not last more than 2 months, then this strategy is not certainly for you. For good quality products, including a “lifetime guarantee” has proven to have much more upsides than downsides.

Tip #6: Product Descriptions that increases conversion

Although your product description on Amazon has little importance when compared to your title, bullet points and images, it is still yet another area that can help you to sell your products to your customers. The product description is not one of the first things that you will see on the page as it appears much lower on the page. Having that in mind, some of the few powerful ways that you can use to have an edge over your competitors are as described below:

Include an FAQ Section

You should first know that the main reason that a customer will check your product description is to get more information about your product. You have failed to sell your product to them with your images, bullets or title and they are trying to look for more information to provide answers to their pending questions. Your only shot at doing that is your product description. You can go ahead to create your own Frequently Asked Questions in your description. You can create this based on your own intuition of the questions that are likely to be on the customer’s mind or based on the questions that you are often asked by prospects. This is a great avenue to provide answers to your customer’s questions so that they can get more confidence to buy.

Your Call to Action

It is always a good idea to begin the product description with a call to action. In case you have a general promotion that is currently on or a bonus available to your customer, tell them right away to add the product to their cart so that they can take good advantage of the promotion currently going on.

Let them in on your Brand Story

In case you do not have any access to EBC (Enhanced Brand Content), then the product description is just perfect for you to let the customers in on your brand story. Although it might not be a good way to hit some more keywords to your listing, it is however a good way for you to build your general brand awareness. In case you have a mission, cause or goal that you are trying to support through your business, you can be sure that this is the perfect avenue for you to expose the story and let them in on it. With respect to the product, a few customers prefer to buy a product that they think has some sort of positive background. Even if all it takes is for them to support a starting business owner.

Additional Keywords

It is sure that you must have exhausted your most relevant and main keywords in the title and bullets of your listing. If you have done that, there is no point repeating them anymore for your ranking purposes. Just including it once is enough. If you however, have a list of “secondary” keywords that you will like to include, then you can go ahead to place them in the description. You can also include words that get less search volume but are still related to your product. There are no negative impacts of including some additional keywords to your listing.

HTML OR NO HTML

The Amazon’s product description field by default is just plain. All your description will look like a block of text if you have quite a lot of words in them. The only problem that this brings is that it is not exactly easy to read, and a lot of your customers won’t even bother to read them. So what can you do to improve this? Well, you can resort to using the HTML. Making use of bolds and page break is well within the Amazon’s TOS, but we you should certainly use this with caution. Some of the few tags to consider are as listed below:

• Paragraph text
  is one great way to structure and breakdown your sentences or paragraphs.
• tag will help you to create break lines and break your texts. It is one of the most important, and it will allow you to structure your texts and prevent them from just appearing as one large block of text.
• Bolded Text will help you to lay emphasis on your words and turn them to Bolded Texts
• You can include bullets. The best way to do this, is to actually copy a bullet point and paste it in the description field. Putting some spaces before your text and a
  tag to break the line will make it more structured. You should know that Amazon can make changes to their rules on HTML at anytime, so you should always have your plain text description handy to use when needed. If you make use of Amazon listing service, it is not uncommon to see them provide you with the two versions (both HTML and PLAIN versions)

Tip #7: Making use of EBC (Enhanced Brand Content)

EBC is one cool way of displaying some additional images about your product and texts. The most exciting part? Now for Mobile, the Enhanced Brand Content is displayed before the bullet points.

There are five different templates for you to explore with the EBC. We usually recommend the 1 header image – maximum size 970 x 600 pixels 5 images with maximum 300 pixels square each and t additional text placements format.

YOUR STORY

Earlier, we have discussed about displaying your brand story in your product description. You can do this in an even better way through the EBC!

Requirements of EBC

In order for you to take advantage of EBC, you have to first register your brand. It is easy for you to have a brand registered once you have your trademark. Usually, getting the trademark is what poses the challenge for the greater part of sellers.

Conclusion: How do you Master the Act of Listing Optimization?

What exactly is the secret formula to becoming a master when it comes to optimizing Amazon listing? Just like a lot of things, you need to dedicate your time and practice often. You can either decide to invest your time and money into becoming an expert when it comes to listing optimization, and you can also go ahead to spend your time doing other things that you long for, and get an Amazon listing service to do the job for you. Your final decision is entirely based on you and the stage of your business.

Conclusion

Some of the steps for you to optimize your listings and increase your sales are as listed here:

1. Images pays a huge role in convincing your customers. Invest in getting professional product photos at an affordable cost
2. Get to know your keywords and just how to research on them. Ensure that your most important keywords goes in your title and optimize the title for mobile devices.
3. In creating great bullets, include a call to action, features and benefits, as well as a lifetime guarantee to help your customers order for your product.
4. Work on your Amazon listings but avoid performing several changes. Making changes to your Amazon title & bullets too much could really have some bad effect on your search rankings.
5. Employ the services of Amazon listing service so as to take off the stress of optimizing your products from you. Although you can become an expert with time if you dedicate some time to it, but where is the time? Your listings shouldn’t be something that you experiment with.
6. Keep repeating the process by introducing new products to the market. Ensure that you are adding new listings every time and keep selling those products!