Amazon SEO: How to Rank High For Amazon Searches

Amazon SEO: How to Rank High For Amazon Searches

Amazon is the world’s largest and most competitive e-commerce site. Gaining visibility for any given search on Amazon requires beating the millions of other products that Amazon might list ahead of yours. The product description you write should  be concise, appealing, and informative and use the language that buyers are likely to use when they search.

Here are some specific pointers for developing high-value content that improves your Amazon SEO and hopefully drive more sales on Amazon.

 

Content that Communicates

Start your e-commerce product description with succinct information about the product. Make the features and benefits easy to read by using bullets to highlight what problem the product solves.  The content should be complete enough that the buyer is left with no questions about the benefit of a purchase. TBe sure you research the intended audience and use the same phraseology that they are likely to use in search for the content.

 

Follow Amazon’s Lead

Amazon will tell you their definition of good content. If they give you 500 characters you should use as many as possible (without going over). Amazon will guide you to build facets, bullets and load images. Amazon’s content guidelines can be found in the eZdia Marketplace Content Guide.

 

Craft Enticing Titles Using Your Keywords

The keyword is the strategy behind the content. Keywords are designed to boost the page’s Amazon SEO value and use the phrases that buyers use when searching for your product. Consider using the Google keyword tool to optimize your keywords for Amazon SEO. Don’t forget to incorporate keywords throughout the text for SEO-friendly product descriptions. Remember that Amazon is a transactional site and keywords should focus on non-branded transactional phrases.

 

Use Images in Your Product Description Design

A picture adds visual interest and gives the most precise understanding of a product. It’s worth it to invest in professional photos that clearly show your product from several angles to provide the buyer a better understanding of what to expect from their purchase. Images reinforce your e-commerce content writing and enhance the look of your page. Follow these tips to improve search rankings for all your Amazon product descriptions.

Make it Unique

If you sell the same product on other marketplaces consider customizing the content for the marketplace. No eCommerce site likes to post duplicative content because it offers no SEO strength. Instead every site wants content that is customized to the site, it’s buyers and its search algorithm’s requirements.

Reviews

Amazon values what your customers think. Driving up the review count (especially if they are positive reviews) helps improve a product’s Amazon search rankings, but encouraging a customer to review a product requires both effort and art. Effort because asking for a review is often a manual extra effort and art because the trick is to ask for reviews only from your happiest customers. If you can identify repeat customers for example, the chances of getting a good review is higher than a first time customer.

Sell More on Amazon: Tips and Tricks

Sell More on Amazon: Tips and Tricks

Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer and an exciting place to expand your business. With its user-friendly interface and step-by-step guide, Amazon makes it easy to list products as a third party seller. Despite the simplicity of the listing process, it helps to understand how to get the maximum possible leverage from your Amazon listings. eZdia works on behalf of large- and small-scale e-commerce companies helping research, setup and optimize Amazon product listings. Here are a few of our helpful tips to build a strong foundation that will promote your brand & will help to sell more on amazon.

 

Become a Professional Seller

Amazon has different classes of sellers. Amazon Professional Seller status is preferable to an Individual Seller if you plan to list more than 40 items for sale. Professional Sellers typically have a higher monthly cost in exchange for lower transaction fees.

Professional Sellers will want to register their brands with Amazon in order to ensure maximum control of the product content and how it’s presented on the site.

 

Buy Box: The Secret Formula

The Buy Box is a reward given to vendors by Amazon.  The Buy Box distinction is Amazon’s pick for the best choice of vendor when multiple vendors exist for the same product. Factors that go into winning the Buy Box can range from Reviews to Vendor performance scores to price and availability.The competition to become a high-rated Buy Box seller can be fierce.

 

Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA)

This is Amazon’s contract warehouse service that owns the inventory management and shipping. For a fee Amazon manages placing inventory close to customers plus all the pick, pack and ship services inclusive of returns. We know that participation in the FBA program also helps a vendor’s status for any given search or for achieving Buy Box status. Placing your inventory in Amazon’s care typically helps sell more on Amazon.

 

Product Description and Images

A product description on Amazon is the equivalent of the product’s sales person on constant standby to persuade customers into a purchase. Incorrect information leads to negative feedback and returns, which can lower your relative ranking. Amazon allows up to 2,000 characters in the product description. This enables you to highlight the product’s top features and address likely objections.

Images are important and Amazon allows for multiple images and videos to fully demonstrate your product. At least one image needs to be on a plain white background and should measure at least 1,000 pixels wide.

 

Mastering the Amazon Keyword Tool

Keywords are fundamental to optimizing your content strategy for your Amazon listings. For example, the product title should contain the keyword that is both relevant for the product and also a popular search phrase. Words should not be repeated but employing a breadth of similar words works well on Amazon. Amazon allows up to 500 characters in the product name and it’s advisable to include the most important keywords in the product name. Amazon suggests including a description, the brand, product line, material, color, size, and quantity.

Discounts and Pricing

Discounts are an excellent way to convert potential buyers and build a strong relationship. Providing product discounts in exchange for a review can improve your rankings and helps to sell more on amazon. In turn, your offer may be featured on the “Hot Deals” or “New and Noteworthy” pages, driving additional traffic to your products.

Amazon provides an amazing platform to expand your business as long as you know how to use it to your advantage.

Amazon A+ Content: Creation, Guidelines & Mistakes | eZdia

Amazon A+ Content: Creation, Guidelines & Mistakes | eZdia

As you know, the Amazon marketplace is hugely competitive, so anything that gives you an advantage over the competition has to be worth a shot. While every seller has access to the regular Amazon detail pages, only brands who sign up for Amazon’s Brand Registry get to create A+ Detail Pages.

So, what exactly is an Amazon A+ Detail Page?

Well, it’s essentially an enhanced detail or product page with fewer restrictions on formatting, style, and content types than standard pages. If you use an A+ page, you can include images right in the description, comparison tables, line breaks, formatted text, and more. It lets you show the consumer more and helps you to stand out from the crowd.

What Are the Benefits of an Amazon A+ Page?

Well, with over 2 million sellers on Amazon and more appearing every day, competition is fierce, so you need to give consumers a reason to buy from you. A single paragraph and a few bullets don’t give you much room to be creative or to stand out amongst all of your competitors. With an A+ page, you can really showcase your product and your brand, giving you a significantly higher opportunity to catch a customer’s attention and convert them into buyers. According to Amazon, sellers utilizing A+ pages experience an increase in sales of up to 10%.

A+ Detail Page content can also be made to be easy to skim, so readers can get a sense of all the key product details at a glance. You create this skimmable, user-friendly look by creating bullet lists and breaking up the text into small, manageable chunks interspersed with colorful images. You can also make use of videos and HD photography to show your product at its very best.

How to Create Great Amazon A+ Detail Pages

Once you’re approved on the Brand Registry, you have two options. You can select the self-service module which gives you full creative control, or you can go with the Amazon Builds module. If you go with Amazon Builds, it’ll cost you significantly more and, although Amazon chooses the layout and placements, you’re still responsible for providing them with all imagery and content.

1. Combine Text, Color, and Images

Create rich, compelling content that really shows off your product, but don’t confront your readers with huge blocks of text. Instead, make use of the A+ modules and break your copy up into smaller chunks interspersed with color, images, and white space. Add videos, HD photos, and informative text snippets.

2. Highlight Key Features and Benefits

Make sure your product copy expresses all the key features and their associated benefits. Combining benefits with features delivers crucial info about the product and elicits an emotional response from the consumer, encouraging them to buy because they can see how the product fulfills a need or solves a problem for them. Where possible, back up your copy with photos or videos of the features and benefits you’re discussing. Seeing a product used in a real-world scenario can clearly illustrate a point for a buyer and can create a stronger level of engagement that’s more likely to lead to a sale.

3. Use Different Elements

Using banners and headers break up content and let customers quickly find the section they’re most interested in. Banners can also help to add a pop of color and provide an extra opportunity to add brand style, font, or logo. Create more interest by including charts and tables and to provide detailed information for your customers.

A+ Page by eZdia

Scroll the image to see the full page.

Mistakes to Avoid When Creating A+ Pages

Whether you go for the self-service or built for you option, Amazon A+ Pages have strict criteria, and a rigorous approval process, so if you don’t meet their quality and requirements guidelines, they won’t approve your page.

  1. Don’t include prohibited elements, including:
    1. Trademark symbols
    2. Links to other websites
    3. Business contact information
    4. Shipping information
    5. Other sellers
  2. Don’t use low-quality images
  3. Don’t use third-party quotes, such as quotes from customer reviews
  4. Don’t use the same image more than once
  5. Don’t use plagiarized content
  6. Don’t submit weak content that contains fluff or errors

Taking full advantage of Amazon A+ Detail Pages lets you showcase your products in a way that many of your competitors can’t. For first-party sellers, A+ pages are powerful selling tools, but you’ve got to optimize them properly for the best results. To find out how we can help you with content creation and creative design for your A+ pages, contact us today for a no-obligation chat or request a call back by visiting the link below.

Competitive SEO

Competitive SEO

Competitive SEO

SEO is not a checklist. Despite what some might believe, ranking on page-one is not as simple as doing X and then getting Y. Search engine optimization is about offering the best results for a given search query. And that word “best” makes SEO a competitive sport.

Search optimization strategies typically follow the journey that begins with being seen and continues into the effort of being understood before ultimately making the case that the site should be preferred.

Be Seen

Typically referred to as “technical SEO” this is the art of making sure that your website can be easily consumed by search engines. This is often about code and security and architecture. All of this is critical, but unfortunately some sites get stuck at this stage and fail to progress beyond this phase. The number of potential optimization issues can feel overwhelming. Software scans can produce thousands of optimization opportunities. Most sites will want to determine when the visibility is “good enough” before moving to the next phases of the process.

Be Understood

It’s one thing to put your site out there and it’s another thing for the search engines to understand what the site is all about. Some sites present an image of great breadth while others are narrow and specialized. Sites should think about what they look like to a search engine relative to competitive sites.

As a general rule of thumb, sites that have less organic strength are probably better off focusing, while sites with the most organic strength are probably better off expanding that strength. For sites with a “focus” strategy, the key is to make sure that every page on the site contributes to a consistent story that is aimed at a specific type of searcher.

The best way to evaluate search engine perceptions is to see which pages (ignoring the home page) drive the most traffic to the site. If this is where the traffic is going, this collection of best performing pages likely represents what the search engines think is most relevant on your site.

Be Preferred

Once a site is both seen and understood, the next goal is drive more success by being a preferred source. What does it take to get to page-one of a search engine results page?

Getting to page-one is really hard. A keyword phrase like “ice cream” generates over 2.5 billion clickable options, but the page-one sites typically get over 90% of the clicks. Getting to page-one probably means displacing an existing link and that’s. Competitive SEO is the art of taking precise aim at unseating specific competitors for any given search.

SEO Competitive Content

Google has been clear that getting to page-one is about providing the best result for any given search query. Think of competitive SEO as competitive content and develop strategies for delivering better content than the competition. Getting to page-one starts with understanding which sites are on page-one today.

Sites like Google rely on a large array of indicators to determine how authoritative a site might be. It’s clear that not all good content is equal and that the stronger sites have a built-in advantage. But Google and other search engines are smart enough to realize that its opinion is not nearly as important as the opinion of searchers. Create exceptional content that searchers will eagerly consume and Google will increasingly reward the site with a higher ranking. It may not happen overnight, but it’s clear that competitive content wins in the end.

Building a Competitive Analysis

The first step toward building a competitive content strategy is to conduct a competitive analysis. There are two types of competitive analyses that can help guide a competitive search optimization strategy.

Competitive Site Analysis

Pick a handful of sites that are most similar. Picking large broad sites like Amazon or Walmart, for example, may not be as useful as picking sites that are similar in strength and product breadth. Using SEO research tools start to build a profile of the competition’s strengths and weaknesses. Your analysis should try to understand today’s success and the trajectory of the competitors. Is their SEO footprint growing? Is their strategy helping them gain or causing them to fall behind? This is also an opportunity to establish some site benchmarks to strive for.

Keyword Competitive Analysis

Collect a bundle of aspirational keywords that are representative of the site and then look to see what it takes, on average, to win. What does it take to come in number 10? How competitive is the site’s content when compared to the sites on page-one today? Which site would you want to best? How much content is required to displace one of these sites?

Most competitive analyses conclude that the single best competitive SEO strategy is to increase the overall content depth (word count) in order to deliver a more complete answer appropriate for more search queries.

Conclusions

Getting to page-one of a search result, whether as part of a paid search campaign or an organic strategy, requires having better content for any given search query than the other options. Building a plan to deliver page-one search results requires understanding and monitoring the content strategy of those sites that rank on page-one today. Generally speaking, displacing competitive sites requires building better content. A competitive analysis will help establish what “better” really means.

About the Author

Greg Harris is the Vice President of Strategy at eZdia.com. eZdia helps eCommerce sites design and scale their content strategies. eZdia offers both a site-level competitive analysis and a keyword competitive analysis for free to qualified eCommerce sites.

Google Announces Free Product Listings on Google Shopping

Google Announces Free Product Listings on Google Shopping

How to create a Google Shopping feed

Google Shopping is quickly becoming the single largest repository of product information. In May of 2020 Google started accepting organic listings for the first time in 8 years creating a significant new organic landscape for eCommerce sites. 

This document outlines the steps to take in order to create a Google Shopping feed. At the end of the day the organic winners will be those sites that invest in original content that engages and converts the reader but the first step is to make sure that Google has full visibility to your product catalog.

Here’s the information you’ll want to add to your feed:

  • ID: A unique alphanumeric ID number for every product you sell.
  • Title: This may be the single most important element on the page in terms and should include the most important keywords.
  • Description: Google will accept up to 5,000 characters in the description and again it’s important to integrate the appropriate keywords that will match your customers’ search queries.
  • Link: A link to the product URL on the site.
  • Image link: Google wants the link so that it can easily display your photo within the search results. Use the primary image.
  • Price: It’s important that you deliver the feed frequently and that the price on your feed matches the price on your site. Assume that Google is checking.
  • Brand: This is the brand name of the product and it helps Google match search intent to the product.
  • GTIN: If available, include the Global Trade Item Number. This helps Google to group sellers of the same product. Google can help you find your item’s GTIN if you’re unsure.
  • Shipping Weight, Length, Width & Height: Google Shopping tries to estimate the total cost of shipping. Values like weight, and shipping dimensions are designed to work alongside your shipping settings inside of Google Merchant Center.
  • Sales Tax: This is required in the US only if needed to override the account tax settings for an individual item. Use Google Merchant Center to settings to maintain your overall sales tax information.

Is my site eligible for Google Shopping?

Yes! All retailers can opt-in to show their products across Google Shopping for free once the product feed is submitted to the Google Merchant Center. Keep in mind that Google does restrict listings for illegal, regulated, or sensitive products.

How do I get to page one of Google Shopping?

The feed is critical and serves as Google’s starting point, but frankly that’s just a ticket to the game. In order to get to page one, you’ll have to compete for the best and most relevant product listings against all the other providers with products relevant to the search. Here’s a list of things to consider.

  1. Perfect your product title: The product title may be the most important page element and is weighed heavily in Google’s ranking algorithm. Be sure to optimize the title around the keyword phrases your customers will use to search for the product. You may need to try a few different titles if you aren’t getting to page one.

  1. Test different images: An image can really help your product stick out on a busy SERP, so pay attention to your product photography and understand how to stand out relative to other photos on the SERP. 

  1. Provide as much product detail as possible: While the most important keywords should be in your title, the description is an opportunity to connect with a broader range of search queries. Include as many relevant feed attributes as you can , such as your product category, product type, color, condition, size, and color!

  1. Product Schema: Schema on your website allows search engines to better understand your page. You’ll need to include the required attributes like price, and you can also add reviews to this schema to show the average rating. This can help entice clicks.

Must Have Schema Elements

We have seen in the competitive analysis that most of the eCommerce stores are not using rich snippets effectively. Rich snippets are missing or major product elements are not included in most of the product pages.

The most important details related to a product (which can grab the customer attention) are as following:

product name

eCommerce stores should consider implementing all important Schema Markups to all the product pages.

5. Offers: If you offer free shipping, or the product is on sale, include this information in the shopping feed. This will help the products stand out from its competitors.

6. PayPal: Google now has a partnership with PayPal, to quickly help stores with set up and provide users with “high quality results”. If you need a faster, more secure payment method for products, this is definitely worth looking into.

How will organic Google Shopping results impact paid product listing ads (PLA)?

Retailers can and should continue to show their paid ads alongside these new free organic listings. This will allow retailers more flexibility in how they chose to promote their full inventory across Google. Once the products are approved in Google Merchant Center, a retailer can create a Google Shopping campaign within Google Ads and promote specific items across Google, paying only when a searcher arrives at their site.

Current Google Shopping advertisers will continue to show their ads on the Google Shopping tab, primarily towards the top and bottom of the pages. Nonpaid (organic) listings will take the remaining real estate within that tab.

The shopping results from the Google Search results page, partner search engines, Google images, the Google Display Network, Gmail, and YouTube will still only feature paid shopping ads at this time, so advertisers won’t expect to lose much of their shopping ads traffic.

What is the ‘Google Buy Button’ or ‘Purchases on Google’? 

Google has branded the tool as Purchases on Google but many people refer to it as the Google Buy Button. The buy button appears when people do product-related searches on Android phones or tablets. This is how the process unfolds:

 

  1. Google Shopping product listing ads appear on those searches and if one of the advertisers uses Purchases on Google, its ad will have a “Buy on Google” button.
  2. When the user clicks on the Buy on Google button they go to a landing page on Google, i.e. not the retailer’s website.
  3. The user can add the product to a shopping cart.
  4. They then complete the purchase using Google Wallet, all without ever leaving Google.
  5. The retailer then fulfills the order and is responsible for all communications and interactions with the customer in relation to that order.

    At the time of the launch, Google said it had analyzed conversion data and found the conversion rates for its Product Listing Ads were 50 percent lower on mobile than desktop.

    With the Google Buy Button, Google aimed to increase conversion rates on mobile. Google says its buy button simplifies the process of buying online as the purchaser already has an account with Google and a method of payment.

    This is easier than going to a retailer’s website and, potentially, creating a new account and/or entering delivery and payment information.