Keywords are an important part of many aspects of selling on Amazon. Sellers need to keep up to date on Amazon keywords best practices if they want to be successful selling on Amazon. As time passes, new trends appear as old ones become less popular. This is especially true as we learn more about how Amazon’s algorithm works and how sellers can make adjustments to product listings, advertising strategies, and other areas in order to rank higher in search results and hopefully get more sales.
Amazon Keywords Best Practices for 2019
Ranking Factors
The first thing to understand about how Amazon assigns ranking is identifying the two factors that impact ranking the most:
Having a relevant product listing
Essentially, you need to have a compelling product listing that gets people to buy your product. This helps you rank better, and creates a cycle that sets you up for continued success. But, how do you get that cycle going?
The first step is to use highly-relevant keywords BUT avoid keyword stuffing. We’ve talked about keyword stuffing before, and these days Amazon has been restrictive on how many characters are allowed in a product listing title in the hopes of preventing keyword stuffing. Every word matters in your title, so you want to make the best use of every one. If you have important keywords that do not fit or flow well in your product listing title, make sure you utilize your back end search terms wisely. This is the perfect place for keywords that you cannot fit in other places that are on your product listing but still want to try and rank for.
Here is an example of keyword stuffing:
The title has a lot of extra words in it that are not really necessary in getting a customer to click on it. For example, it’s unlikely that a customer would or would not click on the this listing because it has or doesn’t have the words “newborn,” “infant,” “toddler,” or “children.” While these are important for the product, it would be better for the seller to relocate those keywords to their backend search terms or use them only in the product listing, like in the bullet points or description. It would make the title flow better if it read something like:
“Baby Girl Soft Nylon Knotted Bow Headband Hair Accessories”
Reduce Bounces
Amazon’s goal is to display products to customers that are most likely to get sales (obviously, because that is how both Amazon and sellers make money). This is why Amazon keywords best practices are so important for your product listings. Even if you have checked all the boxes you think you need to, if your product listing has a lot of traffic that “bounces” (customers clicking your product listing from search results and then leaving quickly without purchasing) then Amazon will start to rank your listing lower and lower.
Maximize Optimizations
One common mistakes sellers will make regarding Amazon keywords best practices is putting the keywords they think are most important in every place they can because they think it will make their product listing rank higher. If you have a keyword in your title or bullet points, you do NOT need to also put them in your backend search terms. Backend search terms have a limited character allowance, so you want to prioritize keywords that you are not able to use in your product listing. Avoid wasting space with duplicated keywords. This is especially true for keywords in your title. Another important note is to avoid placing important keywords towards the end of your backend search term fields because they may end up getting cut off due to character limitations. The limit is currently 250 bytes (spaces and punctuation like commas, dots or semicolons do not count but hyphens, slashes, colons, and brackets do count towards the limit). If you have a keyword that goes over this limit, even by one character, the whole keyword will not be indexed.
If you are struggling to come up with keywords that are applicable to your product, consider using synonyms. Double check the relevancy by searching for those keywords on Amazon before adding them to your listing. If you see products similar to yours, then add them! If you don’t, they aren’t going to be helpful in driving the right kind of traffic to your listing, so don’t add them.
Amazon gives some great recommendations on how to craft your bullet points. Bullet points are a great way to incorporate keywords into your product listing while highlighting the important features and benefits of your product. If you want to get examples of how to best-utilize Amazon keywords best practices in your bullet points, check out how Amazon uses them for their own products. They know who their algorithm works best, so it can’t hurt to try and emulate their strategies for bullet points.
These are just a few examples of how to use Amazon keywords best practices to help boost your rankings and get more sales. Stay tuned to our YouTube channel and the Sellozo blog to stay up to date on trends in best practices for Amazon Sellers.
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