Amazon SEO: Step by Step Product Optimization [2018 Best Practice]

This is the first thing you need to know before you start to optimise your product.

Not following Amazon's TOS or requirements may get your listing removed from the entire Amazon search.

#1 Amazon's Official Guide for Product Titles

Titles should be approximately 60 characters long. You only have a moment to catch the eye of a shopper.

Capitalization:

• Capitalize the first letter of each word
• Do not use ALL CAPS
• Conjunctions (and, or, for) and articles (the, a, an) should not be capitalized
• Don't capitalize prepositions with fewer than five letters (in, on, over, with)

Numbers and symbols:

• Use numerals (2 instead of two)
• Spell out measurements ( 6 inches not 6" )
• Don't use symbols, such as ~ ! * $ ?
• Don't use Type 1 High ASCII characters (Æ, ©, ô, etc.)

Product information:

• Include the size and color in "child" ASINs for variations (In Variation Relationships, only the title of the parent ASIN is shown on the detail page. The title for the selected child ASIN will appear once the ASIN is added to the customer's cart, so it is important to include the variation attributes (such as size and color) in the title for the child ASIN.)
• Don't include price or promotional messages, such as "sale" or "free ship"
• Don't use subjective commentary, such as "Hot Item" or "Best Seller"
• Your merchant name for Brand or Manufacturer information should not be included, unless your product is Private Label

#2 Amazon's Official Guide for Bullet Points

• Highlight the five key features you want customers to consider
• For every feature, include a benefit
• Begin each bullet point with a capital letter.
• Write with sentence fragments and do not include ending punctuation.
• Make each bullet point brief yet descriptive; This is not the place for paragraphs
• Do not include promotional and pricing information.
• Include warranty information or included accessories as the last bullet point
• Use semi-colons to separate phrases within a single bullet point
• Always use numerals, never spell out numbers, in bullet points
• 500 characters maximum (can vary by product category)

#3 Amazon's Official Guide for Descriptions

In addition to the manufacturer's description, you can add your own description of your products. Give concise, honest, and friendly overview of its uses and where it fits in its category.

Discuss the features and benefits of the product and focus on your product's unique properties. Don't mention competitors. Highlight the best applications for the product. If the product has limitations, you can say so and upsell.

Check spelling and grammar before submitting. The Product Description is a text-only field with a limited number of characters that varies by product category.

#4 Amazon's Official Guide for Search Terms

After making sure your product listing is written in a way that follows Amazon's TOS, it is time for you to know how to optimize every single section of it to achieve higher keyword ranking.

Let's see what are the most important sections in your listing page that determines your product ranking (from the most to the least important):

1. Listing URL 
2. Product Title
3. Bullet Points
4. Search Terms
5. Descriptions

Amazon SEO for Product Title & URL

Keywords appear in the product title and URL are given the most weight for ranking by Amazon A9. That's why you should put your most important keywords in these 2 areas.

As we all know, titles can be easily changed in sellercentral. But most Amazon sellers don't know they can actually control the URL of their product.

The URL we are talking about here is the canonical URL, which is the official Amazon URL of your product page without adding any parameters at the end.

It looks something like this:

https://www.amazon.com/Be-Smart-Get-Prepared-injuries/dp/B00CYBXH7G

The part that can help with ranking is the red highlighted one. 

You are not able to edit the canonical URL as it is given to you by Amazon.

When you first set up the product, Amazon will choose 5 words from your title that they think can represent your product, and use those 5 words to construct your URL. 

Once your URL is given, it cannot be changed anymore.

But here is the simple but powerful trick we used to insert our targeted keywords into the red part of the URL.

When we first list the product, we give it a title with 5 words only. This leaves Amazon with no choice but to use those 5 words in the canonical URL. Then we wait for a few days and rewrite the title to make it more descriptive with more long-tail keywords.

Since Amazon will only include 5 words in their URL, you need to make sure those 5 words you choose are your main targeted keywords! This is super important as you only have 1 chance to make it right.

Let's make this more powerful now!

As I mentioned above, each canonical URL only contains 5 words. But why does the one below have 6?

https://www.amazon.com/Swiss-Safe-First-Piece-32-Piece/dp/B072QL11QN

Let's see what are the 6 words chosen by Amazon.

From here, we know Amazon treat the phrase "32-piece" as 1 word since they are connected with "-".

So the trick we learn from here is: Use "-" to connect keywords in your first title if you want the URL to include more than 5 words.

E.g. "First Aid Kit Home Car-Emergency" can be a good title to target these keywords below.

1. First aid kit for home
2. First aid kit for car
3. First aid kit for emergency

But you don't want to use too many "-" in your title and make your canonical URL super long as the ranking weight given to each keyword will be less.

From our past experience, 6 words work the best!

Amazon SEO for Product Bullets, Description & Search Terms

Bullet point is another good place to insert your keywords.

According to our research of 200 keywords, 90% of products ranking on page 1 have that exact keyword in their bullet points at least once.

Description is a more important place to tell the story of your brand and product than to optimize for keywords. Amazon A9 is putting the least weight on keywords in the description. 

So you need to make sure you have a well-written copy of description with a strong call to action at the end to help improve conversion rate and sales.

Now let me show you the easiest way to optimize the title, bullets, description and search terms in one go!

Step 1: Create a new group in the listing builder and name it whatever you want. You can create 1 group for each product and optimize them together. 

Step 3: Import your existing listing details. Product title, description, and bullets will be automatically filled in for you. Or you can write one from scratch.

Keywords that are already included in your listing will be highlighted in green in the Keyword Bank. The Phrase section shows you how many times each keyword phrase has appeared in your listing. This helps you make sure no keyword is missed out.

Step 4: Find places in your product title, bullets and descriptions to insert those keywords that are not yet in your listing. After making sure all your targeted keywords are appearing at least once in your listing, you can copy everything back to your sellercentral, or save it for future edits.

Another simple but key step not to forget is formating your text description in a clean and easy-to-scan structure in the HTML Converter, and convert it to HTML code directly.

Amazon SEO for Search Tems