Optimizing for Amazon
If you do a search for a product in Amazon using their search bar, the results that are initially displayed are ranked by relevance across all of the departments. If you select a specific department then you can also choose to sort the results by best sellers, price, and user ratings.
How does Amazon determine relevance? According to Amazon, they rank relevance based on key terms found within the product feed in the following locations:
- Search Terms
- Title
- Brand
- Designer
- Manufacturer
- Manufacturer part number
- Standard product ID (UPC, EAN, GTIN)
You can assign specific “search terms” (unseen by consumers) to each product that you list on Amazon to help improve relevance. One thing to note when choosing these terms is that they should not be the same as the words in any of the other locations mentioned above because Amazon has already associated your product with those words. You would, however, want to use words that are in your description and bullet points because Amazon does not include those to determine relevance. The search terms are limited to 250 characters, 5 lines of 50 each. Another good place to look for the terms would be the customer tags. If you know how customers categorize your product type it would probably be a good idea to associate your product with those key words.
Example of Tags for Folding Bike
How do you determine the correct keywords if there are alternative ways to search for your product (i.e. Bike versus Bicycle)? Amazon does not have a keyword tool that shows the search volume on its site for specific search queries, so we recommend using either the Google Keyword tool or Word Tracker. Our assumption is that the relative nature of traffic in these tools will be similar to the search patterns in Amazon.
Results for "folding bicycle" in Google Keyword Tool
For example, if more people search for “Folding Bike” versus “Folding Bicycle” using the Google keyword tool (as indicated in the picture above), then we are assuming the same is true in Amazon. Using this information, we would recommend that your product title and search terms somehow incorporate the word “Folding Bike” since we believe that it will generate the most traffic for that phrase.
When I tried searching for “folding bicycle” 4 out of 16 products on the first page had the word “bicycle” in their title as opposed to 0 when I searched for “folding bike.” The latter search also had more results than the first one (916 for “folding bike” vs. 646 for “folding bicycle”) as we predicted based on the Google keyword tool. A portion of the results pages for these searches can be seen below.
Amazon Search Results for "folding bike"
Amazon Search Results for "folding bicycle"
To summarize, there are three basic steps that you need to take to help your product appear more relevant to Amazon:
- Consider how Amazon users are tagging products similar to yours
- Use a keyword tool like Google or Word Tracker to find which keywords are searched for most often
- Include those exact keywords (not abbreviations) in your products’ “search terms” and title
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