You could have one of the most robust, brilliantly researched and developed products of all time but if the customer can’t find it in their query results, it doesn’t exist. Not conducting a thorough keyword research to optimize your amazon listings is like throwing down a fishing line without any bait on the hook.
If you want to succeed on Amazon, you need Amazon keyword research to understand the search terms that the majority of customers use when they’re looking for something in particular. You can use these keywords to optimize the content on your Amazon page for greater visibility. In order to achieve this, you will also require a working knowledge of how a search engine operates.
This guide will break down Amazon keyword research to its fundamentals and walk you through the steps. Remember, as a new e-commerce merchant or existing merchant with new products your priority is visibility. Visibility gets you leads that can be converted into sales. It is a simple formula.
Why is Keyword Research so Important?
At the end of Amazon’s 2020 annual business cycle, small-to-medium sized businesses in the U.S. alone sold more than 3.4 billion products on Amazon stores. A hike of 2.7 billion from their previous year of business.
It’s hard to answer this question because the importance of Search Engine Optimization and all of its domains (one of which is keyword research) grows in tandem with e-commerce. In other words, it’s still growing and rapidly.
The pandemic has drastically altered the business landscape by outmoding all the interpersonal skills involved in making a sale. Fortunately, these conversational soft skills can be channeled into creating high quality content for your product display pages based on keyword research that will help potential customers find your page.
What is Keyword Research?
The act of keyword research is to use various tools and sources which we will elaborate more on later, to discover the set of keywords most pertinent to your listings. These are keywords that customers have regularly searched for when they’re looking for products not too different from your own listings.
The keywords are then incorporated into the promotional content you display on your website and e-commerce stores. This helps search engines find and display your products when visitors enter matching queries.
How does a Search Engine Work?
A Search engine’s purpose is to take your query and guess what you’re looking for based on the most prevalent outcomes with the term you entered. And this could be a range of different things if your queries are short.
For instance, say you entered the search term ‘glasses’. Now that could mean you’re searching for drinking glasses, glassware of some kind or eyeglasses. If it turns out that most people (and these results vary from country to country) end up searching for eyeglasses when they enter that query, you’ll find pages relevant to eyeglasses at the top of your results page.
Google aims to supply you with the right information when you make a query. Amazon’s search engine A9, on the other hand has only one goal, connecting buyers to sellers so that you can make conversions.
Amazon’s search engine differs greatly in purpose from popular sites like Google, Bing and Yahoo, but it doesn’t differ in principle. It still uses scans of high ranking keywords and displays relevant results.
Amazon’s Search Engine
Amazon is an online marketplace to buy or sell things, A9’s motives, therefore, need to be purely transactional to make as many sales as possible. A9 ranks your listing based on two main criteria, relevance and performance.
To establish relevance, you need a listing that is backed by strong keyword research backing. For higher performance rankings you need to have a stand-out product that gets more traffic to sales conversions.
The more competition you’re up against, the stronger your SEO and keyword backing needs to be if you’re going to remain competitive. In 2019 there were about 1.1 million active sellers on the Amazon marketplace in the United States. According to Amazon reports more than a million new sellers join the multi vendor marketplace every year.
Amazon likes to keep the big numbers to itself, but the bottom line is, if you’re serious about expanding your e-commerce operations through Amazon, you’re going to have to up your SEO game, because the competition shows no signs of slowing down.
In another blog we have discussed 10 actionable SEO tips to rank your amazon products listing much higher, mildly brushing on the topic of keyword research. Amazon keyword research however is in and of itself deserving of a detailed article so you can develop your keyword research skills right here using this blog as your guide.
How to do Amazon Keyword Research
If you want to learn how to do Amazon keyword research properly you need to identify all the keywords relevant to your listings. That way there are a number of terms that Amazon customers can type to see your listing. Keeping it relevant is key.
The goal of using keywords is to establish your products relevance to highly ranked keywords in the search engine. The systematic approach to keywords is to divide them into two basic-level categories.
There are keywords of higher importance to you, called primary keywords. And there are keywords of lesser importance but important nonetheless called secondary keywords.
Primary keywords generally include words that identify the product and its important features. Here you’ll have the very name of the item itself or whatever term it is most popularly referred to by as well as words that describe its characteristics that matter to the buyer. For instance, 100% cotton T-shirt
Secondary keywords can be divided into further categories, but for simplicity they’re words that might be typed along with your primary keyword when customers are making queries. They also include words that mark important specifications such as say length, for an extension cord.
1) Amazon Keyword Suggestions
When you initiate a query through the search bar on Amazon, you may have noticed that even before you complete the first word, A9’s autocomplete feature throws up a bunch of suggestions based on previous popular searches beginning the same way. This is to save you the trouble of typing.
This is a completely free Amazon keyword tool, come to think of it. It gives you an overview of what customers frequently search for which also helps you decide what to sell. There are plenty of other tools as well which we’ll get to but remember to exploit this free one. It’s a great place to start for legitimate keywords pertaining to your listing.
Try out a bunch of alternative names the product also goes by with specifications if they’re important enough to be included in the title. It will also give you an overview of what format or units to enter product specifications like size or color in.
2) Competitors Products
Arguably the biggest source of inspiration for keywords, especially for the title of your product is to browse some of your competitor’s listings. Look for competitors that are selling products most closely identical to yours as the leading data source for title and description keywords.
The competitors whose strategy and keywords you want to emulate are the ones with high search rankings or conversions. You will find this by checking out their ratings and performance.
You don’t necessarily have to limit yourself to Amazon for this either, you can check out how successful products have been worded on other e-commerce sites for some fresh ideas.
List words that you tend to see re-occurring more often as well, these keywords will form an important part of your organic SEO when you’re creating content.
3) Explore Your Niche Keywords
Your product may be intended for something every specific for instance, a boiler to heat water only, a charger for mobile phones with c-type connections. These things need to be mentioned in the title and reiterated at length in the salient features and product description sections. That’s what brings in quality leads.
Say you’re selling vegan chocolate chip cookies. Well, that’s a product only vegans would be interested in so they’re likely to enter the term “vegan” too in their search and when they do your product needs to turn up.
You need to find keywords for the characteristics or features that narrow down the unique problems your product is meant to solve. If the cookies are gluten-free, mention it. If they’re also made from whole wheat and that’s something your customers are interested in yes, include that too. Are you selling them in packs of 12? Again mention so.
There are many potential and important keywords to be found in the unique features of your product alone.
If you have a complex product the list may seem endless. You should prioritize which keywords to use based on research using Amazon keyword tools and other methods described in this guide.
4) Target Products that Complement your Product
If you’ve ever taken an e-commerce or a business course, you might remember complementary products are goods that are frequently brought with your products because they can be used in conjunction or because one requires the other.
If you’re selling Laptops, a lot of customers also purchase keyboard guards and cases too. Basically, if you’ve ever seen the items Amazon organizes under the ‘frequently bought together’ tab- those are complementary items.
By using keywords from complementary products in your description and bullets, there’s a chance that when customers go looking for that complementary item they’ll be led to yours. These are also called backend keywords and will help you further boost your brands visibility if you use them to optimize your content alongside primary keywords.
5) Amazon Keyword Tool
For a more professional and detail-driven research you can use a software to explore keywords. There are many available online. AMZScout is a software specifically for conducting research on Amazon keywords.
The additional insights keyword tools can provide are indispensable to your SEO pages. These tools will also save you a considerable amount of time. You need to know which keywords rank the highest, especially if this list you’ve created so far has compiled more keywords than you can use.
How to Use Keywords – Tips
Now that you’ve compiled your list of keywords and separated them into primary and secondary it’s time to put them to use. The goal of the keywords is to help the search engine understand what you’re selling to the utmost precision.
Using Keywords in the Title
The title should obviously contain your foremost primary keyword, which is the name of the item itself. You’d be best served putting this word at the start of the title too. Because with long titles Amazon tends to cut off some of the text in their display results and this is a word or phrase that cannot be missing.
The title also needs to borrow some secondary keywords. For this step we’re going to borrow an old cliché but a relevant one which is “put yourself in the customer’s shoes”.
If you were a potential customer, what is it about your product that would make you want to buy it or that meets an important requirement of yours? Do you only drink coffee that’s dark-roast? That’s a keyword worth mentioning in the title.
Using Keywords in the Product Description
Your product description and salient features column is the best way to impress your customers and achieve conversions. The salient features or bullet points need to include all the important keywords that didn’t make the cut for your product title.
The one rudimentary error to not make at all costs is to try and squeeze as many keywords as you possibly can at the cost of a description that is engaging and pleasant to read. This will have the opposite effect of what you want.
Yes, high traffic, more leads, more sales that’s how e-commerce works but this is one big caveat. If your content is not engaging, it doesn’t matter how visible you are. Your customers will feel less inclined to purchase from you.
Remember, your conversion rate has an important influence on your display rankings. So if your product isn’t making enough sales your bounce rate goes up and that’s a pathway to closure.
Final Words
Keyword research is to marketing and promotion what a backbone is to the body. Without it, there’s nothing holding your content in place in order for it to be visible. By learning how to do Amazon keyword research and use keywords properly you’ll be able to make your listings seem more relevant, return high-quality leads and thereby sell faster.
And with e-commerce, there’s a positive feedback loop when you achieve a lot of conversions. They help you to achieve even more conversions and so on.
Author Bio:
Valentina Stashina is a COO of AMZScout and at the same time the heart of the team. She is always up to date with the latest news and trends.