In addition to Amazon SEO, there are other strategies to increase sales on the online marketplace Amazon. Our guest author gives four tips.
With more than 240,000 sellers, the competitive situation on Amazon’s market place is becoming much more acute. It is all the more important to understand the algorithm behind the product placements. This enables long-term profitable positioning to be achieved on the largest online marketplace in Europe.
In addition to the pay-per-click campaigns, the so-called A9 algorithm also influences the organic ranking of the products. In this way, satisfaction and sales per customer should be increased.
But what factors influence product placement? How can the ranking be improved? And what influence does the conversion rate have? The following four tips provide information.
Choose the right campaign type
Depending on the structure of the pay-per-click campaign, the profit can vary widely. In addition to higher sales figures, PPC campaigns can increase brand awareness and make initial customer contact.
In the past, the following campaign types have successfully proven themselves:
Main keyword campaign
In the main keyword campaign, the search terms with the highest relevance are defined. These main keywords can be identified using certain tools such as Helium 10 or Junglescout. The tools provide information about the respective search volumes of the keywords.
Many Amazon sellers make the mistake of combining all keywords in a single campaign. The combination of the keywords with high and low search volume leads to a cannibalization effect:
Keywords with a low search volume that have a high sales relevance are not played out by the keywords with a high search volume. This creates non-representative data that make campaign optimization difficult. It is therefore advisable to divide the campaigns accordingly by search volume with an adjusted budget.
Tip: In general, longtail keywords convert better than shorttail keywords. The reason for this is that longtail keywords have a specific purchase intention and competition is less than for shorttail keywords.
Car campaign
The auto campaign does not require keyword definition. The algorithm places the ad by product and budget.
After a two to three month term, the auto campaign achieves an ACOS (Average Cost of Sale) of 20 to 35 percent. In order to have maximum control over the campaigns, you can identify the keywords under which sales were made under the “Search terms” tab.
Using these search terms, you can set up a manual campaign that takes over the best converting keywords from the auto campaign. This way, the seller can better coordinate his campaigns, in particular the display, and reach the target ACOS more quickly.
Competition campaign
A competitive campaign is ideal if your own product is cheaper and ideally higher quality than a comparable competitive product. To do this, all competitors’ ASIN must be defined as search terms. This means that your own product is displayed on the product pages of other competitors. The click prices in the competition campaign are usually cheaper and therefore the ACOS is lower. So if you sell a cheaper product than your competition, you can achieve amazing results with this type of campaign.
Improve the listing
Since Amazon is a product search engine, conversion rates of up to 45 percent are not uncommon. In order to achieve high conversion rates, the listing must be optimized.
The most important Amazon SEO factors include the product title and bullet points. In the third place are the downstream keywords, which can be defined in the backend as “general keywords”. The product description is given a low weight.
In all four areas, sellers should put the main keywords with the highest relevance. Keyword bashing is not suitable because the customer experience suffers.
The following performance factors should also be taken into account, as they are highly relevant for Amazon SEO:
- reviews
- Product images (1,000 x 1,000 pixels)
- questions and answers
- Length of stay
- Response time to customer inquiries (maximum 24 hours)
An improvement in the performance factors has a positive effect on the click-through rate (CTR) and thus on the number of potential sales.
But be careful! A high CTR does not always result in higher positioning. If the conversion rate gets worse, the ranking also suffers. Therefore, the sources of external traffic should be chosen carefully.
Amazon’s Choice
Amazon’s choice branding increases both visibility and conversion rate because it gives customers a sense of security. Amazon takes the following criteria into account for Amazon’s Choice branding:
- Low return rate (less than 30 percent)
- Sufficient inventory
- competitive prices
- Increase sales using keywords that are highly relevant
- Above-average sales history
Activation of the conversion booster
The A-Plus content is displayed instead of the product description and acts as a kind of landing page. The function does not have a direct impact on the ranking, but it does significantly increase the conversion rate because it finally convinces potential customers of the product. A-Plus content is only available for registered trademarks. Thanks to the modular system from Amazon, you can build up an extended product description without any coding knowledge.
Conclusion
The implementation of the tips not only increases sales figures, it also increases visibility and branding. Ultimately, the optimization of the ranking factors and PPC campaigns leads to synergy effects, which at the same time also increase the chances of a “choice” or “bestseller” positioning.
