How To Rank Higher In Amazon Search – Guest Post

Tonight in the FBA Master group on Facebook (join it, if somehow you haven’t yet because we have some amazing people helping us all work together) we are hosting an event, as part of our Tech Tuesday Series.  Being showcased this week is AMZ Shark, which is a great site for helping find profitable product lines as well as researching the data in real time to determine how best you can capitalize in your own selling.  The following is a blog post written by Tharyn, part of the AMZShark team, and gives a much better intro to how it can help.

Check it out if you have the time and want to see how it can help your business!
– – J3

Amazon is all about sales! Duh! It’s obvious right? Well, in this quick post we’re going to go over how to leverage the obvious in order to get your listing ranked higher in Amazon Search.

And even though these tips may seem obvious at first glance, you should make sure your listing and business strategy checks each and every one of them off.

Conversion is king

You can boost your product ranking in several ways. They are pretty straight forward. The bottom line is: Amazon wants to convert the customer.

The factors below will build on each other in order to CONVERT. When you convert for a buyer’s search term, Amazon then says “Okay, this listing will convert for this query.” And then you climb the ranks. It’s not more complicated than that. It’s all about relevant conversions.

For example, a buyer searches for “organic plant protein powder.” They click on a listing on the first page. They like it. The buyer purchases. Now, that listing will gain credibility in Amazon’s search algorithm and either continue to stay on the first page or even climb higher. Conversion is king.

Basic listing tricks

Since it’s that simple, what do you focus on? Well, the first thing you do is focus on building the best possible listing you can, so that you can convert browsers into buyers.

Here are the essentials:

1. Title – Good title, short, concise, information front loaded. People are skimming these titles, Amazon wants people to say YES and click, and BUY NOW. When you look at the items below, the 2nd mouse follows pure Amazon guidelines. Model Name, Product, Model #. Or you can go the route of the 1st or 3rd listing which pack the title with extra keywords, however Amazon is now limiting title length and will be trimming titles in the future. I recommend putting those extra keywords in the bullet section (see #7).
   
2. Sales – Make sales faster and rank faster. Sales velocity is important. Every sale builds rank, which builds visibility, which builds authority in the minds of buyers, which improves sales, into a beautiful cycle of profit.
3. FBA – You already know this since you’re an FBA MASTER! FBA is Fulfillment by Amazon which means a lot of good things for you. Prime members get 2 day shipping (also, keep in mind that Prime buyers buy MORE and love to see that Prime logo plastered across the product.) Plain and simple: FBA rocks and will lead to easier conversions from Prime subscribers.
   
4. Reviews – Reviews are essential. Even 10+ reviews on a product will convert WAY better than zero. Also, this depends highly on the competition. Do they all have hundreds or thousands? This will influence buyers and sales and therefor your ranking. Consider Amazon PPC if reviews or ranking is super low.
5. Product Pictures – Make them good, high quality and white background. Make them huge so people can hover over them. Follow the guidelines. Pay for professional photos. It’s a no brainer.
6. Answer and Ask questions – This newer feature should be utilized to answer any FAQ your product gets. Even if an Amazon user doesn’t ask directly on your listing page, YOU should go find someone to ask the question so that you can answer it. This shows good seller communication and some people actually think that it helps ranking (I don’t though).
7. Product Bullets – Check out these bullets, they convert. They tell you what you want to know FAST. People read these bullets before any product description. Optimize them with your USP’s.
   

Find the best keywords

Those are the primary tips for optimizing a listing to convert. The next step is choosing your keywords properly. Here are a few tips, tools, and advice for finding the best keywords which to rank for.

1. Spy – Find your competitors and read their listing titles and bullet list. This is what they are trying to rank for. Copy and paste those into a new Amazon search and you might see them there too.
2. Keyword Explorer – This is an AMZShark feature which gives you a list of related search terms and keywords from a single phrase. For example, if you type in “gloves” it will spit out latex gloves, leather gloves, gloves for cleaning, snow gloves, and hundreds more ideas. You can see the 875 results that gloves turned up by clicking here (just a dumptext list of the keywords).
3. Amazon Autofill – Start typing in the first part of your product and see what Amazon “thinks” you want. This is the auto-fill feature that is so popular these days. It could provide a good list of ideas if you play around with it.

Track your ranking

So if you want to rank higher in Amazon, you’ve gotta know where your at in the first place. You can’t change what you can’t measure. You’ll need some sort of Amazon Rank Tracking software to do this the easy way.

There’s lots of good tools on the market, including the AMZShark Rank Tracker. It tracks where your product listing is for any keyword(s) you want. Moreover, you can use this same function to track any competitors products for any keyword too. It’s very good to know the lay of the land. You can check it out here.

Ninja ideas

Here are some additional ninja techniques you can use to increase sales and begin your upward velocity which brings in more organic sales.

1. Super URL’s – You can make these yourself, or use a tool like http://amzshark.com to create them. When you send people to these links, and they buy, they include keywords in the URL address and bump up your rank for that particular keyword. This adds to your sales velocity as mentioned above. So if you can push a lot of traffic, this is a powerful way to move upwards in Amazon’s search.
2. Give Aways – This can be costly, so watch out, but giving away or trading your product for legitimate and honest reviews is totally possible. Reach out to friends, family, or even on groups on Facebook.

Hope that helps. My name’s Tharyn and I host an awesome Podcast called the Seller Dojo for Amazon Sellers, Brand Owners, and Private Labeling. I also am part of the AMZShark team and we pride ourselves in helping sellers with the best possible Seller Toolkit on the market. Check us out.

If you’ve got questions, then let me know and I’ll do my best to help. Cheers.