In effect, Amazon is one of the world’s biggest search engines and rivals Google as the first port of call for consumers researching products.
As Amazon search has become more important to merchants, a new discipline of Amazon Search Optimisation has emerged, explicitly focused on improving performance in the Amazon search.
What is Amazon Search
When a user searches on Amazon, Amazon will generate a list of the most relevant query results. The Amazon search algorithm is called A9 and has two equally important ranking factors:
- Keyword optimisation. A product can only be found with the Amazon search if the product page contains the keyword(s) for which a customer is looking. Keyword optimization ensures that a product can be found for all relevant keyword searches.
- Listing performance. How well a product ranks for these keywords depends on its performance metrics. The performance metrics are traffic and sales, click rate (CTR) and conversion rate (CR).
How Amazon Ranks Listings
How well a product ranks for these keywords depends on a listing’s performance metrics. These include the listing’s customer rating (product reviews and customer questions) and its sales performance.
- Sales Rank. More sales = higher rankings. Higher ranking = more sales!
- Customer reviews. The number of product reviews received and the quality of these reviews are important ranking factors.
- Price. The price of your products strongly influences conversion rates and sales.
- Click through and conversion rate. Amazon looks at a listing’s historical sales performance when ranking search results, including click-through and conversion rate.
Building Sales History
Sales history influences the search performance of a listing. However, when a listing new, it obviously will not have any sales history. You can either wait for this to build naturally over time or use Amazon’s Sponsored ads product to drive traffic to the listing and hopefully generate sales.
A listing will more quickly build sales history by using sponsored ads and thereby climb up the organic search rankings.
Improving Click-Through Rate and Listing Performance
The click-through rate of a listing can improve by having high-quality content, including a compelling hero image and product title. Optimising listing is covered in the Creating Amazon Listing section above.
Gathering Reviews
An essential component of increasing your listing performance is by encouraging product reviews. You can increase your number of reviews in several ways.
- Excellent customer service. Both great and terrible customservice encourage reviews. You could also use parcel inserts to remind customers to leave reviews.
- Amazon programs. Amazon also offers vendors and sellers two fee-based programs for generating reviews: Amazon Vine (vendors) and the Early Reviewer Program (seller).
- Request review button. Use Amazon’s request review button on the order details page. This is guaranteed to ensure you stay with Amazon’s T&Cs
- Send a review request via email. This can be automated using tools such as Bqool
