Amazon shoppers often arrive with a specific product in mind, making Amazon’s search box the starting point for most purchases.
However good your product is, if it’s not appearing in the first few pages of Amazon’s search results, few people will ever see it (and even fewer buy it).
Here six things that you can do to get your products into the first few pages of results:
1. Optimise your listings with keywords.
Both the text and phrases that you use in your listings need to mirror what shoppers are typing into Amazon’s search box. This includes everything from your listing title to your product summary and bullet-point descriptors.
Something worth doing is checking out your competition to see what level of detail they’ve added to their listings. If they’re including more detailed information than you are, chances are that they’re going to capture a larger share of both search traffic and sales.
2. Use price to drive sales volume, sales velocity & higher rankings.
When it comes to online shopping, price often influences shoppers’ decisions more than it would on the high street. How you price your products on Amazon’s marketplace will often impact both your sales volume and velocity, which in turn will affect your ranking and visibility.
Competing on price alone can quickly erode your margins so you’ll need to find the balance between pricing your products competitively and differentiating them from whatever else is available.
Doing this could be as simple as focussing on product features that competing products don’t have, or taking it further and adding something unique to your product to increase its value.
3. Keep your marketplace store well stocked.
Amazon want to make sure that you have plenty of stock to fulfil orders. So, how much stock you have will impact where you list in search results.
You’ll need to plan your inventory carefully to make sure that you don’t run out of stock and miss sales, while also making sure that you’re not tying up cash unnecessarily in extra stock.
4. Use Amazon FBA for preferential treatment.
Everything else being equal, the fulfilment method you choose on Amazon is fundamental to how high you rank in organic search results. In search rankings, products that include one of Amazon’s Prime offerings benefit from increased exposure and sales conversion. Using either a Fulfilled by Amazon (FBA) or Seller-fulfilled Prime (SFP) fulfilment strategy is the fastest way to success on Amazon.
If you put yourself in Amazon’s shoes this makes complete sense – if they’re controlling fulfilment themselves, they’ll be more confident that those customers will receive a positive experience, which then makes them more likely to return.
5. Stronger sales means a higher ranking.
If you want to win that coveted top spot in organic search results, you need to be selling more than everyone else, faster than everyone else. There are quite a few ways to increase your sales volume and velocity on Amazon – here’s a few of them to get you started:
→ Divert existing traffic – if you’re running campaigns to drive traffic to other webstores, divert some of it to your Amazon listings to boost your numbers.
→ Invest into a PPC strategy – depending on how much competition you’re up against, using ad spend can be a great way to kickstart your Amazon sales.
→ Focus on getting positive product reviews – the more you have, the more shoppers you’ll convert into customers.
→ Product photography – make sure you’re using high quality product photography that gives shoppers a good idea of what your product looks like in reality. If you’re photoshopping your product photography to remove imperfections or defects, chances are you’re going to end up with a higher level of returns. In this situation, you’re better off tweaking your product.
→ Demo videos – these are one the most powerful selling tools in your marketplace toolkit. What type of video you choose depends on your product – if you’re selling lifestyle-orientated products, a lifestyle video would probably make the most sense. If your product is more functional, showing it doing the job you’re saying it can do will be more powerful than having photography on its own.
→ A+ content – the higher a product’s price, the more information you’ll need to offer to convert the sale. A+ content is a great way to add rich content to your product listing and help shoppers make a more informed purchase decision.
→ Get your price right – as discussed above, the biggest influencer of sales ranking on Amazon is sales velocity, and your sales price is the most influential lever you can use to affect it.
→ Control your customer returns – Amazon will only show your products to shoppers if your return rate is low. Why? Because a low return rate indicates that your product quality is high and selling it will lead to happy customers.
6. Use PPC to jump the queue.
Depending on how much competition you’re up against, and how much time you have, you may need to invest into some ad spend to speed things up. Sponsored ads can help you jump to the top of the search results and kickstart your sales.
Some of the common Amazon ads include things like sponsored products, sponsored brands, and video ads.
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Written by Tom Head | 25 October 2021