Amazon SEO: How to Rank Higher on Amazon in 2024

Long gone are the days of ignoring Amazon SEO, stuffing any old product on Amazon, and then waiting for the bucks to start flowing in. Rather, Amazon keeps developing algorithms to connect sellers’ products with their customers in a market going more and more competitive. Your good needs to be relevant.

If you’re not optimizing your Amazon SEO today, you run a serious risk of losing sales and slipping in search results.

We will thus go over the following ins and outs of Amazon PPC management and SEO and how to start optimizing your listing so you can increase your position right now if you are ready to strengthen your SEO strategy and grab your fair share of sales and exposure.

Why is Amazon SEO relevant and what is it?

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of raising the quality and volume of website traffic using enhanced website or web page visibility to users of an online search engine.

Although Amazon is an e-commerce company and SEO is usually thought of as a Google-related issue, this is rather important.

Shoppers tend to browse both sites when shopping online: 56% of U.S. consumers start their product searches on Amazon, according to IndeedSEO’s Consumer Trends Report.

While Google and Amazon’s search algorithms are similar in some ways, Amazon’s A9 algorithm has shopping in mind—it returns the most relevant products as search results, as opposed to the informational articles Google surfaces. In this way, Amazon streamlines a shopper’s journey from search to purchase – which is why most consumers start their search on Amazon.

What makes a product rank on Amazon?

While Amazon keeps a tight lid on the details of its A9 Search Algorithm, there are a few key factors that we know help to determine a product’s rank.

For example, when you create an Amazon product listing, you are telling Amazon: “Hey, this is what my product is.”

Then, when customers click on your product listing and make a purchase, they, too, are telling Amazon: “Yes, this product is exactly as described and precisely what I was looking for.”

Think of Amazon’s A9 search engine as the smartest person you’ve ever met. However, this person lacks confidence in their answers. It’s not until a few thousand people tell the person they’re right that they start to believe it themselves.

And that’s Amazon SEO and the A9 algorithm in a nutshell.

Keyword relevancy

If Amazon’s A9 search algorithm doesn’t know what your product is, how can it make sales? And how does Amazon even know what your product is in the first place?

When you create your Amazon FBA product listing, Amazon requires a lot of information including:

• The product’s title
• The product’s images
• Bullet points offering a quick description of the product
• A longer description of the product
• Back-end keywords and categories

All of these elements are used by Amazon’s algorithm to understand what your product is (more on creating an optimized listing below).

Sales velocity

As Amazon is a company (and businesses want money), the more money your product comes into Amazon, the more likely it will rank.

The sales velocity of a good shows its total income over time. All divided by the sales length cycle, it is a measure of the number of opportunities—in this example, page impressions—times the average sale times the conversion rate.

This might assist to clarify how sales velocity is computed:

• Your product page offers 3,000 chances for a sale in one month, sometimes referred to as page impressions—that is, the total number of people seeing your product listing.
• The product price is $20.
• Your conversion rate is 10% (conversion rate = total order items/sessions).
• The sales cycle is 30 days.

Amazon SEO: Product listing best practices

As we’ve discussed, the primary ingredient to rank highly with Amazon SEO is relevancy, and every element on an Amazon product listing helps with relevancy.

Understanding the structure of an Amazon product listing

But, before we go into the individual components of your Amazon product listing, you must understand the actual structure of the listing itself.

Amazon’s user experience designers placed each element of a product listing in a specific position, based on common internet-user reading habits (most internet users — you and I included — read in an F-shaped pattern).

First, the user starts at the top-left corner of the screen, scanning the content. On Amazon search results pages and product listings, the first things the user sees are the product photos.

Next, it’s the product’s title (with the price very close to the top). And at the far right of the listing, still in line with the other content, is the Buy Box.

If the user does not make an immediate purchase based on the image, title, and price, they scroll further down the page and make a second horizontal movement. That means the user sees the items’ delivery options, product variants, and bullet points.

The final movement involves the pattern’s vertical movement.

As a user scrolls past ‘the fold’ on an Amazon page (the portion of the page a user sees when they first log on), they are treated to more content to convince them to make a sale. This includes competitor products, offers and promotions, a detailed product description, questions and answers, and reviews.

The most important elements of an Amazon product listing

With this knowledge of a user’s reading pattern, we can order the product listing’s elements from most important to least important.

by a potential buyer when they first click through to your page, without scrolling down.

They include:

• Product images. Amazon is very much a visual website. Therefore, product photos are the first thing a customer sees when their search results come up, helping to confirm that their search terms are correct.
• Product name (title). Next, the product title makes its debut in the reader’s field of vision. The title supplies a lot of important information, for further confirmation that the product was relevant to the customer’s search.
• Amazon badges. Some badges can be associated with a product listing. First, if a product leads in its parent category, Amazon awards it a ‘Best Seller’ or ‘Amazon’s Choice’ badge. Next, below the product’s rating is a badge that lets shoppers know the product qualifies for Prime. Finally, the ‘In Stock’ badge (which is not visible on all listings) lets the buyer know the product is available for purchase.
• Product rating. Just below the product’s title is the product’s overall rating, represented by one to five stars.
• The Buy Box: The Buy Box is the page’s call-to-action above the fold. It allows the buyer to immediately purchase the product from the product’s top seller.
• Variants. If the product has variants, these will appear below the product’s title and pricing information.
• Bullet points. Any details that the listing creator could not convey through the product’s images or title are placed in the bullet points. These details are less for establishing relevance, and more for helping customers make informed buying decisions.

How to improve SEO on Amazon: The do’s and don’ts

Now that you’re armed with a basic understanding of Amazon SEO and user experience, you should be able to optimize your Amazon product listing for relevancy and conversions (sales velocity).

More ways to optimize your Amazon SEO and ranking

Once you have a well-optimized listing, it’s time to spike your sales, as nothing will boost your ranking like cold hard sales can.

Two of the best ways to increase sales are:

1. Running Amazon PPC (pay-per-click) ads

Paid advertisements are a great source of traffic and additional sales to help rank your products. Facebook or Google Adwords can be used, but Amazon PPC is the easiest way to boost your keyword-driven sales.

Start by setting up manual PPC campaigns using your target keywords, then crank up the bids (but staying within your budget) to increase exposure and sessions.

2. Social media influencers

Social media is a very powerful way to grow your brand and generate interest in your products.

Many sellers in today’s world take advantage of TikTok and influencer marketing to promote their products in such a way that doesn’t feel like an advertisement.

How to keep track of your Amazon ranking

What good is optimizing your listing, working on Amazon SEO, and boosting ranking if you can’t track the results? There are two ways to check if your product has been indexed and where it is ranking for keywords: manually and automatically.

Manually

First, check your product is indexed for keywords by typing the following formula directly into the Amazon search bar:

Learn more about Amazon SEO

And that’s it! Hopefully, this article has given you a solid start on mastering Amazon SEO, however, if you’d like to learn more, be sure to check out the IndeedSEO YouTube channel:

If you have any tricks you use for Amazon SEO you’d like to share, feel free to drop them in the comments below.