If you are selling online, then keywords are your ticket to success. If you don’t know how to find the right keywords for your product, then you will almost definitely fail!
Finding keywords on Amazon is pretty simple and many people offer podcasts and software to find out what keywords your competitors are using. You can google that and find a huge number of them.
Be warned if you do that and you have also followed everyone else during your quest to find a product to sell on Amazon, that you will also be following them down the same rabbit hole to potentially find the same keywords!
I prefer to do my own research. I still use an Amazon auto campaign in the beginning and see if Amazon can point me to the keywords that it thinks will convert best. Sometimes that doesn’t work though, it hasn’t always worked for me.
I prefer to use Google. Here’s how:
Type the words into the Google search bar that you would use to find your product, note down the auto complete options you get and go through each one.
Look down the bottom of the page at the suggestions “Searches related to…” and note them down. Do a google search on each and every one of those, repeating the same process of checking what comes in the auto complete and what comes up at the bottom in related searches.
If you are not in the USA and you are looking for keywords to sell on Amazon.com, then click on the Advanced Search button in Settings and change the country to USA.
Do the same in Yahoo.
The other important tool is the Google Keyword Tool. This tool will help you to find a very comprehensive list of keywords for your product or service. It will also give you the number of times each keyword is used in a search each month. That’s vital information that should be used when you are researching into a product or market to potentially sell online.
Next, in order to convert the traffic you bring to your store or your listing you need to be sure you are paying good money to bring buyers – not tire kickers!
There is a huge difference between the keywords buyers use and the keywords browsers use:
When someone is browsing for information and not in buying mode, you will find they use totally different keywords and the trick for you is not to rely on those browsing keywords to bring people to your store (or your listing on Amazon).
Here’s an example:
I want to do some renovations to my outdoor area and when it’s done I will need new furniture so I google “outdoor furniture” “white plastic outdoor furniture” “teak outdoor furniture” to get some ideas. I visit dozens of websites without any intention of buying, I’m just browsing.
Some months later the renovation is complete and now I want some outdoor furniture and I want it delivered asap. So now that I’ve decided I want teak furniture I now google “suppliers of teak outdoor furniture in my town” or “best price teak outdoor furniture” or “buy teak outdoor furniture online”.
Now you see those keywords all have buying signals in them (in bold). THOSE are the keywords you want to put money on!
Long tail keywords:
One and two word keywords like “furniture” and “teak furniture” and “outdoor setting” are all costly keywords as they are so broad that they fit a multitude of situations. Someone could be googling “how to make an outdoor setting” and if you have that keyword set to broad match then you will get all the people who want to make one, or who google “second hand outdoor setting for sale”, or “how to get a stain out of my teak outdoor setting”.
Setting your keywords to a few words on broad match will bring hundreds of people to your store or your listing who are not interested in buying your product.
Not all traffic is good traffic! There is a double-edged sword to high non-converting traffic. If you are constantly bringing people to your site or your listing for the wrong reasons and they leave as soon as they get there having realized that’s not what they wanted, Google penalizes you and so does Amazon. This is known as the bounce rate. A high bounce rate is not good!
Enter the long tail keyword:
Long tail keywords are used to narrow down your traffic to those people who are looking for your specific solution or product. Long tail keywords are long strings of keywords with more than three and preferably more than four words. You can have as many words in the string as you like. Just as long as you can confirm that people are using those phrases to find your exact product. Be sure to use as many buying signals as you can find (in your Google research as I outlined above) in your long tail keywords.
So in our outdoor furniture example, “where to buy teak outdoor setting in my town”, “cheap price for teak chairs”, “best quality teak outdoor furniture”. All of these are long tail keywords with buying signals in them.
If you follow this advice you may find your traffic drops off quite a lot but your conversion rate will rise. It really pays to do a lot of research on your specific keywords. Amazon allows you to add in your own keyword search terms for your product via Seller Central, so you can make sure that your long tail keywords and your buying signals are all included there.
If you have an independent website, then be sure to put all the long tail keywords and buying signals in your website copy. This is just good search engine optimization (SEO) practice.
Amazon traffic fluctuations:
Every day we see Amazon sellers asking “no sales today, anyone else having the same problem?” This is a newbie question really. Anyone who has been selling online or on Amazon for any length of time will know that traffic and sales fluctuate all the time.
But if you are seeing a drop in sales that is concerning, then there are a few things you should check.
The first thing to do is to check your session numbers. Session numbers in Amazon is the measure of traffic to your listing. Look at Reports>Detail Page Sales and Traffic by ASIN. Check your traffic numbers against a recent month when sales were higher and try to work out if the lower sales is due to lower traffic (sessions) or lower conversions (unit session percentage). Try to aim to have a unit session percentage of over 30%. If it is really low, say under 10%, then you may be bringing people to your listing who are not ready to buy. Or, worse still, your listing is not great (title, description, images etc).
If it’s a traffic issue then work on your keywords as explained above. If it’s a conversion issue then you need to optimize your listing.