So you’re ready to start selling on Amazon, but you’re not quite ready to start dealing with “SEO” and “Keyword Research.” These terms can be intimidating and confusing, but it is necessary to implement these strategies into your Amazon marketing in order to get the best results. 

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How Keyword Research Helps to Rank Your Brand & Products

Keyword research is the process of finding which words people in your customer target base are actively searching for and how to include those words within your web content to get the most traffic to your page possible. 

Many new e-commerce professionals find themselves wondering why this process really matters. Shouldn’t Amazon know what to showcase to their customers for any given search? Why do you have to do research to find the “secret sauce” of words to put within your listing?

We’re going to tackle these questions together today.

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Why Keyword Research Is Important

There are over 350 million items on Amazon. This massive marketplace is no longer just a website - it is a search engine filled with tough competition and thousands of other sellers looking to profit off FBA stores just like you. 

A simple search for an item results in tens of thousands of similar listings. Just searching for “women’s workout gear” results in over 40,000 items.

Here are some of the listings from page 1 of those search results (as of March 28, 2022).

Here are some of the listings from page 7 of these search results.

At first glance, these listings have a lot in common. Quality hero images, variations in color, great reviews, use of coupons, use of Amazon Prime. However, the latter four images won’t even show up for most customers. In this case, page 7 of search results is the last page of results that Amazon will allow shoppers to see. Only 306 of the 40,000+ results for this keyword pairing are even visible. 

Now, we don’t know the specifics of the listings we have showcased above. There could be many reasons including search engine optimization why some of these items showed up on the first page and others didn’t show up until later. Amazon uses many elements in its A9 algorithm to decide which posts are going to get traffic and which aren’t. 

One of these elements to Amazon’s algorithm does include the proper use of keywords, or popular search terms, within the listing. 

Amazon’s success is built on this algorithm. Their ability to comb through thousands of listings and present to a customer exactly what they are looking for is why they are so popular! So it is essential that you do the work and find out what these terms are. 

Amazon keyword research tool and keyword research in general help you find the terms and phrases that are most used by customers in your niche so that you can then integrate these terms into every portion of your listing (and metadata, where applicable). You’ll likely stumble across some of your keywords without trying, but just using a few strong words is not enough to get the maximum organic traffic possible.  

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Why Keyword Relevancy Is Important

There are a few important elements to consider when performing your keyword research. Two of the most critical are:

• Search volume
• Competition

Relevant terms are those that have high search volumes - terms that many consumers are using. Relevant keywords must also be relevant to your actual listing (ie, Amazon or any other search engine won’t reward you for entering in a bunch of high-volume words that have nothing to do with your listing). When choosing keywords related, you want to choose that particular keyword that applies to your product and has a high search volume. 

This ensures that Amazon is able to feed your product to those who are actually looking for it, and feed it to the most people looking for it. Relevancy is everything when it comes to search engines. 

Competition is another ball game. When picking your keywords, focus on those that are:

• High traffic with high competition
• Medium traffic with low competition
• High traffic with low competition

Covering all your bases in this way is your best bet to maximize your traffic. 

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How to Choose Your Keywords

Choosing your keyword/phrase requires the use of keyword research tools that have access to search results and terms used on engines like Amazon and Google. Some helpful resources include:

• SEM Rush
• SpyFu
• WordStream
• AMZ Data Studio
• Keywordtool.io
• MerchantWords

Most of these require a monthly subscription to get the most out of them, which at times can be pricey. If you’re going to pay for keyword research, you’re better off paying someone to handle the entire process for you from beginning to end, rather than paying for partial help and then getting stuck in the implementation.

If you decide to go the DIY route, however, more power to you! Your keyword strategy would be to be on the lookout for both seed keywords and general keywords. Seed keywords are the main words that are most relevant to your listing. These words are frequently easy to find, and you can start the process of getting these words just by describing your product or typing it into the Amazon search bar. These can be long-tail keywords or short-tail keywords.

For example, let’s say we are looking to sell a stainless steel water bottle. Well - odds are most customers are going to search “stainless steel water bottle” when looking for one. Sure enough, when we bring this to the Amazon search bar, this is one of the first results for “stainless steel.” Using a reverse ASIN lookup can help you find even more relevant seed keywords.

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Checking out competition can also help you see what keywords are working well for competitors. This brand is one of the top unsponsored results for “stainless steel water bottle.” They have also included words like metal, thermos, reusable, and flask within their title - all of which can help to catch customers who may search for the same item using other terms.

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Once you have some seed keywords, you also need to find your general keywords. These keywords will be used to fill out your descriptions, title, bullet points, and backend data. You can continue your Amazon keyword search to get some ideas, but it’s a good idea to use a more complex service at this time.

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This whole SEO keyword research process can be tricky. Just finding your keywords is step one of the processes - craftily including all these within your listing. This requires copywriting finesse, as you want the writing to sound natural but still have the maximum quantity of keywords. You’ll want to include seed keywords and your general keywords in your title, description, bullet points, alt text where possible, and the backend keywords. 

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Conclusion

Keyword research is a vital part of your Amazon selling journey. Without it, you’re missing out on untold organic traffic and needlessly keeping your conversion rates lower than they need to be. You can do this yourself, but you’d be better off working with someone who is experienced in the field and can help you not only find the data but use it properly with quality copywriting. If you’re looking for help doing just that, check out our keyword research service where our team handles this whole process for you!

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