In the most important discovery since Steven Pope proved A+ Content indexes on Amazon, My Amazon Guy is yet again at the forefront for industry best practices.
ALL THE SEO TOOLS ARE WRONG
Many Amazon SEO tools are incorrectly counting spaces against your character counts for the search terms field on Seller Central. My favorite 2 keyword tools Helium 10 & ZonGuru and many other tools are counting spaces towards your 250 character count.
Why does this matter? Because that’s 30-45 extra bytes, 5-10 extra key phrases you can add to your search terms field that the tools are telling you that you don’t have room for.
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Case and point – the SEO Help file literally spaces are not counted. So I don’t know why the SEO tools are counting spaces.
2. Are spaces and punctuation counted?
No. For the purpose of calculating the length of Search Terms, Amazon Search does not count spaces or punctuation. For readability, Search Terms should be separated by spaces. Punctuation can be used, but is not mandatory.
Read that here.
If you haven’t read this help file, I highly recommend it. SEO myths keep coming out of the woodwork. Another one I heard this week was “Amazon only indexes the first 80 characters of the title” – I can’t prove this one wrong yet, could use help on that if anyone has proof.
1. What’s the difference between bytes and characters? (This is important to denote, SC shows red flags when you go over 250 bytes, not 250 characters)
The Search Terms field in Seller Central has a built-in byte counter which stops accepting input at the length limit that is quoted in bytes and not characters as some Search Terms contain multi-byte characters.
When you add over 250 characters to Seller Central, no error message.
Only when you add 250 bytes does the error message flag. Therefore you can have 299 characters up to 250 bytes and be fine.
