Growing Your Amazon Sales
We have the honor of guest posting on Feedback Whiz on A+ Content.
As brand registry starts to mature on Amazon, and everyone has their trademarks in places, it’s become a wild wild west for enhanced brand content. Because of that, Amazon has tightened up its reigns by moving both Vendor Central and Seller Central onto the same module platform and renaming it all simply A+ Content.
UPDATE 6/27/2019
Amazon recently warned about suppressing ASINs with titles longer than 50 characters; they quietly upped that number to 200. (HT JB)
Please review these pages carefully. Account Managers are telling sellers that these guidelines will be strictly enforced in the coming weeks. Please make sure your titles DO NOT use “symbols, such as ~ ! $ ? _ ~ { } [ ] # < > | ; / ^ ¬ ¦ “.
6/19/2019 Amazon may crack down on title length to 50 characters with a news release today. Below is a copy of the policy found at https://sellercentral.amazon.com/gp/help/201051300?ref=nslp_at_6341070800586908994_1_201051300 but if you aren’t logged into seller central that link won’t work so read the below.
The only unusual component is the title length which may be cracked down upon on July 22, 2019. I recommend waiting to see if your titles get suppressed before you shorten them.
Creating a product title that meets all Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) requirements will help ensure customers find your products on Amazon.
The product title for an ASIN listed on the website needs to contain the right information and be in a consistent format. Product labels must also include the exact same product title or your inventory may be refused at Amazon fulfillment centers or received as Unfulfillable.
Whether you are using FBA or not, listing your inventory on Amazon is handled the same way. Here are some resources if you are new to selling:
Length:
Use 50 characters maximum as a general rule. However some product categories allow longer titles, so be sure to follow category-specific instructions.
Capitalization:
Numbers and symbols:
Product information:
In Variation Relationships, only the title of the parent ASIN is shown on the detail page. The title for the selected child ASIN will appear once the ASIN is added to the customer’s cart, so it is important to include the variation attributes (such as size and color) in the title for the child ASIN.
1See the Variation Relationships Help page for more information about parent-child products.
Creating an Amazon Listing that generates sales and builds a brand takes a lot of work.
You have to have titles optimized, copy in place for title and descriptions, backend keywords added, clear photos, and much more.
Today, we’re going to talk about optimizing our title, bullet points, descriptions, and search terms to ensure that we get in view of potential customers and convert as many clicks into sales as possible.
A software called Sellics states that the order of importance is: Title, Back-end Keywords, Bullet Points, Description
Title Best Practices:
[Example:
Meliora Goods 4K Ultra HD QLED Smart TV 240Hz High-Contrast 1 Billion Shades of Color HDR Power-Efficient Voice Activated Back-Lit (65”)]
Bullet Point Best Practices:
Bullet points should highlight the five key features you want customers to consider. These might include dimensions, age rating, ideal conditions for the product, skill level, included accessories, country of origin, and so on. Each individual bullet point should:
Bullet points should never include:
[Example:
Product Description Best Practices:
The product description lists the product features, explains what the product is used for, and provides other product-specific information.
A good product description is concise, honest, and friendly. It introduces the product and gives an overview of its uses and where it fits in its category. It can expand on the features mentioned in the bullet points.
When writing your product description:
[Example:
Enjoy our <strong> Living Progesterone Cream </strong>! Each pump of Living Progesterone 50 delivers a generous 50mg of Progesterone, or 5% strength per bottle. <br /> Every Living Progesterone 50 container manufactured includes over 80 pumps that should last approximately 2 months. <br /> Living Progesterone 50 is 100% Paraben free and 100% Phenoxyethanol Free. <br / > Living Progesterone 50 has a 5% strength, which means that one pump provides 50 mg of progesterone. <br /> Living Progesterone 50 usage may vary, however, one bottle should last at least 2 months. After it is applied, Progesterone only lasts for about 5-6 minutes in the bloodstream because it is so readily picked up by receptor sites. <br /> The most important time of day to use progesterone is before lunch. Insulin levels are the highest in the afternoon, which, of course, is why many people get sleepy between 3-4PM. Please keep in mind that when sugar levels drop, the body will be releasing adrenaline to raise the sugar levels back up. <br /> <strong> How to use: </strong> <br /> This container yields about 180 half pumps or 90 full pumps. Massage into your inner arms, thighs, chest or apply to inner forearms and rub arms together until fully absorbed. Use at night or once or twice a day as needed. Each pump delivers about 55mg of Bio-Identical Progesterone along with MSM, Shea Butter, Coconut Oil, Aloe Vera, and Licithing in a rich cream that absorbs into the skin. <br /> <strong> BENEFITS: </strong> <br /> Progesterone has been shown to help with a variety of health conditions, including: <br /> – Stress <br /> – Adrenals <br /> – Unbalanced Cortisol Levels <br /> – Sex Drive <br /> – Managing Cholesterol Levels <br /> – Sleep <br /> – Restless Legs <br /> – Managing Thyroid <br /> – Managing Blood Sugar <br /> – Aging <br /> – ADHD <br /> – Depression <br />]
Search Term Best Practices:
In order for customers to find your products, it’s important to provide keyword search terms customers might use when searching for products…
Our system limits the length of the generic keyword/search terms attribute to less than 250 bytes. It is still technically possible to go over the limit, however if you do, none of your entries will be indexed by our search engine. Being indexed means that your product is eligible (but not guaranteed) to appear in search results.
In general, characters count as 1 byte. However, some special characters such as ‘é’, ‘ä’ or ‘&’ count as 2 or more bytes. We recommend that you use an online byte counter to check the byte count of your generic keywords.
Your keywords should be:
[Example: ORO24KARAT ORO 24KARAT GOLD OROGOLD 24K 24KGOLD reinvigorating express non-surgical facelift minimize age spots reduce fine lines new anti aging formula anti wrinkle made with gold 24 karat]
Doing keyword research is the best way to do SEO and optimize your product titles and copy “to sell more products to more people more often for more money.” Quote by Harry Joiner.
There are a few tools you can use to help you with your keyword research:
This video walks you through how and why to use these tools. If you follow this advice it will skyrocket your organic traffic to your products and help push your sales!
Everybody knows driving web traffic is a good idea. And thousands of people out there claim to be good at SEO offering even thousands more ideas. It’s overwhelming, and if you’re an eCommerce or website owner how do you even measure your success? How do you know your team (if you have one) is executing properly. How do you know if your website and strategy are sound? You’ve come to the right place to get some SEO eCommerce Consulting from an SEO Expert Consultant.
This particular article is meant to simplify SEO down to two executable things:
If you’re blogging once a week, you’re doing content production right? WRONG. You need to scale far beyond that, you need 500+ pages of content a year. If your team can execute that, that’s content production. 500 pages might break down to blog posts, adding paragraphs of content to your category and product pages, or even building landing pages.
Think big because…
What makes your website special? Why should Google pick your page to outrank the billions of other pages it could use. That 1-billion website number isn’t the number of pages, it’s the number of websites. You need to build a catalog of information. You may have heard the phrase “Content is King” before. Well the reason is in an information age, the more relevant content you produce, the more people can find your site. The more people who can find your site, the more people who may convert and become a customer. Relevant content helps boost your ranking because the #1 SEO ranking factor today is engagement.
Engagement means:
How do you scale SEO content?
There’s a lot of ways you could tackle this. Depending on the size of your organization, here are possible options:
Okay you’ve got a content production team, now you need the infrastructure to translate your content in a way that Google understands.
The basics:
Taking this a level deeper, you need to build a website with a good hierarchy.
Building your url to look like www.brandnamehere.com/category-name-here-/page-title-here
On those pages, you need a layout to give:
This organizes your content so Google knows what’s most important. Beneath the headlines of course you would have paragraphs of text.
This is just technical organization. The advanced items delve into:
I’ve linked 5 articles that delve into each of those in depth. But I recommend you tackle all the organizational tech before attempting those.
Photos: 6+ photos of product. Most brick and mortar focused companies, or catalog companies, tend to provide a single photo of the product. This simply is not enough in today’s world. If you don’t have 6+ photos you are behind the curve. You should have a photo of the front, back, side, lifestyle, group photo of all products for potential upsell if you sell variations or similar products, close up of product in action (like an apple cutter cutting an apple close up shot of just the apple and cutter), label/ingredients if not easily seen on back.
Sometimes you don’t have the ability to get all these kinds of shots. Perhaps you only have access to a single photo and there’s nothing you can do about it. In these instances you can hire an affordable overseas graphic designer to make the image look different with liquids or effects. Such as this Fine Occasion Monogram Wine Glass. Here you’ll notice 5 photo options, all similar in shape and size but the image has different “wines” or aesthetics used on the glassware.
Reviews: Recommend getting 3-5 reviews on each product asap. Once you have that, future reviews will come organically. In a pinch, get some friends and family to buy your product on Amazon from their personal accounts and leave you a review.
Content: Spending time on bullet points is a must. Fleshing this out and the product description to really talk up the product, why it’s special, why people should buy it. This copy has to balance having a conversation with the consumer (most important) and putting in keywords to generate traffic (see below keywords section).
Amazon ads – Categories like beauty and technology have abnormally high PPC bids. Other categories will be more fortunate like home and goods. Depending on the competitve nature of your category I would recommend a strategy of break even on ads. Factor in all your costs and max your ad spend to break even on your products. That means your ACOS could be as high as 50% on many products. Typically more healthy at 25% but on launch especially you should be spending a lot on ads. If you have 1000 of something in stock at $25 a piece you should be spending at least $5,000 in the first month to launch this product. Every product will be different, but if you are weak in other areas this is the easiest one to do, it just requires you opening your wallet/budget.
Offsite traffic into Amazon – This is probably the hardest thing to do. But any off site traffic you can drive into Amazon will pay dividends. Recommend 2-3 month campaign to push people to Amazon through any means. Could be store traffic, emails to customer base you have (if applicable), sites like www.snagshout.com.
Keywords (SEO) – The title of your product is the most important thing you do. Be sure to be as descriptive as possible, but do not go too long or the Amazon brand guideline team will truncate your title without consulting you. When I first launched the Fine Occasion monogram wine glass I had about 20 words in the title. Amazon cut me down to 4 words and I had to fight to get it back to the 8 words it’s at today. Second fill in your bullet points. These should be super fleshed out. One technique I employ is to use caps on an important phrase at the beginning of the bullet point and then regular non caps copy that follows. This allows you to convert two different types of people. Someone who is making a decision to buy in under 30 seconds will only read the caps. Someone who spends 10 minutes will read all the copy. Third fill in keywords in the search terms field of the item editing. If you have a list of commonly used industry terms for each product, it is valuable to have. For instance, one person might call a product shaving cream, and another might call it shaving soap. Need your product knowledge to take advantage of things like that. Third writing rich copy with keywords in product description.
Any friends, family, or business connections you have that can make a purchase on your products will help lift the products off initial ground. Buying a product from your personal account, and getting others to do the same, will start your BSR sales velocity. I’d call this a guerrilla marketing tactic and it’s only good at the launch. Some sales are better than no sales for ranking consideration. In most categories there are just simply thousands of product alternatives and Amazon has no incentive to show your product without prior sales history in their organic rankings.
For the non-private labelers out there, ie people who sell at trade shows, wholesale, brick and mortar etc. You need to focus on more than traffic and conversion. Distribution control. Right now with the product fresh it could be tempting to allow other Amazon players. Especially since you may be slow to get your product into FBA and launch. I would recommend not allowing additional players to enter Amazon on your behalf however, as IMAP concerns, data issues, and other problems can surface. Having future partners sign an agreement that says they won’t sell on Amazon is advised. It will save you a headache down the road!
When you win the “Answer Box” in SEO with Google, it’s like winning a beautiful free paid ad that leap frogs your website to the top of the competition. Answer boxes come in many forms, depending on your industry, and have been nicknamed “position 0.” They were created by Google as a way to deliver the BEST result possible to the user, and the user generally gets a lot of valuable information from the box of information displayed. There are several ways to optimize for the answer box.
Just this week my company website that specializes in Gold Spot Prices published a change to our historical price tracker page that resulted in us winning the answer box in less than 24 hours.
Users who want to know specific information, get that information instantly from their Google search. Many users will not even need to click on the result because they already know what they were seeking. YET – many users do still click. A significant portion of them will end up clicking on the answer box, and at a higher proportion than a regular organic listing because they already know the credibility of the source. Many users will want to know even more information from this new trusted source they found.
In the example above, after winning the answer box, we added column headers for “Gold Price Today” and “Spot Change” to make it even more understandable to the search query. Google had the updates displayed within a couple of hours. So it’s entirely possible to optimize the answer box, even after you win it. I think Google has gotten even better at this recently because some of the blog posts out there from a year ago on answer boxes suggested that Google would cache the result and maintain it even months after the content of a page was gone.
Back in September of 2014, Moz was tracking the percentage of answer box results. On 9/26/14 the use of answer boxes doubled to 3.5% of all results. SearchEngineLand found that answer boxes led to incredible click through rates of 33% (that’s like double a “regular” #1 organic listing). In February of 2015 one study showed 20% of all search queries were rich answer box results. I personally found that number too high compared to Moz’s study in a short time period. So it’s possible that latest study was true for only some industries.
With that said, I believe we could see answer boxes double, triple, and even quadruple in 2016 year over year. And than over the next 3 years, we will see answer boxes appear in as many as 33% of all results. So if your SEO team isn’t optimizing for answer boxes now, you’re missing the inevitable strategic shift of opportunity in SEO.
Some SEOs think Google will eventually monetize answer boxes. I think that’s possible, but I think it’s more likely Google will only monetize answer boxes for retail, and leave the factual information gathering answer boxes alone. For example, Google might end up monetizing “Best place to buy (fill in blank)” just like they did with PLAs, paid search, and other products in the past. The primary payers of those systems? Retail.
You’re going to need a website with high site authority to begin with. If you just launched a website, chance are your authority isn’t established enough to even compete on this scale. If you have some great content that already gets thousands of visitors, it will be easier to optimize that than to launch a new page. Building something that has schema, markup, or at least a direct answer to a question, are good starting points to winning the answer box.
In short – you’ll need a page of content that has meta tags optimized, relevant information that answers a query, and keywords in the copy.
Relevant continued reading:
Answer Box – Search Engine Land
