Getting More Shoppers to See Your Amazon Products
Author: Brian Carter
This
is a topic I haven’t seen much information about online. I was shocked,
because in the Internet world of 2005, forum posts and articles usually
come up for any kind of optimization topic. But it could be that those
who are Amazon marketplace merchants are a more select group of
internet marketers… and that no one wants to share any of the secrets
they’ve learned, if they’ve learned any.
Well
I’m going to spill the beans, because that’s my policy as far as the
web goes- what would an info-site be without info-beans?
So
here are the basic points about optimizing your Amazon marketplace feed
to increase your chances of appearing, or appearing high in search
results:
1. The most important elements to optimize are the product title and the 5 search-term fields (search-terms1, search-terms2…)
2.
Your product name, if it’s already SEO’d on your website and elsewhere,
should already be several words long. For example, instead of calling
it the ‘Mavica CD1000′, you should be calling it the ‘Sony Mavica
CD1000 Digital Camera’. Some might consider it excessive to add
‘digital camera’ to the end- I don’t have any data either way. My
experience has been that 4-5 word product names are ok with the search
engines.
3. The search-terms fields can only
have one word in them, so in this case, a ‘keyword’ really is just one
word. It’s up to you whether you’d repeat a word that’s already in your
title, but since you only get 5, I’d suggest you don’t, unless you
really can’t think of 5 search-terms.
4. To
choose keywords for the search term fields: First look at the product’s
name, brand, model, features, and benefits, running those through the
overture search suggestion tool and adwords keyword tool, or some other
metatool, if you have one.
5. Which keywords
to choose? The most popular words? The most unique words? If you really
want to get competitive, see how many competitors you have in the
search results for each of these, and occupy a sparsely populated
niche. If you want to know the most popular words in your keyword list,
run over to Mark Horrel’s Keyword Density Analyzer (I think it’s
inaccurately named but an awesome tool- I’d call it a ‘Word Frequency
Analyzer’), and paste your whole list in there, don’t show stop words,
do it ‘by frequency’. Now you have a numerical portrait of the most
common and most unique words.
6. Stemming:
According to Technical Support at SellerCentral (in an email to me
11/16/2005), Amazon’s search appliance will take care of plurals and
singulars- meaning if you put ‘moisture’ you don’t have to put
‘moisturizes’- but does not get any more sophisticated than that- so if
you want ‘moisturizing’ you’ll have to use another field for that word.
7. Now experiment- I’d suggest using a combination of general and unique words.
8. To fine tune, search Amazon on the keywords you’ve targeted, as well as your product names, and see how visible you are.
9. Experiment, tweak, and win!
About
the author: Brian B. Carter, MS is an internet marketing consultant in
San Diego, California.