Amazon Product Listing Optimization: Best Practices

In this webinar, you will learn Amazon keyword targeting best practices in order to gain traction selling your products using amazon PPC ads. Check it out!

Pooja Kothari: Hello, everyone. I’m Pooja from DataHawk and I welcome you all to DataHawk’s
webinar. Thanks for joining in today on such a short notice. We apologize for the
technical glitch that happened but we really hope that we are able to deliver
some good insights to you guys. I also have Pritique with me as co-host. He’s an
Amazon expert.

Prateek: So firstly, guys, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re really excited to
have you, and I’m really excited to serve as co host on this webinar. So as I said,
Pooja is gonna be taking the lead on this webinar. I’m just gonna be sort of the
copilot. I’m gonna be answering your questions in the chat. So if you have any
questions, please, please feel free to write them in the chat. I’m gonna try to
address as many as I can. And yeah, I think we should dive right in. What do you
say, Pooja?

Pooja Kothari: Let’s go for it. So guys, I’m here to talk about Amazon listings optimization. How
you can have great visibility and conversion on Amazon. Now we know that
success on Amazon doesn’t come overnight. It comes with a multitude of things,
all put together strategically. Now, the most important thing that you wanna
look at is knowing your customers, knowing your customers in and out, what
they are looking for. And then serving them exactly what they want in terms of
expectations and attention, sounds easy. Sure. But there is one more thing that
we need to consider while planning our listings. And that of course is Amazon
SEO. That is precisely why we are here. Your product listings, such that they not
only appeal to your customers or prospects, but also satisfy Amazon’s SEO taste
buds is what should be the priority. So, let’s dive in and see what we have in
here and how we can help you to understand and how you can optimize your
listings better on Amazon.

So, the first thing is, why optimize? Why do you need to optimize your listings on
Amazon? Well, you know, there are a lot of people who just throw their listings
up, and let it ride. Which is absolutely the worst thing that you wanna do
because you are going to end up wasting so much money by the end of it. You
know what, let me take an example. So here we have two products and I have a
simple question. Which one would you buy? Well, most of us would go for the
first one. Isn’t it? Let’s take a closer look at why the first one is more appealing.
Here, you can see someone who has just thrown up some words for their listings
and someone who has actually taken time and effort to optimize the listings.

They’ve used some great keywords here. If you compare the titles of Bulletproof
Brain Octane, MCT oil and Nutiva Organic MCT oil they have a keto and paleo
diet. But other than that, if you see the first one, the Bulletproof MCT oil, you
see them use a hundred percent.

Amazon likes numbers. Non GMO. They have used ketogenic. They’ve used
coconuts only. So they’ve included all these important keywords in their title.
And not only title, they also have included all these keywords in their bullet
points as well. And if you see Nutiva, they don’t have any bullet points. So, you
know, for most of us, it’s a pretty easy choice. Now, if you’re giving a little bit of
information and the products are comparable, you know, even if it’s more
expensive, most people are probably gonna go for the one on the left. Now,
why? Why is it important? I touched on it a little bit, what it can take away and
what it’ll get you. So of course, if you have slacked listings on, it’ll get less or
very, you know, little or no sales. It’ll have crummy conversion rates and you’ll
end up wasting a lot of time and money. Shrinking PPC performance, lesser
visibility. When we talk about visibility, just a quick fact in here, a lot of times
when you change your listings, you see a little drop in sales here and there.

It’s quite normal. It takes a little time to show results. So once you optimize your
listings, you wanna let it ride for a bit, because you have to give Amazon some
time to digest the new data that you’ve just given to them. Right? And also a lot
of people ignore backing keywords, which is really important to kind of back
your listings and push the rankings for your product. When we talk about
shrinking PPC performance, a bad PPC performance, if your listings don’t carry
the right keywords, a lot of times Amazon PPC platform wouldn’t even show up
your products. You’ll sit there wondering if I’ve just spent so much on ads,
probably hundreds of dollars, but still are not making any sales. So the results
that you get when you have optimized listings are just the opposite. Like you get
more organic sales, you have increased conversion rates, you have a better
brand awareness, a better PPC, more visibility, and all this just pumps up your
rankings on the product listing page, right?

Let’s take a closer look at two products who are ranking really closely to each
other. So for the query mattresses on Amazon these two products are ranking
very close to each other. The first one Zinus 12 inch mattress is ranking on
position four and Olee sleeps product is on eighth. Now you see both are well
optimized. Their listings are looking good, but what has Zinus done better in
order to rank more than Olee? If you see if you compare their titles they have
queen, both of them have queen. They have long tail keywords like memory
foam mattress, but what is better in Zinus is the consumer pleasing is the
customer pleasing and captivating keywords like pressure relieving, plush feel.
And they make sure that they have used these keywords somewhere or the
other in their bullet points as well.

Whereas if you compare the bullet points of Olee sleep to it, you see that
they’re quite direct and plain. They don’t really have those keywords, which are
customer captivating and catchy keywords which really nudge your customer to
buy the product. Right? So now you know why and what is the importance of
optimizing it? You’d wanna know how to optimize it. So first things first, don’t be
lazy. Take the time to get it right, because it’ll pay you back and take the time to
understand what will sell. Another important thing a lot of people ignore is to
look at competitors, what they’re doing better than you. Find the right long tail
keywords and phrases that can work. The title has the most important keywords.
Now, if you are selling a mattress, you wanna make sure that you have a main
word there, but you need to also have the other related words around it. We’ll
go through how that can change the way you fill your content space on a PDP, on
a product detail page

But for now you need to be sure that all the space that you have is completely
filled up with all the relatable keywords for your product listing. All right, now,
how do you go about it? So at DataHawk, we call it the AOR technique, which is
analyze, optimize and repeat. Step one is definitely the analysis, the research
process. And what you wanna do for your analysis, you need to analyze your
listings and see where you are lacking. According to Amazon’s guidelines. You
can have a listing quality score for your listings, like how we provide you on

DataHawk. The next thing you wanna do is identify who your top competitors
are and draw inspiration from the competing products. And you can do it by a
few approaches. I have listed three here that you can do on DataHawk. The first
one is keyboard research. The next is looking at the bestseller ranks and also you
can do a simple market analysis around the keywords that you think are related
to your product.
Let’s see how you can do this. To start with the first thing that you need to do is
optimize, to start optimizing you’d first wanna know where you are currently.
What is the current state of your listings? The listings analysis tool by DataHawk
does exactly that. Let me take you to the platform to give you a more clear
picture of what it looks like. So if you see here, this is a product detail page
where if you click on the listings analysis tab here, which is on the right hand
side, you will see the listings analysis tool. If you click on the state option, this
will give you the current version of your listings. This enables you to compare
your current listings with the previous version, and this highlights the changes
that you have made. How you can do it is with this interesting feature here on
the left hand side, where you see there’s a timeline like thing. So this basically
gives you an opportunity to, if you click on this you can see what were the
changes made on this particular date.

So for instance, if I wanna see what were the changes made in the bullet points,
I would click here and this will instantly show me all the changes that have been
made. So the ones that you see in green are the words that have been added.
And the ones that you see in red are those that have been removed. What you
see here is a word cloud, which consists of all the keywords that you have used.
So you know what product has, how many you know, what keyword is used and
how many times it is used in a listing of a product. You have the media account
here, you have the title, you also have the character account and the word
count. If you go on the right, you can see it here. The bullet points and the
description at the end. So you can monitor it all and see the changes made from
the previous version. Now, what is most interesting on this listings quality
analysis tool is the listings quality score tab here.
So if you click on the listings quality score you will get the listings quality score
right here for the product. This shows you the score of your listings on the basis
of their compliance with the guidelines of Amazon. So the higher the score, the
better. So for instance, you can see here that from March 9th to March 15th, the
listing quality score was 77. The percentage that you see here is the percent in
change in listings from the starting date to the end date here. This also shows
you the detail score here so that you know where you are lacking and what
section needs the most improvement. So for instance, if you see the title here,
you see close to 200 characters that have 20% scores, which means the number
of characters that have been used, maybe they are less. So you might wanna go
there and see the title and, you know make some changes, add some relatable
keywords. Similarly for the bullet points, you can see some suggestions here,
according to the guidelines, and you can make the required changes.

Now, once you know where you are, it is always a good idea to know where your
competitors are, right? You’d want to know how they are doing on their listings.
So let me show you how you can spot them quickly and optimize your listings
using the listings of your competitors. So the first thing that you wanna do is
using keyword research, right? So for keyword research, what you can do here is
the keyword lookup tool. It allows you to see which keywords, I’ll open another
one for you here. So it allows you to see which keywords have high search
volume and track the ones that you think are the most relatable to your
products and add them to your listings, right? So for instance, you can see Tuft
and Needle Mattress. It’s a brand keyword, but you can go for instance, full size
mattress. You can go for the best mattress, natural mattress, mattress king, you
know, all these keywords. You can look at the search volume, their CPC and
choose the one that you think is the most relatable one for you. Now, what you
could do better is track them before adding them to your listings and see what
are the other products that are ranking for that keyword.

And that is exactly where your competitor analysis starts. Now, for instance I’ve
picked a keyword for your mattress, you know, so what you wanna do is the first
thing that you wanna leverage is the market analysis tab right here. I’ll zoom it
for you. You can click on the market analysis tab, this gives you a view of how
the products are ranking for this keyword, how they’re priced, reviewed and
rated globally as well as on different pages. So for instance, if your product is
priced above the maximum price here, which is 1056, then there is no chance
that you’re gonna rank for this particular keyword. So you might wanna go for a
longer tail keyword where you have a higher probability of ranking. So for
instance, I’ve taken another example for you. So for instance, if you take the
queen size mattress, let’s look at the market analysis part. Well, so you have that
margin here. So you have a high probability of ranking on this particular keyword
rather than the shorter ones, right? So that’s one thing that you can do for
market analysis around the keyboard.

The next thing that you can leverage here definitely is the organic products tab
on the left. If you click on the organic products tab, this will help you identify the
top products that are ranking organically for this particular keyword. Now, here’s
something interesting that you can do here. You could queue down your
research a little bit more. You can go deeper on the pricing. You could filter the
list by pricing. So for example, if you’re ranking somewhere between, if you’re
priced somewhere between 500, it to 1000, what you could do is you could filter
the list by price and see which products are in your price range and their ranking
order. And then you could go for these competitors and their listings and see
how they’re ranking on Amazon, on the page that you’re interested in, or maybe
globally. Now, there’s another approach that you could take which is by going
through seller rank, sorry. I forgot to show you one thing here. So there’s one
more important thing that you wanna take care of while conducting a
competitor analysis.

And that is sales. That is very, very important. Now, for example here, when you
wanna pick the top competitor from this list, you should go for the one you
know, that has more sales out of the list of top ranking products for that
particular keyword. So for instance, if you see the third ranked product is by Line
Spa, and the second one is by Signature Design. Now, if you see here on the right
and zoom in a little bit, you see the sales estimate for the one on the third
position is higher than the one on the second one. So now, you know that these
are in the top five, and they’re probably on the same shelf. So you wanna go for
the one that has higher sales, rather than the one that has, you know, higher
rankings on it. Right? So that’s for research around keywords. Another approach
that we could take is by going through the seller’s rank and picking the top
products from the bestseller list, right?

Let me show you how you can do it. So when you’re inside a product detailed
page there’s another tab called the sales rank tracker. It’s right here. You can
click on the sales rank tracker and it’ll show you the list of how a product is
ranking over a selected time rate and across different categories on Amazon,
right? So you can see the different categories right here. Like here, you can see
the categories and you can see the sales rank for the selected time range, right?

So you can choose the category that you wanna rank in. So for instance I’ve
chosen a mattress, let me open another one for you. So, here I have opened this
page for you. So you see all the products that are ranking, that have the
bestseller ranks. We have a list of the top hundred here. You can pick the top
five, top 10, or you can pick the products around, your own rank, the product
where you are ranking. One thing again, that you would not wanna miss here is
your sales estimate. So what you want to do here is track all these products.
For instance, if you’re ranking seventh or eighth or ninth, you wanna track all the
products around here and you want to see their sales estimate and go up to the
ones, or, you know, analyze the listings of the products that have higher sales.

And also are falling in your range of ranks, per se, right? So that was for how you
can find your competitors in order to get inspired by their listings, and then try
and optimize your listings. So once you’re kind of done with that thing with the
finding out and finalizing on the keywords, you can start optimizing it. Now,
when you optimize, you should always keep in mind that you need to place your
best keywords in the title. You need to optimize your bullet points. The
description should be involved and with the right spacing and the right
descriptive keywords. Never forget the backend keywords, use important
phrases in your backend keywords. Try to use the long tail keywords and the key
that your competitors are using, but you’re not able to include them on your
product listing. Maybe you wanna use them in your backend space, right?

Then the next step is to repeat. So once you’re done with all this you wanna
track and see how your listings are doing, you wanna track your listings. You
wanna see how your testing is going. So you can track your products listing using
DataHawk, and you can analyze using the listings analysis tool that we just saw.
The next thing that you wanna do is track the impact of changes in our products
listing. So you can use Amazon alerts, you can use Amazon alerts on DataHawk.

You can keep a track of all the changes that are being made in your listings. For
instance, title description, bullet point, media, and how it is impacting your
ranking. So you can track your organic ranks and you can set alerts on it so that
you receive the daily email alerts that we have and get notified on whenever
there is a change, this will also help you to keep a track on your competitors,
because if they’re making a change in their title, ,and you’re also tracking their
rankings at the same time, you’d know that what kind of change or what kind of
optimization has impacted change in their rankings, right?

So you can do that. And then you can keep modifying your listings and following
the same process. Now, after all this, you also want to have a successful
overview. You want to have an overview of how your products are performing,
and you wanna see it, you know, in a brief on one screen. So it’s always great to
have a dashboard to see how your changes are making an impact. So in order to
measure the impact of optimization, we can use the listings quality score
dashboard. Let me take you to the platform again, to show you how powerful it
is. So here you see the listings quality dashboard. When you see the listings
quality dashboard, what you wanna do first. So firstly it is on the homepage on
the SEO dashboard. You can click on the listings analysis from the left section
that you have here. You see the listings quality dashboard. Now the first thing
that you wanna do is filter by marketplace. And the second thing that you wanna
do is filter by project. You can add all your products to a project, and then you
can open it here.

You can select the required time range here. And then the listing quality score is
the overall score of all your products from that particular project. You can see it
here. You can also see how your listings are performing. So it says that 92.5% of
your listings are acceptable. Similarly, what percent of your listings are good?
What percent of your listings are improvable? So, you know where you are
ranked or where you are standing in terms of your listings quality score. Now,
you also have listings quality score and subscores for each product, on
a granular level. So you can see all your products here. You can see their overall
scores, and you can see how they scored on the basis of title, description, bullet
point, images, and a plus content. Now, what you could do better is take another
approach where you add all your competitors’ products and your products in the
same project, and start seeing. So like that you’ll be able to differentiate how
you are better or how your competitors are better than your products, right? So
for instance, I’ve done it in a similar way. I’ve added all the different brands here.

I’ve added Casper Sleep Olee Sleep, then Zinus. You have Purple mattress, so you have
different brands, and now you can see how each brand is scored differently in
here. So for instance, if you see this one here by Olee sleep, it has an overall
score of 68%. You can see the title is 78%, whereas the Zinus has 89%. It is the
same example that we took in the initial slides in our presentation. So you know
that they have a better score in the title, and you can improve by getting
inspired by their titles. So that’s how you can differentiate using this dashboard.

And you can take a similar approach where you wanna add all your competitors
and see who are your top three or four competitors in terms of listing, and just
go after them and start monitoring and analyzing their listings and get inspired
and optimize your own listings from it. All right. So, that’s how that’s more or
less how you could use DataHawk and leverage the data that we have in here
beautifully presented for you.

And you can definitely rank higher in terms of the listing quality score. And you
can really push and pump your organic rankings using these techniques with
that. I also have a few actionable tips here for you. So the first one is to have the
most important keywords in the first 80 characters. This is because when you
view your listings on a laptop screen or a computer screen versus your mobile
screen, you know, it gets scrubbed on your mobiles. So it’s very important to add
the most important keywords in the first 80 characters, because the others will
get cropped on the mobile screen. Right? So make sure that you do that. The
next one is to use powerful and captivating keywords, which persuade your
customer into buying, which nudge your customer into buying. For instance,
latest, fun, interactive. We also saw an example of a Zinus mattress, how they
pressure relief. When I want to buy a mattress and I see pressure relief, I want to
buy that mattress, right? I don’t want to go for a plain listing. I will love to get
attracted to another you know, just, just some keywords thrown randomly out
there, right?

So you wanna make sure that you add powerful keywords that nudge your
customer into buying. Then you should keep track of the formula for the titles.
So every category has a different formula for the titles. You can crack it by
analyzing two or three or four products. And for instance, I’ve cracked one for
home appliances, you have brand name, plus model number, plus modeling,
plus product type. So you wanna make sure that you don’t randomly arrange
your keywords according to yourself, and see how they’re looking nice. But also
go with Amazon SEO and try to maintain the protocol that there is and try to
follow the formulas that there are. The next one is adding variations to
introduce other versions of your product. In many cases, it is a great way to get
multiple item sales. You can also sell the products, which are not actually ranking
on the page. How you can do it is for instance, if a hundred ML product is
ranking, you can add a 150 ML product, which has a very less difference in price,
in your listings.

And, there’s a huge probability that the customer will actually end up buying
that product because of the lesser difference in price, right? So you can rank that
product without even actually ranking it. Okay. So that was it for the tips. The
last thing that I wanna go for is back in keywords. Guys, do not forget the
keywords. Here are little dos and don’ts for you. You can use tools like DataHawk
keyword lookup in order to find the most relevant keywords, and then add them
to your backend. You can get inspired by the keywords of your competitor. As I
said earlier, you can pick the keywords that you’re not able to use in your
listings, but you know that your competitor is ranking for them. You can add
them in your backend definitely, it’ll help you rank better. You can use the first
field for the important phrases and the remaining field for the long tail
keywords, which really back your listings and give a huge push to your rankings.

You can include converting keywords for your campaigns. The ones that you bid
on, you can always include them in your backends.

And what you should not do is ignore your competitors, ignore your PPC, not
utilize the complete space and use only short keywords. Use long tail keywords
guys. All right. So that’s that from my side. And I’ll just pull in Pritique because
we have something very interesting for you, and there are some free gifts for
you as well. Prateek, would you like to jump in?

Prateek: Thank you Pooja for the incredible webinar. I mean, I can’t speak for the
attendees, but I can tell you that. I think you explained really well, you know, the
importance of PDP optimization and also how the people can use DataHawk to
optimize their PDPs. Okay. So, folks you know, we did not wanna turn this just
into another regular webinar with the one sided spiel. So we want to actually
solve real problems for you, you know, give you something tangible. So we’ve
come up with a little something here. I’m gonna share a link, you know, in the
chat. This is a link to our LinkedIn post, where we initially talked about the whole
webinar. So you know, it’d be great if you could just go onto the post there and
write whatever questions you have, visa vi, PDP optimization, and we can get in
touch and we will get in with you separately thereafter. And, you know, we’ll
maybe take a couple ASINs from you from your catalog from Amazon.
And we’ll try, and we will give you real insights, which can help you optimize
those PDPs. So for example, we can tell you what your LQS or your listing quality
score is for those specific ASINs. We can tell you what you can do to improve the
LQS, so for example, if you need to add some characters to your title, if you need
to get rid of some promotional you know, words, stuff like that. And yeah, so I
mean, and that can basically really help you optimize your knowledge of some of
your PDPs. So just give me a second and I’m gonna post the link in a second
here. There we go. So it’s now in the chat. You can just go there, right? Whatever
questions you have and we’ll get in touch with these separately. That’s all I have.
I hope you guys enjoyed the webinar and thank you again so much for joining us.
Pooja, do you have anything else you wanna add?

Pooja Kothari: Thanks everybody. And again, we apologize for the technical glitch. I hope we
delivered some insights here, and I hope it was useful for all of you. If you have
any questions we have Pritique.

Prateek: One thing. So you know how this week we are producing another podcast on the
same subject, PDP optimization. So in case people didn’t get a chance to watch
this, or if they just, you know, they’re interested in learning more, maybe they
can tune in and just follow us on LinkedIn. And they’ll know when the podcast
comes out.

Pooja Kothari: Right. So follow us on our LinkedIn and there’s lots of content coming up. So I
hope we have you all in our next webinar and for our next podcast as well.
Thanks everybody. Bye