Finding Keywords for Amazon Listings
Thank you so much to ImportXperts member, Pip Wheatley for writing this blog post on how to find keywords for Amazon listings!
Amazon ranks products and displays them according to the quality of your listing. The quality of your listing includes: your title, images, product description, sales, reviews, and crucially… keywords.
Amazon uses its algorithm to match products with what the potential buyer has typed into the Amazon search bar. This way, Amazon is most likely to fulfill the customer’s needs quickly, and carry on shopping on Amazon.
This is why we want our listing to be as good as possible.
One way to do this is to be ‘keyword-optimized’.
Being ‘keyword-optimized’ helps you rank higher using Amazon’s SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), much like Google, YouTube, or any other large online platform where you might search for something.
With keywords, it ranks your product based on 2 things:
1. The placement of the keywords in your listing
This is all about how high up your keywords are in your listing, and why you want your main keywords to be in the product title.
If a potential buyer is looking for a product, they will go to the search bar on Amazon & type in the name of the product they’re looking for.
The higher up these keywords are in your listing, the more chance you have of appearing in the Amazon search catalog for that product.
For example, if your customer types in ‘Dumbbells’ and your product is called ‘Dumbbells-For Weightlifting and Muscle Mass Core Strength’, you’ll rank higher than if you had the keyword ‘Dumbells’ much lower on in the description, or further along in your title.
Remember: with wording, your title is highest, followed by your 5 or 6 bullet points, and your description is way down the bottom, where the user has to scroll (and often won’t) usually after Amazon have shown other peoples ‘related’ or ‘suggested’ products. This is where you have more space to write, and your least important keywords go.
Don’t make people scroll to find out more – make it as easy as possible to give them the information fast. This also prevents them from finding and clicking on your competitor!
2. The more keywords you have that are associated.
Weightlifting, muscle mass, core, and strength are all associated. Weightlifting is more closely related than ‘core’ or ‘strength’, and is more likely to be another keyword the user types in to narrow down results further. So I’d put it high up in the title.
3. You don’t necessarily score higher for multiple uses of the same keyword.
You have a limited number of characters (letters and numbers) for your description and bullet points.
You only have to use each keyword ONCE
The Magic: Amazon will combine words from different parts of your listing to match search results.
If your title is ‘Armchair with back support’, and someone types in ‘chair with support for head’, as long as you have put ‘head’ and maybe even ‘chair’ later on, even at different points so the words aren’t together, Amazon will notice you show all three keywords In your listing, so you could be a match. You might only have two of the three, or less!
You wouldn’t do as well as someone who’d actually put ‘chair support for head’ or ‘head support’ somewhere, but hey, Amazon will also look at all the other things, like images, reviews, and even associated keywords.
Plus, unless you’re Mystic Meg, you ain’t gonna know exactly what everyone will type.
It could be really weird: ‘Chair with support posture correcting chiropractic head’…who knows?
There are a FEW exceptions to repetition:
- I would repeat the most important keywords found in the title, high up in the bullet points (points one or two) because it’s hard not to, and it helps reconfirm to Amazon this really is relevant to your customer.
- The other exception is common mis-spellings, alternate spellings, or hyphenated spellings. For example: include ‘hip-belt’, ‘hipbelt’ AND ‘hip belt’ if you find a lot of other listings do, or you think it’ll be typed in several different ways. Customers are concerned with finding what they want – not about their spelling or making things clear to Amazon. If you can’t, just use the phase once and separate the words (hip belt). It might not look right, but if Amazon can find both stem words or both words and put them together, it’s happy. For example: if someone types ‘hipbelt’, Amazon will look for stem words like hip.
- Use both British AND American spellings if needed (Australia sometimes uses both)
- Similar words eg: comfy and comfortable
- Don’t waste characters. Don’t worry about single and plural eg: mum, mums. Just use what makes sense! If in doubt, use the singular. Amazon will notice the stem word with an ‘s’ on the end.
So as you can see, there is a lot to fit into the small space which is your product listing 🙂
One final word – of course, you can edit your listing once it’s live; however, it’s best to get your keywords right from the beginning. It can confuse Amazon if you change the title & bullets, so we recommend spending a bit longer on your keyword research to make sure you include the best ones which will bring in traffic & generate sales.
We hope you found this post useful, if you have any questions on keywords – just drop a comment below!
