Amazon SEO – the shortest path to success, Part 1

Some say that BSR is the most important search ranking factor on Amazon. However, many experts, including CPC Strategy and BigCommerce explain that Amazon A9 algo is actually based around multiple factors.

Sales are among these factors, but BSR is not mentioned directly. And there is no reason why we shouldn’t trust guys who have a demonstrated history of SEO optimization success. And what's more important, BSR is not something you can rely upon when you're just launching a product.

So, they’ve split all factors into direct and indirect. Here go the direct factors, ranked by their importance for A9*:

  1. Sales Performance History
  2. Text Match Relevancy
  3. Price
  4. Availability (in stock history)

Here go the indirect factors*:

  1. Fulfillment Method
  2. Reviews (number of reviews & review score)
  3. Images
  4. EBC / A+ Content
  5. Advertising
  6. Promotions

How you can affect direct factors

While sales performance is achieved over time, it is obvious that text relevancy (i.e. product descriptions) is something you can work on right away. Even the price is not as important. So, it’s imperative that you focus on text, spend some time and do it the right way at product launch. More on that later.

How you can affect indirect factors

Fulfillment method is something that you can’t change just to optimize your listing. It’s a core part of your business model defined by your strategy and profit margin expectations. So, though user reviews rank second here, they are actually something that plays the key role.

Bottomline, if we want to improve product listing, we need to focus on the following aspects:

  • Product description.
  • User reviews.

Product descriptions

Product description comprises multiple parts, and they rank as follows*:

  1. Title
  2. Feature Bullet Points
  3. Product Description
  4. Backend Search Terms

All are important and you should pay attention to all of them. And I highly recommend the guide to Amazon SEO from CPC Strategy if you want to avoid some pitfalls from the very start. It even includes a basic title formula with positive and negative examples and it suits most products.

You’ll be surprised that A LOT of products on Amazon have bad descriptions. There are some tools you can use to get ideas for writing your product descriptions. Here are examples of a bad bullet description and a bad long description.

A bad bullet description – very scarse, no benefits for the end user, no information about item weight, the last item longer than the previous ones, overall not a compelling description:

Bad bullet description of a product on Amazon

A bad long description – the first phrase copied from the bullets, other text copied from elsewhere, anchor text is missing the link ("Click here to view Seal"), missing line breaks:

Bad long description of a product on Amazon

What’s next

So, now we know in general where to look to get your product a good start on Amazon. In the next article we’ll discuss what tools we can use to do it quicker and easier.

* List content quoted directly from the Ultimate Guide to Amazon SEO