Are you struggling to get your products noticed within the Amazon marketplace? This may be because you’re not triggering the right ranking signals to crack the Amazon A9 algorithm.
Yes, that’s right, Amazon has its own search algorithm just like Google, Bing and other search engines. Although there are fewer ranking signals to take into consideration in Amazon, SEO works in the same way here. However as Amazon is a buying platform, you shouldn’t approach this with the same web-SEO mind.
What is Amazon A9?
Did you know nearly 50% of US transactions take place on Amazon? The result of this is through Amazon’s complex algorithm – Amazon A9.
Amazon A9 is labelled as an “organic product ranking algorithm” which is comprised of many ranking signals used to match the user’s query. These signals can be distributed into two categories – direct and indirect.
What are the ranking factors?
Text match relevancy
Keywords are one of the most important elements to remember in order to make Amazon A9 happy, as these influence the ranking signals. However, be sure to use the most relevant keywords according to your product.
Keywords can be inputted in many areas of your Amazon product pages, such as your product’s title, the seller name, your backend keywords, the brand field and the product description. Here are a few tips to improve each characteristic:
Product title
Include your brand name, a unique feature of your product e.g colour or size and (if applicable) mention the quality of your product as well.
Seller’s name
From many marketer’s observations into the complex platform, Amazon ranks products higher in organic search results if the main keywords are used in the seller’s name. E.g. If you are searching for ‘Red Collars For Dogs’ and your seller’s name is ‘Dogs For Life’, your product will come up because of the word ‘dogs’ being incorporated.
Backend keywords
This function’s job is to instruct Amazon’s algorithm (A9) on a specific product listing targeting of an individual keyword. This is something similar to Google’s meta tags as we’re telling the search engine what the webpage is about. Therefore, it’s important to keep in mind not to repeat any words (i.e. keyword stuffing), avoid unnecessary quotation marks, commas are ignored and include variations in spelling and synonyms.
Brand field
This is always positioned above the title and links to search engine result pages (SERPs) of additional products from the same brand. When writing in this field, it’s imperative you spell your brand name correctly each time because, from an analysis of Amazon customer behaviour, searches use your brand name in their query.
Important tip – if your brand name has different variations, use a keyword tool to find out which variation has the highest search volume and use this.
Product description
This part of Amazon allows you to be as persuasive as possible in order to seal the deal! However, you’ll definitely want to include the keywords you want to target here too. You want to write for both A9 and the current customer, so you want your most important keywords to sound as natural as possible. Try to make these descriptions as unique as possible, therefore this avoids the risk of content cannibalism.
Sales velocity
It’s important to note sales velocity is known to be the most successful way of ranking high on Amazon’s SERP’s, therefore it’s imperative to keep enhancing this in your strategy.
This can be done by simply advertising your products to increase your sales by using headline search ads, product display ads or the sponsored products feature. However, it’s crucial that you use the correct ad for each stage of the sales funnel.
Headline Search Ad
- Top of the funnel traffic
- You will recognise these as banner ads, which are displayed at the top of the SERP
Sponsored Products
- Middle/bottom of the funnel traffic
- Considered as the most powerful advertising tool in the Amazon platform
- An immense portion of advertising revenue comes from sponsored products
Product Display Ad
- Bottom of the funnel traffic
- You will find these in numerous places around Amazon, however, it’s most common to find these beneath the buy box
Premium content
According to Amazon, producing great content to your users results in a 5+% increase in sales. Therefore, a great marketing tactic to include within your Amazon strategy would be to highlight a great user experience. And this can be implemented via numerous methods i.e. images, reviews, promotions and blog content.
In addition, it’s essential to acknowledge the two types of audiences available; Amazon A9 audience and your current customers, and by doing so tweaking the keywords within your copy to match each audience’s queries (text match relevancy). It’s also important to make sure your product pages are as detailed as possible.
With Amazon being the top level search engine for product research (that’s even better than Google), the vast majority of Amazon’s customers will be looking for a specific product when using their search function, making it more important than ever that your products have visibility. So there you have it, a foolproof way to crack the Amazon A9 algorithm and increase your product visibility through intuitive SEO practices.
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