Guest Post by our friends at TurnKey Product Management
Amazon PPC and Amazon SEO are the two cornerstones for improving product visibility and sales on Amazon. You can’t rely solely on Amazon PPC if your listing isn’t well-optimized and firing from all cylinders. Sending people to a listing that isn’t optimized, sets your ads up to fail. Any paid traffic strategies on or off of Amazon will not be as successful if you don’t have the fundamentals in place for a highly converting listing.
The Correlation Between Amazon PPC and Amazon SEO
Amazon PPC and SEO build off each other to improve sales, and a well-optimized listing improves product ranking over time. Amazon PPC sales will boost your ranking because conversion and sales are some of the most significant factors in Amazon’s SEO algorithm formula. This is because Amazon’s algorithm will boost your organic rankings if you get more sales, so by getting an increase in sales from your Amazon PPC traffic, you're increasing your organic rankings much faster.
Keyword research is an integral part of both your listing and PPC campaigns. Using relevant keywords in your listing copy contributes to your listing’s optimization, rankings, and conversion. Your listing lays the foundation to increase conversions and the overall effectiveness of your PPC campaigns. If you don’t have a highly converting page, you will likely lose money on your advertising campaigns. If you use the wrong keywords in your listing, you’ll also bid for the wrong keywords in your PPC campaigns. As a result, you’ll drive the wrong traffic to your Amazon listing.
How Do You Optimize Your Listings?
The primary determining factors for your listing optimization are image quality, keyword placement, and strong listing copy. Your product images need to meet Amazon’s product image requirements. Adding lifestyle product photos is imperative to demonstrate what customer avatar buys your products and how they use it. Adding infographics are another great way to solve customer pain points and show how your product will help solve their problem.
Another key factor, if you are brand registered, is to add a video to your listing. You can hire a professional to make product videos on sites like Fiverr for under $100 if you don’t know how to do it yourself. Some of TurnKey Product Management’s clients have seen significant improvements in conversion rate from adding a product video.
When shoppers visit Amazon, they search for products by typing specific keywords into the search bar and browsing the results. Incorporating these keywords in your listing copy ensures that your products regularly appear in customers’ searches. At TurnKey Product Management, we use MerchantWords’ keyword software as one of our main tools for completing this research.
Weave relevant keywords into your listing by expanding the title to accommodate more keywords, but keep in mind the character count and guidelines for your product category. Remember, never repeat the same word twice! Don’t waste your characters! It’s also important to include keywords in the bullet points and product description section. For keywords that do not make it into your title, bullet points, or description, make sure you input them into the backend search terms in Seller Central and, if you are brand registered, the backend of enhanced brand content (EBC) images.
To fully optimize your bullet points, they should be listed from the most important to the least important. On some customer devices, only the first few bullets are displayed, so choose carefully! Tell customers why your product is the best choice for them. In your description use emotional and compelling language that creates a clear image of what their life would look like with your product and convinces shoppers to make a purchase.
Other Listing Factors Affecting Your PPC Campaign
Many listing factors can affect your PPC campaigns, but here are a few to pay attention to:
Buy Box
Buy Box issues negatively impact your PPC ads. If you’re not the primary seller of your product and continually losing the Buy Box to resellers, you’re setting up your ads to fail. Every time you lose the Buy Box, your ads shut off.
Inventory
Inventory is another determining factor for your PPC performance. Inconsistency in your stock directly translates to inconsistency in your ads. Your ads will automatically shut off when you run out of stock, making it hard to hit ad spend goals and scale your business. Maintaining consistency with your ads allows you to lower your ad cost by collecting the data necessary for ad optimization.
Reviews
Lastly, customer reviews play a critical role in determining your Amazon PPC success. If you have few or poor reviews, it’ll negatively affect your PPC campaign. Reviews build trust for Amazon customers and a listing that is lacking reviews will have low sales conversion, causing a high ACOS. Getting more reviews (especially positive ones) boosts your ad success and increases conversions.
So make sure you’re making the most of your precious ad dollars, and send those potential customers to a professional and fully-optimized listing. If you need help, TurnKey Product Management offers listing audits to help pinpoint the exact changes you need to make in order to increase conversion.
About the Contributors
This article was contributed by Jeff Lieber and his team at TurnKey Product Management, an Amazon consulting company. With over 12 years of Amazon experience, over 150K products sold, and over 8-figures in revenue made for our clients in the past year alone, we are uniquely positioned to help brands scale their sales on Amazon through a variety of services: full-service management, Amazon PPC management, 1-on-1 coaching, standard operating procedures, online training, and more.
Tell us your thoughts