In This Episode
Want to improve your Amazon clicks and sales? Seasoned SEO veteran, Jordi Ordóñez joins us this week and shares useful tips and tricks to drive more traffic to your listings by organically improving your product’s appearance in Google search. Listen in!
TRANSCRIPT
Tommy Beringer:
What's up you data-hungry Amazon sellers. This is your host, Tommy Beringer of the Sell Rank Win Podcast from MerchantWords. And in this podcast, we give you the answers to your most burning questions; actionable insights that you can take away and implement into your business today. So let's go ahead and dive right into today's episode. What do you say? Let's go.
What's going on everybody? Welcome to the Sell Rank Win Podcast for MerchantWords. I'm your host, Tommy Beringer, and as always, we have a very special guest on with us today. My next guest is an e-commerce SEO expert and has been optimizing search for hundreds of brands since the year 2000. His main expertise lies in Google search and Amazon search, and that's why I have him here today. So without further ado, I'd like to introduce you to our good friend Jordi Ordóñez. Jordi, how are you today?
Jordi Ordóñez:
Hi! I'm fine and well. It's a massive pleasure to be here at the MerchantWords Podcast. Thank you guys for having me.
Tommy Beringer:
Absolutely, Jordi. Absolutely. Thank you so much for coming on and spending your time with us. An expert like you coming on is always welcome and exciting to discuss, especially since you've been doing this since 2000. That's pretty awesome.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah, yeah. I'm an old guy in this business.
Tommy Beringer:
You don't look old!
Jordi Ordóñez:
And also I have to say, I think I'm here because I'm friends with your CEO, so yeah, that's the main reason why I'm on your podcast feature today.
Tommy Beringer:
Well, you know what? We have many friends, but if they're not experts in their field like yourself, we wouldn't give them the time of day. Trust me.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Okay.
Tommy Beringer:
All right. So Jordi, tell everyone where are you joining this from? I always like to tell the people, especially if they're in another part of the world, where are you in the world today?
Jordi Ordóñez:
I'm in Barcelona, which is one of the big cities in Spain, and maybe it rings a bell, names like Leo Messi, Salvador Dali, Sagrada Familia, fútbol (go Barcelona), and all that kind of stuff. Well, so I'm located in Barcelona.
Tommy Beringer:
Very cool. Very cool. I need to get out there one day. I will. I heard it is a very beautiful city, so I need to make my way out there. Me and my family, we will get out there one of these days soon. I'm sure.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Absolutely. This is a sunny city and we have amazing food.
Tommy Beringer:
Oh, I cannot wait. I cannot wait. Yeah, got to do it. Got to do it. We'll come out there and have some Paella or something right? Is that like the specialty out there?
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yep.
Tommy Beringer:
Okay. Awesome. I love paella. We asked the Spanish restaurants around here, but I doubt they're anything close to getting something straight from Barcelona or anywhere in Spain for sure.
Jordi Ordóñez:
No, I don't think so.
Tommy Beringer:
No, no, no, no. We won't even go into that. So, okay. Let's go ahead and dive into it. So tell us a bit about why you got into the SEO space.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Well, I studied advertising and four years later I realized it was pretty much useless. So I started working on online projects around the year 2000 and got interested in SEO like 10 years later when I started my first online store, which was built on PrestaShop, which is, it's a pretty famous CMS in Spain. My first online store was a Jamaican Reggae music shop because I had this website called Bose Sounds, which was focus on to make a music like Scar, Reiki, Dancehall, and that kind of stuff. And I just decided to open my first online store, selling out merchandising and CDs and LPs.
And then I started working for small and sized companies. And at the same time, it started blogging on my own site about e-commerce SEO, and that led me to bigger clients, such as Intersport or Castanye, maybe they don't sound familiar because you live in the U.S., but they are big in Europe. And finally, about three years ago, I partnered up with a showshoweb.com, which is an SEO agency. We have like 25 people working now on our main focus is SEO, but well, PPC and CRO are all the focus that the company has. And while we work for well-established e-commerce brands and startups as well, and we also develop our own site projects, like niche sites focused on, well, whatever sells on the internet.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah. Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. That music shop that you had, so what happened in that? What was the downfall of that? Was it the digital age of music? Like napster taking over and all that or what?
Jordi Ordóñez:
That was the thing. Yeah. I started selling CDs and LPs on the wrong moment and Napster was taking the lead on the P2P exchange of music and MP3 was down the road. So it was a total fail, but it got me in contact with the technology, the CMS PrestaShop which I used to build shops for clients and all the side projects that I had.
Tommy Beringer:
Very cool!
Jordi Ordóñez:
And that was my pretty much my first adventure in e-commerce. So it was a total flop if you ask me.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah, no, absolutely. But you live and you learn, right? So very cool. Very cool. All right. So this is something I really want to know from an expert, such as yourself, is how can Amazon sellers optimize their brand Google search in order to help with their ranking and sales on Amazon?
Jordi Ordóñez:
Well, the first thing I always recommend is using MerchantWords, of course, and I also recommend at least setting up a landing page about your brand. But, well, let's say that the ideal scenario would be to have a complete website with your brand values, kind of an Amazon store, but outside Amazon, including also your full brother portfolio, contact and all that stuff. And once you build that, I normally recommend driving traffic to the website, using PPC ads and publishing organic content, wherever your audiences could be. That Google using organic ranks, or Google ads, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Pinterest, or forums work great for websites, blogs, websites, magazines, whatever. And then if it's possible also use micro influencers, like people with 50,000 followers or less, that kind of people can help you improve your brands [inaudible], and simply by exchanging product giveaways with them, or by offering them small fees.
And in this first phase, I would avoid co-sleep branding actions with big influencers, and you need to focus on Guerrilla Marketing and having some Gray or Black Hat marketing actions. I mean, staying away from actions that cost you lots of money, and remember that this is a long-term job so you need to define a strategy that lasts for months, and that goes on well with branding actions within Amazon. Amazon, sorry. Things you can do like brand registries, sponsored brands, brand store, display ads, so that new audiences find out about the brand and also sponsor products on your main competitors ASIN's. And if your budget allows it, you can also carry out offline actions, such as radio press or even television ads, or niche TV channels. I've got this made, my English is not that good, but I wrote it down and I have a script. So, that's my secret.
Tommy Beringer:
Your English is great. You said that you said that earlier, before we got on, it's actually great man. So don't even sweat it. You're good.
Jordi Ordóñez:
I try my best. I studied English at school and then at college, but I learn English by listening to heavy metal music and watching The Wire on tv. I have this kind of, neighborhood English.
Tommy Beringer:
There you go. There you go. Very good. Yeah. So with the Guerrilla Marketing tactics and all of that, yeah, very, very smart to do that. And then you also mentioned something about forums earlier. That's pretty interesting. So what forums would you suggest maybe some Amazon sellers to get into? Anything in their space? I know that's pretty general, but what are your suggestions there?
Jordi Ordóñez:
Well, in Spain for example, if you're selling fishing products, you have lots of forums about fishing, and it's pretty easy to set up an account there and give away products or even advertising on that forum. And that's something I've used in the past and it works really, really well for niche products, not general products. And then you have these general forums in Spanish called well, there's one called For El Coches, which is something that translates like car forums or whatever. It's called For El Coches in Spain, and it's the second Spanish forum in the world. The first one is called taringa.net, which is from, I think South America, Argentina, I can't remember. And you can post whatever you want to post on that forum because you have of topics, threats. So it's pretty easy to make any Guerrilla Marketing action on that forum.
Tommy Beringer:
Very cool. Very cool. Yeah. I think that is an awesome way to go ahead and reach out to your niche. Right? Get into those forums, provide value, and then maybe provide a discount or something, send them over to your Amazon page or something like that. That'd be very cool. All right. So something else I wanted to know, you being an expert in the Spanish market, what non-Spanish speaking Amazon markets, do you see Spanish keywords having the biggest impact in?
Jordi Ordóñez:
UK, France, Portugal, Italy, or Germany are huge markets for Spanish keywords and products. Mostly because we have lots of experts and there are many keywords related to Spanish products like food and drinks, especially. Which are our search in this countries. I don't know, if you ever traveled to Catalonia, there's a funny food here called Fuet, which is like, well, I couldn't describe it. You have to try it. So any Catalan that is an expert living in France/Portugual needs for it to survive. So this is one of the words that is search on Amazon UK or France, and in addition, many tourists, especially German and English discover products when they are on holidays.
In the most typical Spanish location sites, such as Barcelona, the city I live, or Madrid, Majorca, Panadol, and then look out for them on their country's Amazon marketplace. And Amazon knows it, and for example, just discovered today while I was reading this script that, Amazon UK, you can find an entire section of Spanish food and wine products, and it's called Food and Wine from Spain store. Well, there are more products in Spain. I mean, we are pretty good in manufacturing other products, but foods and wines are great, and that is a selection of some of the five kinds of top products of the Spanish astronomy. And some of them have more than 1000 reviews, which is quite a lot for a Spanish food. I mean, it's a niche product.
Tommy Beringer:
It's amazing. Fuet, huh?
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah, fuet. Like F U E T.
Tommy Beringer:
Got it. Got it. Yeah. I doubt I can get some good...
Jordi Ordóñez:
Let me see if it has a translation in English.
Tommy Beringer:
I doubt that we have anything like that out here.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah, well, the translation would be wip like the wip, but it's a Catalan-themed rye-cured sausage of pork meat and pork got.
Tommy Beringer:
Interesting.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah, well, you have to try it. I mean, there's no way you're going back after trying it.
Tommy Beringer:
I'm definitely trying that. I don't care. You know, I don't want to see how the sausage is made, but I'm going to eat it.
Jordi Ordóñez:
No, you don't want to see that. Believe me.
Tommy Beringer:
No.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Pretty disgusting.
Tommy Beringer:
Very cool, okay. Yeah, I didn't know Germany had, that's interesting. I need to look back into that. Do some more research. Very cool. Interesting.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Loads of German tourists fly from Germany too, or you're at the Mar for example, which is a small city, well, small town next to Costa Brava, it's like the, well, the brave coast for nice playas? Beach.
Yeah, Mark talks about Costa Brava all the time.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah.
Jordi Ordóñez:
I think that you would love Costa Brava, it's a beautiful place, but Guardamar is like, well, the place where anything can happen. And there are entire buses from Dusseldorf to Guardamar, and for 200 Euros you can spend five days with free alcohol and medical insurance. So you can get drunk 24 hours a day. That wasn't on the script. I'm sorry, but, I mean, it's my fault.
Tommy Beringer:
No, it doesn't matter. We don't have to stick to the script at all. The $200, wait a minute. The $200 covers alcohol and then medical insurance?
Jordi Ordóñez:
Medical Insurance.
Tommy Beringer:
Is that what you said?
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah, yeah, because most of them got drunk and got out of their-self and there's this wild, crazy thing called balcony where betas jump out of the balconies from the hotel rooms to the swimming pool.
Tommy Beringer:
Oh my God.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah, and 9 out of 10 times they land onto the swimming pool, but there's one time...
Tommy Beringer:
9 out of 10 times.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah. They land on the ICU, you know. Now the getting drunk 24 hours a day and getting sunburned made the companies include the medical insurance. So for 200 Euros you have like one week of free alcohol, crazy party hotels, and that is Guardamar. I can't remember why I was saying that, but yeah, that's the reason why they go back to Germany and also the cheap Spanish beers they were drinking and you're at the Mar, for example.
Tommy Beringer:
Very interesting. It sounds like that's something I would have took a little bit of a time into when I was maybe 20, 20-ish, but now I can't do that. No, that's too much.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah, maybe when your liver was at the 100% capacity, but well, that's believe me destroy your Google search looking for your Guardamar Fiesta, and that's really, really bizarre.
Tommy Beringer:
Wow, very interesting stuff.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah.
Tommy Beringer:
You learn something new every day.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Not related to Amazon.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah, I know. Right. There you go. That's a little treat there for you guys. Okay. So everyone wants to know, do you have any tactics that you recommend for Amazon sellers to rank higher in the search results?
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah, so if you sell more, you will rank more and, yeah, that's it. I mean, there's no secret sauce. Whatever you do to increase sales, volume or sales speed, sales velocity, and positive feedback from customers will improve your Amazon rankings, and then we can discuss, whatever. Is it called now A9 algorithm? Is it called A10? Are there new ranking factors or whatever? Yeah. But I mean, the core of the A9 algorithm is just getting sales and getting reviews, positive reviews, of course. I would say that the most powerful formula is combined strategy. A combined strategy between sponsor ads and product lounge strategies. And the fact of staying focused on new keywords and competitors ASIN's, so you don't miss a new opportunities and there's no secret source, as I've told you, just work, work and work. And there are no shortcuts unless you use black hat, but well, you know how that ends so...
Tommy Beringer:
That doesn't stay, you can't stay there for a long time with that. You'll get shut down. No longevity here.
Jordi Ordóñez:
As a matter of fact, just read on marketplace posts, Twitter that two new big brands were closed on Amazon Japan because of that. Well, the leak on the rivalry on buying and selling reviews, that there was a leak like one month ago about, so two new brands were suspended in Amazon Japan. So I think that they are not finished with that issue.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah, no, definitely. That's ongoing, that's unfortunate that these brands do that and kind of hurt some of the mid-tier sellers and things like that.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Everybody buys reviews, but well, do it just slowly. Don't buy 1000 reviews. That's crazy, and you will end up with your business shut down.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah, I would actually recommend not to buy any reviews at all. Cause that could, I mean, if Amazon finds that out, that is an absolute no-no.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah, don't do that unless you know 100% what you're doing.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah. I don't do that. I don't recommend doing that. But just, just so you guys know, that's Black Hat tactic right there that Amazon does not like for sure, reviews is a very delicate issue there.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah, that's a red flag, absolutely.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah. No, for sure. So Jordi, like we just said, there's no secret sauce. It's all sales-based to try to get their ranking up at the top of the page there. But do you have any other non-Black Hat tactics that you can get up to the top of the page?
Jordi Ordóñez:
Yeah. I'm sorry for bringing up the Black Hat.
Tommy Beringer:
No, no, no. No worries.
Jordi Ordóñez:
But I'm a fan of Black Hat stuff. I do Black Hat SEO for my small websites that need to, so I'm sorry, but that's one of my, well, that's a fail. Yeah, recommendations to get to the top of page one. Well, I would say always focus on creating remarkable brands on Amazon. So you don't have to compete against everybody else, including Amazon's White Brands, which I think they have more than 400 of them and then pay attention to your needs. Generic keywords and combined organic and sponsored sales offer a great service, of course, and a great product and work at least eight hours a day. And I would stay away from the idea of the autopilot or six figures a month or four hours a week, passive income and all that stuff and all that dreams because if you give any chances to your competitors, they will most definitely kill you. So you need to work every day.
Tommy Beringer:
Yeah, complacency loses, right? So you want to stay, you want to stay on top of your competition, and just make sure you're not letting anything through. Totally, totally agree. Now we like to keep our podcasts short and sweet Jordi, and we're going to go ahead and wrap up the show. So I always like our guests to give our listeners at least one tip or trick that they can take away after listening to this podcast and implement it into their lives or into their business. So, what do you got for us?
Jordi Ordóñez:
Well, it's a pretty basic tip, but I think it's really useful and it's sponsor products automatic campaigns. And I always run this. You can discover new keywords and ASINs and if they perform great, I normally pause them, pause the ASIN or the keyword on the ultimate campaign and isolate it on a new manual campaign, just for that keyword, for that ASIN. So I can control the beats and the performance of that particular keyword, and if it's a branded keyword of your competition, you can use it as well on your backend keywords to rank organically for read. So I think that's a really easy but useful tip.
Tommy Beringer:
Got it. Yeah, I do, I love the sponsored products, ads, Amazon's iterating more and more on their ad campaigns and they're going in a good direction. You can do so much more stuff. I really liked doing the video, the sponsored video ads. That has been showing me a good return on some of my products. But yeah. Thank you so much for that tip Jordi, very useful, very useful stuff. So if someone wanted to reach out to you, where can they find you? How can they contact you?
Jordi Ordóñez:
So you can look out for Jordi Ordóñez on Google, Twitter or LinkedIn. There's a guy with a beard and he's a doctor that would be my father, and he doesn't know anything about Amazon, and the other guy is me. So if you want to contact me, I'm not the doctor. I'm the other Jordi Ordóñez.
Tommy Beringer:
You're not a doctor. You just want to make sure that's in bold, right?
Jordi Ordóñez:
A sale's doctor.
Tommy Beringer:
There you go. Exactly. A sales doctor. That's perfect. I love that one. Well, Jordi, thank you so much for joining us on the Sell Rank Win podcast here and thank you so much for taking the time out of your day and, till next time, I'm sure we'll be talking to each other online or offline, I should say, but thank you so much. Just wanted to say that.
Jordi Ordóñez:
Thank you guys for having me, it was a pleasure.
Tommy Beringer:
Absolutely. All right, Jordi. Thanks so much.
Jordi Ordóñez:
See you, take care. Bye.
Tommy Beringer:
All right, bye-bye.
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