Since Amazon is becoming more and more competitive and is constantly changing TOS and algorithms, it is smart to have a highly targeted method to successfully boost your ranking on the platform. Because 70 percent of Amazon consumers never scroll past the first page of results, the higher up your product is on the page, the more likely you are to sell that product.
The problem is, as Amazon’s business network grows and consumer options increase, it can be difficult to always maintain the top position. Now, depending on what it is you sell, you could be competing against thousands of other sellers for that coveted item on Amazon’s search results page. Thus, you must know how to go up against the competition and successfully secure the number one search position on Amazon.
So, how exactly do you do that?
For starters, if you want to earn valuable leads for your business, you need to have a basic understanding of what is Amazon’s Ranking Algorithm and how it works.
Let’s talk about the Amazon product ranking algorithm
Known as A9, this product search algorithm is what Amazon uses to pull the best results from their massive “catalog” of product listings. Then, these results are sorted in the most relevant order to the user.
At first, it might seem that Amazon’s SEO is similar to Google search engines. However, both of them focus on different aspects of searching. While Google focuses on matching search intent, Amazon focuses on customer purchase intent. The main difference between the two is how Amazon measures relevance versus Google.
When a customer enters a search term on Amazon, the A9 algorithm kicks in to almost instantly return a list of products for the customer to choose from. This heavily optimized list is delivered through a two-step process. Firstly, the algorithm pulls the most relevant results from their catalog, after which it ranks them according to relevance to produce the highest chance of generating a sale.
The most important thing to remember with A9 is that its primary goal is to generate a sale. The reason for this is Amazon makes more money if a sale takes place. With that in mind here are The Core Pillars of the A9 Algorithm:
- Conversion rate – Linked directly with the price, your product’s conversion rate is a highly significant performance factor in your search ranking. Examples of conversion rate factors include customer reviews, quality of images, and pricing.
- Relevance – Remember the first step in the A9 algorithm? They gather the results, and then they decide how to list them. Relevancy factors tell A9 when to consider your product page for a given search term. These factors include your title and product description.
- Customer satisfaction and retention – Make your customers happy and satisfied so they’ll keep coming back to buy your products over and over again. Amazon knows the secret to maximum RPC is customer retention. Customer retention factors include seller feedback and order defect rates.
The A9 algorithm looks at a large number of data points, all of which have the potential to impact these key performance indicators, which are extremely important in determining the organic rank of your product.
So, let’s dive into the main factors across conversion, relevance, and customer satisfaction that Amazon’s A9 algorithm considers when ranking your product:
Conversion-Related Amazon Ranking Factors:
- Sales – The Best Seller’s Rank (BSR) is an Amazon award given to products that sell well on Amazon. Each category (and sub-category) on Amazon has its taxonomy of BSRs. The lower your product’s BSR in a given category = the higher the sales are.
- Customer Reviews – The number of satisfied customers indicates if your product is worthy of holding the top position on Amazon’s search results. Amazon needs to be confident that the potential buyer they are recommending your product to will be provided with exceptional service and high-quality products.
- Price – If you offer your product at a competitive price, then your conversion rate should be positively affected. However, if any products in the same category are selling for less than yours, then two things likely will happen:
- You won’t sell as many as those similar products
- Amazon’s algorithm will prejudge that your product likely won’t sell as many as the others
Not only this, but the price is further taken into consideration when Amazon selects products for the Buy Box – another great opportunity for winning more sales.
Relevance-Related Amazon Ranking Factors
- Title – Your product title is the most important element of Amazon SEO and the only real opportunity you have to capture the attention of potential customers. Try to include as many relevant keywords as possible. This is because each word within the title is searchable on its own, meaning if you want to show up for a broad range of search terms, you have to try to capture as many of those in your title.
- Product Features – Your Bullet Points and Product description go hand in hand. Both show the main features of your product and tell your customers more about it. Remember to be as detailed and creative as possible, and use a wide amount of relevant keywords that will not only attract your customers but make them purchase your product and recommend it.
- Images – According to studies, products with high-quality images have a higher conversion rate. Make sure you use nice looking pictures with a minimum of 1,000 x 1,000 pixels so your potential buyers could see your products in more detail.
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- Search Terms – Use the “hidden” keywords that will only be used in your Amazon Seller Account’s backend section to associate your product with. Sellers are provided 5 fields of 50 characters each, or 250 characters total worth of search terms.
- Brand Name – Allow your customers to recognize your brand name and find more of your products based on it. Always include your brand name in your title so that shoppers could easily find you again.
Customer satisfaction and retention factors:
- Availability – If your product is out of stock – then, there is every chance that Amazon will not show you towards the top of the search results. Try to do whatever you can to avoid going out of stock and always maintain your availability, otherwise, you risk losing your top positions.
- Answered questions – By getting as many answers to the customers’ questions you get a pretty good interaction with your target group and will have a good impact on your ranking.
- Negative Reviews – If your Amazon reviews are negative, take a look at what people are complaining about and work to address the problems with your product.
Remember: it’s all about sales, sales, and getting more sales. The more sales we get, the more money Amazon does, and as a result – the further up on the page we go. And the further up on the page we go, the more sales we get—it all comes full circle!
How to find Amazon sales rankings and estimated rankings?
If taking a careful look at your Amazon product listing, you can notice that your product has a specific Amazon Best Sellers Rank. It is supposed to try to ‘capture’ the popularity of your product, compared to others in that category.
The interesting part here is that to get a Best Seller Rank your product does not necessarily need to be the “best seller” or to have impressively high sales. Your product simply needs to have one completed sale.
If you launch a product, as soon as your first sale is completed – Amazon will begin to track its sales performance. Thus, the BSR is a fantastic indicator of how well a product is selling on Amazon.
So, here is what you need to do if you’re looking for your product’s Best Seller Rank:
- Go to the Amazon website and search for the product of your choice.
- Scroll down to the bottom of the product page until you get to a section called “Product Details.”
- At the bottom, you’ll see an entry called, “Amazon Best Seller’s Rank.”
This will show the ranking of the product in the specific category under which it is listed. If your product hasn’t sold any units yet, your ranking will be “None”.
Depending upon the category of the product you or your competitors sell, there are such tools as the Amazon sales estimator. It provides you a rough estimate of the number of products that can be sold in a day.
Amazon sales estimator purely uses the sales rank of a product listed in a particular category to estimate the number of units sold in a day
So, the main thing to remember about the BSR is that products with low sales have high BSR’s, products with high sales have low BSR’s, thus, the Lower the BSR, the More sales will have been made!
What are the best Amazon product ranking tools for analyzing listings?
When it comes to technical analysis and optimization for Amazon listings there are many different tools available out there. Choosing the right software to help with your Amazon FBA product sourcing is crucial for your product’s success.
Check out our Top 5 Amazon Best Ranking Tools for Analyzing Listings:
This software features multiple Amazon seller tools that will help build your business and create continuous revenue with powerful analytics and advanced smart filters. Moreover, they offer you the possibility to find high ranking keywords, identify trends, spy on competitors, and optimize product listings. The Amazon optimization tool suite is specially designed for sellers looking to grow their Amazon FBA businesses exponentially.
Their Amazon Listing Optimization Tool analyzes product listings against best practice strategies to provide recommendations about the listing optimization. In addition to the full listing analysis, they also offer to strengthen the visibility of your listing, research and analyze competitor listings, track every change with the listing quality alerts and take care of them for you.
IO for Amazon is a product research tool that works as a Chrome extension. Their Listing Builder will help you compete on Amazon search results with data-driven listings, optimize your listings with recommended keywords, and see how your sales grow! You can easily access product detailed statistics and data right from amazon websites. You can also add specific products to your tracking lists to monitor them.
Jungle Scout is one of the most popular Amazon research tools. It offers solutions for big data analytics, competitor monitoring, estimates, and more. Jungle Scout’s Listing Builder helps you compete for critical ranking on Amazon search results with data-driven listings and build better Amazon listings while ranking higher with a proven keyword strategy.
Sonar is a free tool that offers a comprehensive set of features including reverse ASIN lookup, extended search to find synonymous keywords, and Amazon search volume. They offer to analyze your listings and immediately see which one needs to be improved, after which they will provide you a full package of recommendations for optimizing your listings.
In this competitive marketplace, not every tool will get you the results you wait for. Only you know what’s the best fit for your business, but we hope the list above helped you out a little bit.
How to get your product on the first page of Amazon [Guide for 2020]
Getting the top position from the first page of Amazon is a complex process that involves taking into account a large number of crucial factors. But, with a little extra effort – you can start moving your products up and land them on the first page of search results. Here are the most important ways you can use SEO to boost your Amazon rankings:
✔ Get an Understanding of A9 – If you have a pretty solid insight into what is A9 and how it works, then you’ll be able to make the necessary changes to lift your rankings. And yet, due to the constant updates – you have to constantly be educating yourself and making changes to your product listings.
✔ Keyword Research and Listing Optimization are the Keys – The best way to increase your sales is by making sure that your products can be easily searched and found on the platform. Thus, to rank higher it is crucial to use only relevant keywords and optimize your Amazon listing very well. By providing relevant and complete information for your product, you can increase your product’s visibility and sales.
✔ Back-end search terms in Amazon Seller Central – Use the opportunity to provide the marketplace with additional information about your listing(s) that isn’t visible to the customer. These backend keywords will help the Amazon algorithm to understand the relevancy of your listing against a user’s search query. Do not use them to spam with unrelated keywords. Remember Relevant Keywords Only!
✔ Price Products Accordingly – The biggest factor the customers take into consideration when buying is the price, as they always tend to seek the best deals. Try to sell your products at a competitive, yet profitable price.
✔ Encourage Customer Reviews – Almost every customer trusts reviews as much as they would do a personal recommendation from a close friend. Therefore, earning many quality reviews should be a priority for you as a seller, as the reviews are essential for generating sales.
✔ Consider running Amazon PPC Campaigns – Using Amazon Sponsored Products and similar ad types can still help you as a seller to increase your sales, to boost up the visibility of your listings through ads that will display next to the search results for the keywords you’re targeting. Each of these, in the end, will help you achieve better rankings and get to the top faster.
✔ Drive Traffic from External Destinations – Sometimes external traffic can boost up your ranking pretty well. So, driving targeted traffic from Facebook, Instagram, Youtube, and other destinations that can be utilized to earn hits on Amazon product pages is worth considering.
You now have a solid foundation of knowledge on how Amazon’s search engine algorithm works and how to benefit from using it. You know which options are available for you to optimize your Amazon listings, how to rank higher in the Amazon search results, and how to increase your sales velocity. Moreover, you have gained insight into the Amazon Sales Rank and how to interpret it in the most successful way possible.
Take this guide as a call to action and rank number 1 and appear in the Top of Amazon’s Search Engine Results Page!