1. Use Reliable Tools for Keyword Research
3. Promote the Keywords You Care About
4. Put in the Time to Harvest Long Tail Keywords
5. Refresh Your Listing Based on What You've Learned
<aside> 💡 Anyone selling online understands the importance of keywords. They are the interface to connect what people want with what we have.
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As sellers and marketers, our job is to anticipate what people might type into the search bar to express their needs. Given the importance of the role keywords play, it is vital that we invest appropriate amounts of time researching, promoting, refining and expanding them. Not just at launch, but on an ongoing basis.
These tips below outline how I use data-based techniques to build a solid repository of reliable keywords that bring in consistent revenue.
My favorite go-to resource for keyword research is Brand Analytics. This is the MOST reliable keyword data, available directly from Amazon, highlighting trending keywords, popular expressions and top products winning market share.
<aside> 💡 The Search Frequency Rank metric is a good proxy for Search Volume. The smaller the number, the more popular the keyword, and the more searches it has.
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I like to drop seed keywords that describe my products into the Brand Analytics search bar and let Amazon show me all the variations of that word along with their conversion share data. Once I have this initial list, I can then use secondary tools and keywords expanders like Merchant Words or Helium10 to find more.
Don’t restrict yourself to high volume keywords alone. There are a lot of sales made in the long tail.
Next, I get into spreadsheet mode to identify which of the top keywords are primary targets that I can place within a listing, and which ones are secondary targets, that I will target ONLY through PPC. Typically the latter includes competitor branded terms that I cannot incorporate into my listing, but that I CAN bid on.
Building keyword relevance requires us to make sure that the most relevant, high search volume keywords have a prominent place in the Amazon listing's title or bullet points in exact phrase order so that they can get indexed by Amazon’s A9 algorithm. Despite what people might say, the sequence of words matters, so you want to keep them together.
Amazon does flag the Search Term field if it has duplicates, but there are a few other fields where duplication is not a problem. One such example is the Subject Matter field, which can be expanded to 5 fields of 50 characters each. You can plant keyword phrases there that you want to be indexed for, in their exact sequence.