Amazon Listing Optimization: The Complete Guide (2024)

Your Amazon listing is crucial for your success on the marketplace. The overall impression of a listing often influences a buyer’s purchase decision more than the price of the product. To increase your conversion rate and drive more sales, optimizing your Amazon listing should be a top priority.

An Amazon listing consists of several components, the main elements being product title, product images, bullet points, product description and product reviews. To get the most out of your listing optimization, you need to consider all of these components.

If you want to learn how to optimize your Amazon listing and increase your sales, you’ve come to the right place. In this article, we will show you the best listing optimization strategies to achieve this.

Why is optimizing your Amazon listing crucial?

According to AMZScout, Amazon.com alone boasts a staggering 600,000,000 products. Now, imagine what it takes to stand out in this sea of listings.

While your specific niche may not have millions of products, there’s still fierce competition with potentially hundreds or thousands of similar items. To secure a competitive edge and ensure long-term profitability, your Amazon listing must distinguish itself from the rest.

Consider this: in a traditional retail store, customers can inspect a product at their leisure and seek assistance from staff if needed. Amazon, however, lacks this physical interaction. Potential buyers can’t examine products freely or ask questions on the spot.

Therefore, envision your Amazon listing as your virtual salesperson. In a physical store, a more effective salesperson closes more sales. The same principle applies to Amazon listings – a well-optimized listing translates to increased sales.

How to rank for top positions in search results

Amazon’s search algorithm is designed to match user queries with the most relevant product listings to optimize customer satisfaction and increase sales. The algorithm considers several factors when ranking products in search results, including textual match, price, availability, selection, and sales history.

A crucial element is the relevance of the product’s title, description, and keywords to the search query. Additionally, Amazon prioritizes products that have a strong sales performance, as this is an indicator of customer preference and product quality.

That being said, effectively optimizing your Amazon listing goes beyond refining images, titles, bullet points and your product description. The key to success lies in driving more traffic to your listing and increasing your sales.

Even with a fully optimized Amazon listing, the absence of visibility translates to no one discovering and subsequently purchasing your product – a paradoxical scenario. In the long term, you need to increase your sales to rank among the top positions.

Regrettably, acquiring (the right) traffic stands out as the most challenging aspect of becoming a successful Amazon seller. In the early stages, you must dedicate both time and financial resources to promotional efforts aimed at attracting visitors.

Over time, as your ranking in search results increases, Amazon naturally directs passive traffic to your listing. If you’re looking for ways to promote your product, check out our article about increasing sales on Amazon.

How to increase your ranking with no visibility

Achieving a prominent position on the first page of Amazon’s search results boils down to generating sales – it’s as straightforward as that. There’s simply no bypassing this fundamental principle.

From a holistic Amazon SEO standpoint, the significance of listing optimization truly comes to the forefront once you’ve successfully secured a place on the first page of Amazon search results.

But how do you get to the first page of search results when you have no visitors on your Amazon listing? The answer is: you need to make sales through advertising. In the following section, you will find a detailed step-by-step plan to achieve this:

1. Determine how many units you need to sell

If you launch a new product, you need to promote it. There’re a few different promotion strategies we recommend, but they all have the same goal: To make sales.

With Helium 10, you can determine how many sales you need to make to rank on the first page of Amazon search results. Here are the detailed instructions on how you can proceed:

Now that you know exactly what your sales goal should be, it’s time to promote your product.

2. Promote your product on deal pages

One of the best ways to promote your Amazon product is to list it on deal pages. That’s because many customers are on the lookout for a good deal. They want to  buy heavily discounted products, and they scan deal pages to find them.

People who are searching for products with specific discounts, like 90% off, are usually influenced to purchase a product by its price, no matter what the product is. This means that it’ll be easy for you to sell products if you offer a high enough discount.

For more control, use discount codes. You can determine how many discount codes you want to give away every day. This allows you to manage the number of customers who buy your product.

3. Promote your product on social media

Promoting Amazon products on social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok can significantly enhance visibility and sales through strategic content creation and engagement. Using relevant hashtags, collaborating with influencers, and running targeted ads can help reach a broader audience.

Leveraging Instagram’s shopping features allows for direct product links in posts, making it easier for followers to click through and purchase items directly from Amazon.

On TikTok, the approach centers around creating fun, engaging, and sometimes humorous short videos that highlight the products in action. The key is to tap into current trends and challenges, using popular music and creative visuals to catch the viewer’s attention.

4. Utilize Amazon Advertising

Advertising on Amazon is one of the best ways to get your first sales. Amazon Ads is based on pay-per-click (PPC). This means that you only have to pay when somebody clicks on your ad.

The best thing about Amazon Ads is that you can set up campaigns for specific keywords. Imagine you sell a blue drinking bottle. You can set up a campaign for exactly this keyword, or you can target other keywords such as “bottle.”

This is extremely valuable because it allows you to target people who are naturally searching for your product, though they might not know it yet.

The easiest way to find keywords to target is to use Helium 10 Magnet. Use this tool to check out how competitive a keyword is before you target it:

With this tool, you can also easily analyze how many competitors have placed ads using the same keywords as you.

It’s worth noting that there are experts who work in the field of Amazon advertising. For greater efficiency in setting up and running your campaigns, you can always work with an agency.

Top strategies to optimize your Amazon listing

Selling your products quickly is crucial, and optimizing your Amazon listing can help you to achieve this. A well-optimized listing increases the conversion rate, leading to more sales.

For those committed to enhancing their product listings, success lies in the continuous testing of various listing versions. This involves changing components of your listing to discover which version most appeals to customers.

If you’re seeking the most effective techniques to refine your Amazon listing and boost your sales, read through the next section in which we have put together the best strategies to help you succeed.

Keyword research

First and foremost, you need to do extensive keyword research to know what keywords your customers are most likely to use to search for your product.

Fortunately, it’s easy to find these keywords. There are two strategies that every Amazon seller should use:

1. Find keywords based on one seed keyword
2. Find out which keywords your competitors are ranking for

Here are both strategies explained:

Check for which keywords you are indexed

Keywords are the foundation of your Amazon listings, so it’s extremely important to know which keywords you’re indexing for.

If you aren’t indexed for an important keyword, you can go under the radar of hundreds of potential customers in the search results, potentially losing tons of sales.

Avoid this by making this quick index check:

Optimize Your Title

The title is one of the most important things you should focus on when optimizing your listing on Amazon. Besides the main image of your product, it’s one of the first things customers see.

Just ask yourself: When you shop online, how do you decide which product you want to check out? You probably look at the title and image.

So, making an eye-catching title will always increase your Click-Through-Rate. And in fact, there are only two things you can do to optimize a title:

Focus on user intent

The most important thing is to focus on user intent. You need to know exactly what customers want and what’s important to them.

If you sell a simple product like a water bottle, you may falsely believe making sales is easy – everyone uses water bottles, right? Well, it’s true that many people use water bottles, and that a water bottle could be a lucrative product, but there are many variations of a water bottle that can affect its market appeal.

Some bottles can hold up to one liter while others hold up to two. Some bottles are only made for cold liquids, and some for hot liquids. Although a water bottle is a very simple product, there are lots of small details that are crucial to buyers. Make sure those details are clear in the title of your product!

The first word or two of your product title should be clear, easy to read, specific, and relevant. You don’t want to turn anyone away by having a confusing title.

Include relevant keywords

The second important thing is to include relevant keywords in your product title. The product title is the most important element for Amazon SEO.

So, pick the 2-3 most important keywords for your product and incorporate them into the title. Most Amazon titles can be up to 200 characters; use that space up and  make sure you don’t repeat anything.

Similarly, include who the product is for in the title. Is it for women? Men? Kids? People on the go? Let your customers know straight off the bat so they aren’t left wondering.

Here are some more things to consider:

• Avoid fluff
• Capitalize the first letter of each word
• Include measurements (pound, inch, liter, etc.)
• Include quantities
• Use numerals for numbers
• Use pipes (|) to improve readability
• 200 characters max

Optimize Product Photos

Optimizing your Amazon product photos is particularly important, as a good photo can attract or deter potential customers as they scroll through Amazon’s search results.

In fact, 75% of customers rely on product photos when they decide to buy a product or not.

Many shoppers actually decide whether a product looks interesting based on the main product photo, ignoring the other photos entirely.

Furthermore, 46.1% of shoppers base a seller’s credibility on the quality of their product photos.

Basically, good product photos are an essential part of a higher CPR, more sales, and a larger customer base. Having awesome photos for your listing is almost like setting your business up for automatic success.

But what makes a great photo? First of all, make sure your photos are of high quality. That should be self explanatory. If you have a pixelated photo, nobody will buy your product.

Amazon requires main product photos to be at least 1000 x 500 pixels, though it’s recommended that photos be 1600 pixels or larger, with 10,000 pixels along the longest side being the biggest size allowed. Larger photos are zoomable, which is a feature that many Amazon shoppers appreciate.

Benefits over features

Then, you should definitely emphasize benefits over features when making product photos. Don’t just upload a boring image of your product as shown below:

Sure, you need to upload some photos showing your product from different angles. But that shouldn’t be all.

Make sure you upload photos showing your product in action. These are called “lifestyle images” and demonstrate the benefits of your product.

You can also compare your product with other similar products on the market in terms of size, color, etc. to highlight its unique benefits.

Take dominant pictures

The best product photos show the product front and center so there’s no mistaking what’s being sold. To make a product photo for Amazon, make sure the product fills at least 85% of the image.

Also – have you ever wondered why Apple is so successful? Sure, they have innovative products that the majority of people prefer over others. But they also have an excellent marketing strategy. Here’s what they do:

Instead of promoting the fact that their product has 1GB of storage (which is a technical detail), they say 1,000 songs in your pocket (which is a benefit for the buyer).

You can also clearly see that they have a very dominant product design, combined with a dominant product photo. It didn’t happen by chance that Apple is so successful. Learn from their marketing strategy and try to implement their tactics into your own listings.

Here are some other things to keep in mind:

• Upload as many photos as possible (up to 9)
• Minimum of 1000px longest side
• White background
• Use multiple angles and perspectives
• Add details to your images with infographics
• Images must be GIF, JPEG, or TIFF files

Optimize Your Bullet Points

Bullet points are also super important when it comes to optimizing your Amazon listing. After title and product photos, customers usually take a look at the bullet points to get more information about the product. So this should be the place where you describe the key product features in detail.

Since the bullet points are also very important for Amazon SEO, you need to include the most important keywords for your product here. However, keep in mind that you bullet points are for customers, not for the search engine. If you stuff all available keywords into your listing, it will sound like a jumbled mess and won’t encourage readers to buy anything.

Amazon allows each product to have up to five bullet points. We recommend using all five, incorporating the most relevant keywords throughout. The first bullet point will get the most attention from customers, making it the most important. Your first bullet point should explain the main benefit or use case of the product.

The rest of the bullet points can include more detailed explanations about additional features and benefits, for example how the product is a solution to a specific problem, and why your product is of high value or quality. You can include product information such as size, colors, materials, quantity, etc. but keep it to a minimum.

Avoid too much technical talk, though. Technical details are not what help people decide to make a purchase. Benefits are! There is a small group of customers who make decisions based on technical details, but they’re not the mainstream.

Here are some other things to keep in mind:

• Use active voice
• Use social proof
• Give a reason to buy
• Use emojis

Optimize Product Description

In a normal retail store, people can ask the staff if they have questions about a specific product. But on Amazon, there’s no staff. Potential customers can’t ask anybody questions if they want to know something.

If people can’t get the information they need to make a purchasing decision, they will leave your listing and spend their money with one of your competitors.

There’s only one solution to this problem: include all the relevant information in your listing. To get this info, you need to study your niche.

Here’re just a few ways to do that:

• Check all Q&A of your competitors
• Check all reviews with Helium 10 Review Downloader
• Study forums within your product category
• Study blogs about your product

Optimize Your Reviews On Amazon

We know you can’t directly influence your reviews on Amazon. However, product reviews are one of the most important things when it comes to listing optimization.

According to a survey by Birdeye, 50% of people say that online customer reviews are their most trusted source of information when choosing where to buy a product.

But how do you get positive reviews? To put it plainly, you need to sell a great product without making any mistakes. That makes up most of it.

However, there are a few strategies you can use to get even more positive reviews. Some of these strategies include using an automated review request tool to send follow-up emails to your customers after they receive your product.

Since this topic is very comprehensive, you should check out our complete guide on how to get more reviews on Amazon.

Use A+ Content

You can only use A+ Content if you enroll your brand in Amazon Brand Registry. But since A+ Content can make a huge difference, we think it’s worth it.

You’ll be able to include video content to your Amazon listing. Video Content can improve your conversion rate by up to 144%.

Imagine you have to choose between two products. One product provides video content and the other one doesn’t. Which one would you take? Of course you would buy the one with the video content.

Here’s what a typical listing with A+ Content looks like:

But it doesn’t end with video content. A+ Content also allows you to add images to your product description:

Split Testing

Do you know what a split test is? You may have noticed that we mentioned it earlier in the article.  A split test is simply a test between two variations to see which one works better – it’s that simple.

When making an Amazon listing, you can use split testing to see which approaches to promoting your content work best. You should especially split test your main product image, your title, and your price.

If you want to give spilt testing a try, I recommend checking out this article from Jungle Scout.

Conclusion – Amazon Listing Optimization

In conclusion, it’s vital to understand that discoverability is a prerequisite for buyability. To boost your rankings, generating sales is imperative. When it comes to creating an Amazon listing, prioritize emphasizing benefits over features to appeal to potential customers.

Also keep in mind that the product title and images are very important for your listing and utilize A+ Content to improve both Click-Through-Rate (CTR) and Conversion-Rate (CR).

Lastly, engage in thorough split testing of different variations of your listing to identify the strategies that work best in your specific context.

FAQ – Frequently Asked Questions