Amazon Listing Optimization: The Complete Guide (2023)

First impressions matter.

On Amazon, customers can only look at your listing. The way your listing is designed can make or break your conversion rate.

It’s hard to increase sales on Amazon, but listing optimization is the backbone of every Amazon SEO strategy.

And it’s especially important to rank high on Amazon. 23 percent of online shoppers go first on Amazon for inspiration when they don’t have a specific product in mind for purchase.

If you’ve high traffic numbers and an awesome listing, you’ll be able to increase your sales and grow your Amazon business in the long run.

However, if you don’t see increasing sales with growing traffic, it’s time to optimize your listing.

If you want to know how to optimize your Amazon listing, you’ve come to the right place.

In this post, I’ll show you how to optimize your listing to increase your conversion rate, make more sales, and grow your business in the long run.

What’s An Amazon Listing And Why It’s Important?

An Amazon Listing is the product page of the product you sell on Amazon.

It’s that simple.

I bet you’ve seen thousands of Amazon listings so far. Here’s how a typical listing looks like:

Every unique product sold on Amazon has a listing.

According to Scrapehero, Amazon.com has a total of 119,928,851 products as of April 2019.

And that’s exactly the reason why your listing needs to stand out from the crowd.

Sure, there’s a high chance that there aren’t 119,928,851 products in your niche. Maybe there are a few hundred or a few thousand. 

However, if you want to beat your competition and make money in the long run, your Amazon listing needs to stand out.

Just imagine, in a normal retail store, people can check out a product however they want. If they have questions, they can also ask the staff.

On Amazon, they can’t check out a product however they want. They also can’t ask someone if they have a question.

Thus, you’ve to think in such a way that your listing is your salesman. And like in reality, the better salesman will close more sales.

It’s the same with Amazon listings. The better listing will make more sales.

Discoverability And Buyability

If you want to optimize your Amazon listing, you not only have to optimize images, title, bullet points, and make your copy better.

First of all, you need some serious traffic to your listing.

In fact, there’s no buyability without discoverability.

If your Amazon listing is fully optimized and nobody sees it, obviously nobody will buy your product.

It just doesn’t make sense.

But how do you get traffic?

Unfortunately, getting (the right) traffic is the hardest part when it comes to becoming a successful Amazon seller. In the beginning, you need to invest time and money into promotion to get your first visitors.

With time, you’ll rank higher in search results and Amazon automatically sends you passive traffic.

But how do you get there?

How To Get To Amazon’s First Page

To explain this, let’s first take a look at how Amazon’s Algorithm works:

Above all, Amazon checks whether your product is relevant to a given search query or not. 

They look at what keywords your listing includes. For example, if somebody is searching for a “red bottle”, and your listing does not include the keyword “red bottle”, your product won’t get indexed for this search query.

Thus, it’s extremely important to research the most important keywords and check whether your product is indexed for them or not.

Helium 10 provides an awesome tool called Index Checker to do so. We’ll take a look at this tool later in this post.

For now, let’s assume your product is 100% relevant.

Here’s What You Need To Do

To rank on the first page of Amazon search results, you need to make sales. 

Yes, simple as that. There’s no way around.

Helium 10 also provides tools that show you how much sales you’ve to make over a specific period to get to the first page.

From an Amazon SEO perspective (and only from this perspective), Amazon listing optimization only gets important when you’re ranking on the first search result page.

Because only then, you can improve your Click-Through-Rate and Conversion-Rate to rank even higher.

Determine How Much You’ve To Sell 

If you launch a new product, you need to promote it.

There’re a few different promotion strategies, but they all have the same goal: 

To make sales.

To determine how much sales you’ve to make to rank on the first page, here’s what you have to do:

Now that you know how much sales you have to make, it’s time to promote your product.

The Best Strategies To Promote Your Product On Amazon

Deal Pages

One of the best ways to promote your Amazon product is to list it on deal pages. 

That’s because customers want to buy heavily discounted products on deal pages. People who are searching for products with discounts up to 90% usually only pay attention to the price.

This means that it’ll be easy for you to sell products if you offer a high enough discount.

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

Here are some deal pages to consider:

• Cashbackbase
• Vipon
• Snagshout

Facebooks Ads

Facebook is still the leading social media platform, reaching 60,6% of internet users.

The big pro of Facebook Ads is that you can target your audience exactly.

The big con is that you have no organic reach. 

You have to pay-to-play.

However, promoting your product via Facebook Ads is a great way to get external traffic to your listing. You can promote your Amazon listing or your coupon codes.

Amazon Advertising

Advertising on Amazon is also one of the best ways to get your first sales.

Amazon Advertising works based on the pay-per-click principle (PPC). This means that you only have to pay when somebody clicks on your ad.

The best thing about Amazon Advertising 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 you target people who are intrinsically searching for your product.

The easiest way to find keywords to target is to use Helium 10 Magnet. 

That’s because you can check out how competitive a keyword is:

You can easily analyze how many competitors also place ads for the same keyword as you.

Here’s Everything You Need For Amazon Listing Optimization

If you want to optimize your Amazon listing, you must understand that there’s no magic trick that automatically brings you hundreds of sales.

If you want to make more sales, you have to get to the first page of Amazon search results. And to get to the first page, you have to make more sales.

Professionally speaking, you need to increase your sales velocity. 

Getting to the first page is a big part of the deal.

Then, there are a few fundamental strategies that you can implement to increase your CTR and CR, and finally make more sales.

However, if you’re serious about listing optimization, you need to split test different variations to see what works best.

Keyword Research

First of all, you need to do extensive keyword research. You need to know what keywords your customers use to search for your product.

Fortunately, it’s easy to find out all these keywords.

There’re two strategies that every Amazon seller should use:

• Find out for which keywords your competitors are ranking for
• Find keywords based on one seed-keyword

Here are both strategies:

Check For Which Keywords You’re Indexed

We cover this point now because it’s extremely important to check out for which keywords you’re indexed.

If you are not indexed for an important keyword, you can lose tons of sales, because you won’t get listed in search results.

Try to avoid this and make 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: How do you decide which product you want to check out?

You look at the title and image.

So, improving your title will always increase your Click-Through-Rate. And in fact, there are only two things you can do to optimize it:

Focus on user intent: The most important thing is to focus on user intent. 

What does the user want?

You need to know exactly what customers want and what’s important to them.

If you sell a simple product like a drinking bottle, it’s clear that people want to buy a drinking bottle.

However, there are many variations of a drinking bottle. Some bottles can hold up to one liter and bottles that can hold up to two liters. Some bottles can only hold cold water and bottles for hot water.

Although a drinking bottle is a very simple product, there’re lots of things that are crucial to buyers.

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 your 2-3 most important keywords and put them into the title.

Here are some more things to consider:

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

Optimize Product Photos

Optimizing your Amazon product photos is uber important. In fact, 75% of customers rely on product photos when they decide to buy a product or not.

And most people only look at the main product photo to decide which product is interesting and which one not.

Furthermore, 22% of returns occur because the product looks different in person.

So by optimizing your product photos, you will not only get a higher CPR and more sales, but you’ll also get fewer returns.

Sounds like you only need to have awesome photos and your Amazon business will run automatically.

But what should a great photo look like?

First of all, make sure your photos are of high-quality. I think that’s self-explaining. If you have a pixelated photo, nobody will buy your product.

Then, focus on these two things:

1. Emphasize benefits over features

Sure, you need to upload some photos showing your product from different angles. But not only.

Make sure you upload photos showing your product in action. Upload photos that show the benefits of your product.

What you can also do is compare your product with others in terms of size, color, etc. to highlight the benefits.

2. Take dominant pictures

Have you ever wondered why Apple is so successful?

Sure, they have awesome products. I personally prefer Apple products over others.

But they also have an excellent marketing strategy.

Here’s what they do:

Instead of promoting their product with a 1GB 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.

Here are some other things to keep in mind:

• Upload as many photos as possible (up to 9)
• Minimum of 1000px width
• White background
• Use angel and perspective
• Add details to your Amazon product images

Optimize Your Bullets

Bullet points are also super important when it comes to Amazon listing optimization.

After the title and product photos, customers usually take a look at the bullet points to get more information about a product.

Since the bullet points are also very important for Amazon SEO, you need to include the most important keywords.

But keep in mind that you’ve to write for the buyer, not for the search engine. If you stuff all available keywords into your listing, it won’t encourage readers to buy.

You’ve to teach the reader about the benefits of your product. Bullet points are not the place to talk about technical details. Technical details are not what people want to hear when they have to make a purchase decision.

There is a small hardcore group of customers who make decisions based on technical details, but it’s not the mainstream.

Keep in mind that you also need to emphasize benefits over features within the bullet points.

Here are some other things to keep in mind:

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

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. People can’t ask somebody if they want to know something.

If they don’t get the information they need, they will leave your listing and spend their money on one of your competitors.

There’s only one solution to this problem. You need to include all the relevant information into your listing.

And to get them, you need to study your niche.

Here’re just a few ways to do so:

• Check all Q&A of your competitors
• Check all Reviews with Helium 10 Review Downloader 
• Study forums
• Study blogs

What you can also test:

• Use a Call to action
• Include relevant keywords
• Use sub-headings

Optimize Your Reviews On Amazon

Yes I know, you can’t directly influence your reviews on Amazon. 

However, your product reviews are the most important things when it comes to listing optimization.

According to a survey by Deloitte, 60% of people say that customer reviews are their most trusted source of information.

That’s similar to the number of people who say that their most trusted source of information is Family and Friends.

Only 16% of people say that they rely on the retailer’s website. So seems like customer reviews are 3,75x more important than your Amazon listing itself.

But how do you get positive reviews?

You need to sell a great product without any mistakes. That makes up most of the cake.

However, there are a few strategies to get even more positive reviews. Since this topic is very comprehensive, you should check out our complete guide on how to get more reviews on Amazon here.

Use A+ Content

You can only use A+ Content if you enroll your brand in Amazon Brand Registry.

But A+ Content can make a huge difference.

Why?

Because you can 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 how a typical listing with A+ Content looks like:

But it doesn’t end with video content. You can also add images to your product description which is also pretty nice:

Split Testing

Do you know what’s a split test?

A split test is simply a test between two variations to see which one works better.

It’s that simple.

On Amazon, you should especially test your main image, your title, and your price.

If you want to go for spilt testing, I recommend checking out this article from Jungle Scout.

Conclusion

To summarize what you’ve learned in this post, here’s everything important:

• There’s no buyability without discoverability
• You need to make sales to rank higher
• Emphasize benefits over features
• Product title and images are the most important elements
• Use A+ Content to improve your CTR and CR
• You need to split test different variations to see what works best