Imagine you’re on the hunt for new exciting products. As usual, you go to Amazon (where else would you go, right?), and start browsing the listings. You see the picture of the product you like, but what you see next to it completely stumps you:
You see this absolutely unreadable, confusing, wordy product title. You can’t even tell which brand these products belong to and what the official product name is.
Unfortunately, for many Amazon sellers, it is a common practice. They stuff their product titles with keywords in the hopes that they will rank higher on Google (Yes, on Google).
But while it may help with SEO, such titles simply confuse and annoy consumers. Your Google rankings may go up, but it doesn’t mean your sales will go up as well.
If you want to become a successful Amazon seller, you need to make every customer’s journey clear and consistent, starting with something as small as a product title.
Today, we are going to take a look at a few useful tips that will help you write great Amazon product titles that not only drive clicks but also boost your sales.
1. Check out Amazon Product Title Guidelines
Before you start drafting title ideas, give a closer look at what Amazon expects your product titles to be.
Amazon provides all sellers with product title guidelines, among which you can find:
- Maximum of 200 characters
- No promotional phrases
On top of that, Amazon recommends that a product title contains product-identifying information. This information can include:
- Product name
- Brand
- Non-promotional adjectives that describe product functions
- Non-promotional adjectives that describe product characteristics (e.g., color, size, quantity)
So, if we take one more look at the title from the image in the introduction, we can immediately say that it misses two of the important product identifiers – the name of the product and its brand.
The reason why it’s in your best interest to include these two identifiers together with other keywords is your target audience.
Your ideal buyer, when looking for your product online, would enter your brand name or the name of the product because they know exactly what they are looking for. Besides, using these identifiers will make the search results more precise and will naturally drive clicks to your product page.
Considering all the above-mentioned requirements, you can use the following general formula when drafting your product titles. This formula can vary depending on the nature of your product:
Here’s a good example of this formula in action:
In this title, you can see the brand name right away together with the name of the product, some descriptive keywords, as well as the size of the product. This title directly guides searchers to its product because it is straightforward and doesn’t contain any unnecessary keywords.
2. Include Keywords in the Product Title
Now let’s talk a bit more about the contents of an engaging and clickable Amazon product title. We’ll start with keyword research.
To create a product title that drives clicks, you need to worry about search engine optimization. And keyword research is famously known as the foundation of SEO.
However, this time, keyword research will be a bit different from what you’re used to doing for Google. The reason is Amazon’s own search algorithm called A9.
We won’t go much into detail describing this algorithm, but the most important thing you need to know about it is that the goal of A9 is to help Amazon sell efficiently.
And this intent is the main difference between Google and A9. The majority of Google search queries have informational intent (to learn about certain things), while A9 focuses more on transactional and commercial intent.
This doesn’t mean, however, that you overhaul your keyword research routine completely. You just need to focus on Amazon as your primary source of keywords.
Here are a few tips that you can benefit from:
1) Play with queries in the Amazon search bar
If you’ve used Amazon at least once, you know that when you start entering a query, you get different search result suggestions. These are the most common keywords entered by Amazon users. So, try to enter various query variations to find keywords that will be relevant for your product title.
This keyword research strategy is especially helpful for those who are about to launch a new product on Amazon and need something to start with. Browsing search queries can help you get the basic most relevant keywords for your product titles.
2) Get keywords from paired products
When purchasing products on Amazon, you often get “Frequently bought together” suggestions.
You can take a look at the suggestions that your competitors’ products get and steal some keywords for your own product titles.
In many cases, such product suggestions are based on intuition. For example, if you’re selling Christmas trees, you know that your customers might also be interested in buying Christmas tree decorations. You can take advantage of that when putting together a list of keywords for your product titles.
3) Steal keywords from your competitors
If you browse through different Amazon product titles from different sellers, you’ll see that the majority of keywords repeat themselves:
There’s nothing wrong with getting keywords from your competition. In the majority of cases, this just means that these keywords work well for the search algorithm, and you can take advantage of them too.
3. Incorporate Psychological Tricks that Drive Clicks
The ways of keyword research that we addressed before are more about ranking higher. But this is not necessarily what makes your product titles clickable.
Sometimes what really matters for the consumers is the intent with which they are looking for a product. If you want to diversify your list with more intent-based keywords, here are some ideas:
1) Address consumers’ needs directly
During your Introduction to Psychology course, you’ve probably learned about Maslow’s Pyramid of Needs, which states that humans are motivated by their subconscious needs. From this pyramid, you might remember physiological, safety, belongingness, esteem, and self-actualization needs.
You can address some of these needs in your product titles. This way, you’re also matching the intent with which the user is looking for your product.
Here’s an example of a product title with keywords that address the consumers’ basic need for rest and comfort:
2) Reference the end-user
This approach is not so much about psychology but about smart marketing. When you address your buyer persona in your product title, you basically start the conversation with your potential customer.
So, when writing your product title, think about who would search for it, and mention them to attract more attention.
Here’s an example of a product title for a pregnancy pillow that addresses pregnant women directly:
3) Include sensory words
What do your buyers imagine when they think about your product? Which color and texture does it have? Which sounds does it make? What emotions do they feel when they use it?
You would answer every one of these questions with something called a sensory word. Including these words in the product title works great as well because if it matches the consumer’s emotional and psychological state at the moment when they are browsing through product listings, they will be more likely to choose your product.
Here’s an example of such a title that includes sensory words describing color:
4. Focus on Straightforwardness and Title Format
We already mentioned in the introduction that one of the common problems with Amazon product titles is that they look messy and wordy, even though they might be optimized.
When looking for the desired product, consumers want the product information to be as clear as possible because, for many of them, purchasing something online is still like buying a pig in a bag – you never know what you are going to get.
So, when writing your Amazon product titles focus, first and foremost, on clarity and straightforwardness. Using the product title formula that we mentioned a bit earlier can already be of huge help.
However, there are a few other things you need to keep in mind:
- Correctness. First and foremost, your task is to make your title spotless in terms of spelling. Grammar doesn’t matter as much because product titles don’t usually include full sentences. Focus more on the spelling, especially if your target audience is coming from the UK, where the spelling of some words is different. Here, you might also keep in mind the metric vs. imperial system differences.
- Readability. If you stuff your product title with too many keywords, it will affect its readability, and we already mentioned how important clarity is for your customers. So, test every product title with a readability checker. You can try the one from a reliable writing service that uses the Flesch-Kincaid readability score.
- Punctuation. Yes, punctuation signs might be a clear choice to add more clarity to your product titles, but you don’t need them on Amazon. You only need to add one specific keyword, and Amazon will match it with other similar keywords. So, if you have keywords that convey the same meaning, there is no need to add all of them using commas or other punctuation signs.
Regarding the punctuation, you might have seen some sellers use it in their product titles, like here:
If required, you can add a comma in your product title as well if it includes measurements. In other cases, it’s better to avoid using too many punctuation marks because they may affect the proper formatting of your product title.
Speaking about formatting, here are some more tips on what you cannot do when writing Amazon product titles:
- Don’t include characters of decoration. Amazon product titles guidelines ask all sellers to exclude characters like ~ ! * $ ? _ ~ { } # < > | * ; ^ ¬ ¦to avoid confusion.
- Don’t capitalize every word. Try not to use all caps, capitalize prepositions of fewer than four letters, conjunctions or articles. Here’s an example of proper capitalization of an Amazon product title:
- Use numerals. It’s not necessary to spell out the numbers in your product title. However, what you do need to spell out are the measurements. Here’s an example of how it is done:
Some of these tips can also help you improve the clarity of your product descriptions and other essential information, like shipping details, that consumers might be interested in while browsing your product pages.
Over to You
Who would have thought that writing clickable Amazon product titles would be such a tiring process?
Indeed, there are quite a few things that you need to keep in mind, from formatting to keyword optimization. On top of that, you might also want to make your product titles more appealing using some psychological tricks.
Nevertheless, once you get into it, you’ll see that writing a good Amazon product title is not that hard. And if you still find it difficult, you’ll always have our tips at hand to help you out.
