Amazon is an ecommerce powerhouse. There are over 560 million products listed on it, and according to Bank of America estimates, Amazon’s share of the entire US ecommerce market is a sizable 44%. Bank of America also projects Amazon will have an online gross merchandise value (GMV) growth of 15.7% in 2020. With such a large marketshare, and growing, it is important to make sure all of your products have gone through a thorough listing optimization process.
With these kinds of numbers, it’s no secret that Amazon listings are an absolute must for your products. However, simply being present on Amazon’s platform isn’t enough to guarantee your brand’s success. You also need to ensure potential customers are seeing your listings.
The majority of Amazon users don’t look past the first page of search results. This means it’s essential that you optimize your product listings. By following these top 5 Amazon listing optimization tips for 2020, you can help your brand establish a successful position in the web’s most dominant and rapidly growing marketplace.
The product title is one of the key fields Amazon uses to measure the relevance of a detail page. So it’s the first thing you should focus on when optimizing your listings. As Amazon notes, customers are more likely to click on quality product titles in search results. So what can you do to create a quality title?
According to Business Insider, 66% of US consumers begin their product searches on Amazon. Therefore, it’s vital that you have an overall search-term strategy for your products. While your strategy should include both front-end and back-end search terms, you can gain more value by focusing on the front end.
Including valuable keywords in product titles is an obvious first step to prioritizing front-end search terms. Additionally, be sure to include keywords in the bullet points, or highlights, following the product title.
Back-end keywords, not visible to customers, can also help boost your product listings. However, they shouldn’t be a priority. They work best to supplement front-end search terms.
According to art museum director Brian Kennedy, nearly 30% of the brain’s cortex is devoted to visual processing. Because imagery is a very important method of communication, having high-quality, professional product photos is crucial for engaging potential customers.
Most importantly, product photos should clearly show what a product is. Using a white background and ensuring that a product and props fill at least 85% of the frame will help achieve this.
Customers also appreciate product photos that include important details. If you’re listing a food product, for example, it can be helpful to include a photo that shows its list of ingredients. Overall, it’s best to figure out what sets your products apart from competitors’ products and highlight those differences through imagery.
When grouping your listings and variations on Amazon, you need to consider both your product and your customers. For a brand-new product, you want to group as many variations together as possible to help increase your cart size and aggregate reviews.
If you’re selling a brand-new T-shirt that comes in three size and color options, for example, you likely want to group these options together. Listed together, each size and color option will be a “child” variation on a “parent” product page.
For an established product, it can make more sense to split the product variations into separate parent listings. You only get one search result per family listing, so separating product variations produces more search results.
However, you always want to consider the customer experience. If your customers tend to search for T-shirts by color, for example, it can be helpful to group different sizes under a separate parent listing for each color. Ultimately, there’s a balance between getting your search results and making your product listings easy for a customer to navigate.
Achieving this balance is not something that you have to do alone, however. WBX Commerce has a team that monitors listings and provides recommendations on how to set them up as well as when to switch variation setups to change ad strategies. By leveraging data and analytics, WBX Commerce can add significant value to brands’ existing listing optimization strategies.
Brands that have a registered trademark can benefit from enrolling in Amazon’s brand registry program. A key advantage of this program is that it offers brands the ability to create a storefront. With a storefront, you can give your customers a dot-com experience like what they would get from your website, only within Amazon. These storefronts are especially valuable because you can use them as a landing page for social media promotions and ads.
Additionally, if you are part of the brand registry program, you should leverage A+ content. By using this content feature, brands can enhance their product descriptions to increase conversion rates, traffic, and sales.
Amazon is already massively important to ecommerce, and it is continuing to grow. To stay competitive on this platform as it continues to evolve, it’s crucial to optimize your product listings for better traffic and sales.
WBX Commerce offers accessible, high-tech optimization solutions to help with this. To get started, consider reaching out to WBX Commerce for a free health report. This in-depth analysis of your listings will help you understand key areas for improvement and maximize the value of your list optimization efforts.
