It’s clear that Google and YouTube rankings are some of the most sought after rankings, but if you’re an e-commerce site or looking to sell a product another search engine comes to mind—Amazon. Amazon is the world’s largest online retailer, so it’s incredibly beneficial for your product to show up first on this website’s result pages. Fortunately for you, with a little bit of effort you can optimize your product pages in just a few minutes.
Tips for Optimizing your SEO Page
When thinking about optimization, it helps to split up your product page into the different section you can find on Amazon and then see how you can optimize each one. Here is how to get stared:
The Product Title
As with any type of optimization for the web, keywords are going to be important. On your product detail page, you will be able to add in a title as well as a subtitle, which is the perfect opportunity to include keywords. Try to use your keywords at the beginning of the title if possible and make sure everything sounds natural. The more specific you can be, the better.
The Description and Meta Description Section
Make sure you always have a solid description of your product, not only because consumers want to hear more about it, but because this is how Amazon will determine what your product is all about. In other words, using keywords in this description is a must. Other search engines besides Amazon will also look at your product description if they are crawling Amazon (so just about every single search engine), so you kill two birds with one stone if you take the time to write a solid, keyword-rich description. You actually have two different places where you can add text to your product listing: in the description section, which is lower on the page, or the product description, which is above the fold. Below are two different screenshots of the same page, the first showing the description above the fold and the second showing the description below: 
The Product Reviews
Reviews have been a hot topic recently all around the web, and Amazon is no exception. Reviews are more unique content about a product and are usually trusted by consumers, so Amazon likes to see a product page with a good number of reviews. There are a few different things you can do to help promote positive reviews on your Amazon page:
- Ask your loyal customers to leave a review on Amazon instead of your site (or both).
- Prompt buyers to leave a review by sending an email with a link after purchase.
- Create a button on your website that makes it easy for your customers to leave an Amazon review.
Remember, you are not allowed to post fake reviews or pay someone to leave you a review (whether it’s through a free gift or otherwise). This is against Amazon’s policies, and your listing could be banned so make sure to use some of the approved tactics mentioned above.
A Few Extra Tips
As with any online listing, make sure all of your information is filled out and filled out correctly. Also, make sure you use a quality photo, fill out product details, and answer customer’s questions. I spoke with Scott Langdon, Managing Partner of my SEO Company HigherVisibility, who explained your Amazon listing should always be entirely separate from your e-commerce website. He said:
“You must optimize your product pages separately from what you’re doing on your own eCommerce website so that you don’t have any duplicate content issues. If you are trying to use the same content for Amazon optimization and on-site optimization, you’ll fail on both fronts. This is a mistake we unfortunately see eCommerce companies make all the time, particularly when it comes to a description.”
Finally, it’s also important to remember that off-page SEO works for Amazon the same way it does for your other webpages. Get started with social sharing and mention your Amazon listing in different blogs and forums to help get the word out there. This will improve your SEO as well as your visibility, so make sure you take some of these opportunities after you optimize your listing. I also recommend checking out this slideshare presentation from the SMX conference last year that really gives you a good view of different options when it comes to product listings on Amazon. Do you know of any more tips to help a company with SEO for their products on Amazon? Let us know your story and your thoughts in the comments below. Feature Photo Credit: soumit via Flickr (Creative Commons) Screenshot taken May 2014
