The E-commerce Leader

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[00:00:31] Intro: Hey folks. Thank you so much for coming back to the e-commerce leader, the place to be for ambitious e-commerce leaders everywhere. And today we are talking about how to Frank, your Amazon listing for keywords. In other words, Amazon S E O a lot of the stuff we take today will apply to quite a degree on other platforms as well, but it is the Amazon focus today.
[00:00:51] We’re going to be talking about keyword optimization and how to even. Lay a foundation for that, the importance of measurements, how to define your target keywords, how to build them into a listing, what indexing is and. Some other little ranking hacks as well. I’m not a big one for hacks. We’ve got a couple of nice juicy ones for you here.
[00:01:10] So stay tuned. If that’s relevant for you of your selling on other platforms, you may want to wait for our Google SEO episode, which is coming up soon. And if you are selling on Amazon, stay tuned and we’ll try and make you some extra money before Christmas.
[00:01:26] Jason: Okay. So let’s keep going. So let’s say you’ve got your short list of keywords, not even eliminated out out the ones that don’t make sense for you in your context. What do you do now?
[00:01:38] Michael: Yeah. So the main thing is to prioritize it’s like anything else, 80 20 rule applies to a lot of things.
[00:01:42] So the, the most important thing is, to, to have a sort of shopping list of, keywords, maybe a hundred keywords maximum, and then cut down to 30, 50 keywords. And that’s your target list for your product listing page for your product detail page? I guess a lot of this would apply in some modified form on a Shopify site.
[00:01:59] And then. Prioritize the top three or five, the top two or three is probably your target for your title and the top through a five, probably the first bullet as well. So it’s like anything else. It comes down to literally a handful of keywords that you probably over time want to rank for. And then other keywords that are not going to move the needle so much in terms of revenue.
[00:02:20] But all very profitable when they do. And so it’s a blend of those, those types of keywords, really. So you make a list and prioritize.
[00:02:27] Jason: Okay. So you’ve got that. You’ve got your, your list and prioritized order. What you think is the primary phrasing or, or term that you’re going to camp on? W what, what comes next?
[00:02:36] What do you do then?
[00:02:37] Michael: So before you start worrying about, pulling leavers, as in, in this case, trying to do something to get ranking, you need to measure where you’re at in the first place, and it’s easy to skip this. So the foundation for everything is. Measure things upfront and regularly measured before you act.
[00:02:52] So the baseline. So I would just check the keyword ranking for a listing. Once you created it using helium 10, and you can also track where your competitors are going with these things as well. So you can track against the competition. The second thing is then as we said, defining. Target keyword list rate clearly.
[00:03:07] And then the third thing we’re going to do is to build those into your listing in priority order. So that we, we know how we’re ranking before we do stuff in this case, SEO, and then we can check how we’re ranking after we’ve done stuff to see if it actually had the effect we hoped for.
[00:03:22] Jason: Okay. So you’re building your listing at this point. So you’re really getting it focused on, what the title it is, the, the opening paragraph, the details and the bullet points, that kind of stuff. Thoughts on how to organize that. What what’s the, what’s the best way to work through that stuff?
[00:03:39] Michael: Yeah. So, the first thing is a quick hack from Stephen Pope of Miami’s and guy who I spoke to recently about using the search term field, which isn’t something that the. General public. We’ll see, but we’ll help the algorithm, I suppose, to recognize, you know, what it should rank your listing for.
[00:03:57] So help the algorithm understand your listing, if you like. And what he says is you get, you have a search term field of 249 characters. So you put in relevant keywords. Use those against the top two competitors and see if they’re ranking and then rank those in order of importance. So you’re going to want to play around in the search term field, very hard to put across in the, in the podcast.
[00:04:13] But broadly speaking, the search term field is more important than you think, and you need to try and stuff in as many relevant single keywords, so not little keyword phrases as possible. So that’s the sort of simplified version of it. If you want to check out Steven Pope of Miami’s and guide, we’ll put links in the show notes, and there’s a more detailed process that he
[00:04:31] Jason: goes through that.
[00:04:31] All right. I love that. Obviously you’ve got you. You’ve got a ton of resources on your other podcasts this way as well. Right? Amazing FBA. So maybe in the show notes, put some links to the best, best episodes there. Okay, great. Okay. So what’s.
[00:04:49] Michael: Yeah, so indexing of keywords is, is a phrase that sounds quite technical.
[00:04:52] And I suppose it is, I mean, as Stephen was talking about, he said that you should focus on indexing first, rather than waiting ranking. So broadly, it means as I understand it, I’m not a technical specialist that the algorithm will, understand that your listing potentially should be. Indexed or should be ranked for a particular keyword.
[00:05:10] So they know that the keywords in there, I suppose it’s a bit like a library and going through a library and the catalog, the fact that you own this title. So they’ve catalog the fact that you have this keyword in your listing.
[00:05:19] Jason: Okay. All right. I don’t know if it relates to this situation or not on the product creation side, but I know on the Kindle book and paperback creation side, there was a fun, insight that one of my buddies gave me, It asks you for keywords for your Kindle book and this slot that it gives you is 50 characters long.
[00:05:38] And most people just put in like, and there’s seven slots. Most people put in seven words. Mm e-commerce online, startup, whatever, but what my buddy Mike, pedigree, told me was when he was doing his book, he spent four days and he created a 50 character. Optimized key phrase for every one of those seven slots, so that all 50 characters in seven slots were created.
[00:06:07] But what he did was he, he created sort of what you might call a stacked set of key phrases, in inside the 50 characters. So for example, if a startup was afraid, he wanted to get. And e-commerce startup was also a phrase you wanted to camp on. He would nest those together as logically as possible. And it actually was a massive project he undertook and, and it really helped his book rank.
[00:06:33] Well, so I don’t know, such shenanigans are the same for physical products that creation of the listing, but
[00:06:40] Michael: similar. I mean, I, again, I’m not familiar myself with Kindle book. Yeah. SEO, but I think it is very, very similar. In other words, what you’re saying, if you zoom out is to, as a general principle, which is probably easier to take away is just maximize everything.
[00:06:53] If Amazon gives you 2000 characters for the description, use it, and particularly Vern, you got a handful of products. If you’ve got hundreds of them, then, then it’s harder and you might skip that. But absolutely, definitely, make sure that you’re really, and this brings us to the next sort of phases. If you’ve done things in priority order, do your best to use every single character.
[00:07:12] In the title to either have really great keywords that you think are both valuable and winnable. There’s a bit of crossover between those two. And, for example, I’m not going to try and rank for iPhone case, cause that’s an insane idea. That’s like trying to win the song with, you know, with one musket is it’s not going to happen.
[00:07:30] But that plus maybe a little bit of a call to action in the title as well, but that you’ve got to make every character, you know, justify its existence. Here’s my main tip. Write multiple drafts of your title, maybe 10, maybe 15. Cause it really matters. And then rewrite each bullet two or three times as well.
[00:07:47] Again like your friend Mike, you should put some serious time and effort into this really does pay
[00:07:52] Jason: off. I love that. Okay. You just mentioned there phases here, three phases of doing this work. So what are the, what does what’s the first what’s the second what’s a third let’s walk through them. Sure. So
[00:08:02] Michael: I owe this to Steven Pope of Miami and guide by the way, just to acknowledge this.
[00:08:06] So the first thing is to use the search term field, as I said. So basically you get some relevant keywords, put them in, see what the competition is doing. I would use a tool like Frankenstein, which is a, De duping tool on, helium 10, there were other ones out there as well. And basically what it means is if you put in something like iPhone case, blue iPhone case, black iPhone case that will come out with the individual words, iPhone case, blue, black, whatever, and you put those as separate words into the backend, right?
[00:08:32] Just to make sure that Amazon’s can start ranking for that, by the way, little hint, Spanish keywords in the U S are huge. There’s a millions and millions and millions of Spanish language, but most, English speaking, I’m to tell us, and you don’t use that. So that’s a seriously good hint. So you might do very well with that.
[00:08:48] And then, Just the second phase. The second phase is that an incremental index. And so you’re going to use your brand analytics dashboard. If you’re brand registered, you would need a Magister trademark for that. And look at the suggestions. And then actually we’ll highlight in pink, the things that aren’t really going to work very well, according to the algorithm.
[00:09:05] And you can, those remove those. So you just
[00:09:09] Jason: skipped over a biggie there, which was being brand registered. So that’s obviously central to the current thesis on how to succeed on Amazon. Rudely
[00:09:17] Michael: speaking. Yeah, you can manage without, I’ve got a client who didn’t want to go to the expense and trouble of brand registry recently.
[00:09:23] And because he didn’t want to go to the expensive brand, you know, trademarking in the U S and it does make it harder to do everything to be Frank. I mean, it’s, I would invite if you can afford it. And again, it’s a budget question. If you were going to budget, this is more for business staff. So if you’re going to establish business units, It’d be unusual for you not to have a trademark, but if you haven’t please go and get it done for multiple reasons.
[00:09:42] We’ve talked about that separately. Sure. Yeah. And then the final phase of this one is, is what he calls matriculating to the top Tam, which is you take all your keywords for which your risk listing is ranking in the top 20 to 50 and the keyword results, and then upgrade, you really update every field to try and target.
[00:09:59] Five to seven key west Palestina to get to the top 10. So that’s quite similar to Google SEO strategy. So you can look at where you’re doing. Okay. And then try and make sure that you do better. So, you may find yourself tweaking things like the title. So you thought you were going to rank for iPhone case black.
[00:10:13] And actually maybe when you look at the results that, that you’re in position 300. So nowhere for that page. Again, maybe you’re ranking for iPhone case rubber coated black, and actually you’re making some sales in that. And therefore you want to tweak your listen to us. So there’s quite a bit of optimizing, strictly speaking means making optimal, right?
[00:10:33] So you can’t really do that at the beginning. You create a listing and then over time, you’re going to use the ranking data and also frankly, PPC data as well, so that you can see what was your converting on. And. And that’s a separate topic, but that feeds back into you may change the keyword order, or you may eliminate some keywords and replace it with others.
[00:10:52] So it’s a little bit, you, you were talking about your gardening injuries before we got on live and it’s a bit like weeding your garden. You need to be constantly weeding the garden. Maybe you put a rose somewhere and it actually doesn’t get enough sunlights and it’s not doing very well. So you gently report it and move it.
[00:11:05] And maybe you replace it with. I don’t know, different kind of Bush I’m struggling. I’m not even
[00:11:12] Jason: doing a good job on the gardening thing. Okay. I will take over your metaphor for you and embellish it properly.
[00:11:20] It is like gardening and here’s the thing I would say. You know, it like, okay. Just imagine any space that you currently own. That’s a current disaster. Just a mess, just, you know, it might be your front porch or it might be your back, you know, little courtyard or whatever. The thing that you’re describing right now to me, like the optimization step to me is about getting momentum in one small, like a foothold.
[00:11:41] That’s how I think of gardening. Get a foothold in your yard and do something that starts to get you momentum in terms of the visual appeal or fact, and then go, and to your point here in the outline, this is what you lean into. And so, you know, in a way, what you’ve described in the first couple of steps of sort of spaghetti at the wall intelligence, Yeah, but then you are looking for feedback from the algorithm and from buyers on Amazon.
[00:12:09] And as soon as you get that feedback, then you’re like a laser guided missile and you know exactly what to focus on. You, you lean into your winners, you cut your losers and you really try to optimize, at optimally for that outcome. And to me, a lot of people who are. Good at the initial phases, throwing spaghetti at the wall.
[00:12:31] Don’t ever scale tremendously. The people who are okay at throwing spaghetti at the wall, but her amazing at the optimization piece where they look at the data and they look at the data, they look at the. And then they say to themselves, I’ve got a little, I got a thread I’m going to pull on here. And I think this is going to lead to greater and greater and greater ranking.
[00:12:53] Those are the people over the course of years, installed them. With bestsellers in my view. And so that’s why I love this, this final step. The most, I’m a huge momentum guy. I can flounder around for a long time with the initial phases. But once I see that something’s working, I generally kind of tap into it pretty, you know, pretty focused way.
[00:13:14] And I think that’s the winning strategy for the Amazon selling.
[00:13:19] Michael: Yeah, I agree with that. And the other thing to say, I mean, I think that the very broad principle, very simple but hard to do emotionally is what you just said, which is, you know, ride your winners and cut the losers. And that applies to the product line.
[00:13:30] Some products you can hire magic elves to do keyword research, and it will never rank. It’s just not going to work. And it’s sometimes that’s the fact. And normally it’s pretty brutally simple because we talked about Amazon keyword research earlier and that’s to do with market selection. And if you’ve decided that you got a budget of $10,000 and you’re launching into a market where you needed a budget of a hundred thousand to actually have an impact and visibility you’re toast, and it doesn’t really matter what you do after that.
[00:13:55] It’s like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Like it doesn’t really matter. So. Yeah, and we have to accept that, that, the market has his judgments. Some products won’t go. But as you say, if you see a sign of life double down on what’s working and double down again, like you may end up spending a big percentage of your advertising budget, which will help the SEO by the way, on.
[00:14:16] I really, really smoke essentially for keywords. And they may not be the ones you thought it was going to be. As you say, you have to be willing to roll with the data and that’s quite, analyst’s gotten hard work and you will need to put aside some time to get your head hurting with the search term report, but it’s worth it.
[00:14:30] Absolutely.
[00:14:31] Jason: Well, what you just said is so key, which is. Emotional mental discipline to, you know, cut your cut. Your losers is key. A lot of people because of the act of creation, the act of setting up a, you know, unique, original product or bundle or whatever it is, they fall in love with it. And the process.
[00:14:52] Hmm. And, as, as product sellers, you just can’t do that. I mean, you have to be willing to, you know, love all of, you know, your little creations, but as soon as you know, it’s proven that they’re not of interest to customers say goodbye, you dismiss them and you lean into your winners and you just have to be ruthless like that.
[00:15:12] And it’s a real. Entrepreneurial discipline that applies across the board in every part of business, not just for Amazon, you know, keyword optimization work.
[00:15:24] Michael: Absolutely. Well, here’s what I would say. That actually a lot of businesses brutally simpler than we make it. Now it’d be floundering around trying to put across what is actually, I’m trying to, the reason I’m finding is I’m trying to compress.
[00:15:34] What I think of is 10 hours of detailed analysis and work into a short, simplistic statements. But the truth is that we can often try too hard. I mean, actually a lot of the time, if you go for the obvious keywords and they’re to compare. You shouldn’t have entered the market. If you go through the obvious keywords and they’re too competitive, but there are related keywords that aren’t ridiculously long tail.
[00:15:53] So instead of iPhone case, I phone case rubber or something, and you’re starting to rank for those and you’re making sales and the conversion rates, okay. Then you can start diving into the detail and doing the thing you said, really optimizing, but the truth is a lot of the time the market will tell you fairly and subtly.
[00:16:08] Nobody wants this product. In which case you have to abandon it. And then. Certain keywords clearly are too expensive to rank for, and you just have to abandon them. And I would say abandoning that, which is not winnable very quickly is actually a real master skill.
[00:16:21] Jason: Man, this is such great stuff. I really, really appreciate your insights into this and the details.
[00:16:27] So do you want to summarize this, second idea that we worked through in this back half of the podcast. Yeah. So,
[00:16:32] Michael: I will do that. And then there’s a couple of GC ranking tactics, which I think people might appreciate cause our little hacks, which do actually seem to be working, which is unusual and most hacks don’t seem to work.
[00:16:42] Yeah. The main thing is. First of all, when you’ve done quality keyword research as a prelude to writing your listing, you need to just focusing on the keyword SEO for the moment you need to make sure you’ve got a long list of maybe a hundred keywords, a shortlist of 30 to 50 keywords. If in doubt, make it shorter simply to handle and then prioritize.
[00:17:00] Three to five it’s on three or five, or getting your Tyler title in your first bullets. And then the rest are going to go in your other bullets. And the description is kind of place where you can dump a heck of a lot of long tail keywords by the way, because people don’t tend to read it, but the algorithm does.
[00:17:12] So that’s a bit of a hint there. And then, we need to just go through in phases and put things in, especially use the search terms, the backend search terms, By the way it’s more distinction. I should have said that, I would in the title put exact match keyword phrases, like iPhone, rubber, black, if that’s exactly the phrase that people tend to use that you’re trying to rank for.
[00:17:30] Whereas in the search term field at the back, I would just put individual words. So there we’ll split up. It’s a small distinction there. Okay. Got it. Great. Then the other thing is, as we’ve been saying to double down on what works and, and to leave what doesn’t, there are two sides to that. Really two tools for measuring that one is the, keyword ranking tools such as healing 10 has.
[00:17:49] And then the other one is the data that you get from the Amazon advertising campaigns. And so advertising is generally seen as a ranking or sales tool, but actually it’s an analytics tool because we can’t tell what the conversion is by keyword for organic sales. So we have to use, I would say PPC as a proxy for that.
[00:18:07] And once you get that data, you can see you’re converting on some PPC driven sales for iPhone rubber case, small or something. Then you can consider optimizing your listing for that word as well,
[00:18:20] Jason: man, this is awesome. Michael, love it. Well, really appreciate your deep dive into this. I was scared when we started this conversation,
[00:18:29] Michael: intimidating topic I’m
[00:18:31] Jason: doing okay.
[00:18:32] My blood pressure isn’t spiked too high.
[00:18:35] Michael: Yeah. We keep breathing. It’s this? Yeah. Rome wasn’t built in the day with this stuff. I mean, it’s like Google SEO, which I’m trying to learn a bit more of myself as well. It’s a new Allston, complex art, and you just need to take it one step at a time and then your craft, you know?
[00:18:49] Jason: Yeah. Well, I’m going to wrap it up here with a simple call to action. If you like the e-commerce leader podcast and we’d love to have you check it out on the player of choice. I know we stream these into our groups on the Sunday morning when we record them, but for those of you who watch it that way and have never gone on Spotify or apple or whatever, and follow the show and liked it.
[00:19:10] You know, subscribed or whatever the appropriate action is. We’d love to have you do that. The show is continuing to grow in subscribers and downloads, and we’re just looking at the metrics and, it’s, it’s really cool. Michael, did you know, It’s not hockey stick, but it’s going, baby. It’s going up.
[00:19:28] And so we’re really, really grateful for everybody who is a subscribing to the show and following it and referring to friends. And, if you’ve done that, we really appreciate it. So we’re going to wrap it up there. And, Michael, thank you again for your expertise in these things as always. It’s an honor, man.
[00:19:45] My
[00:19:45] Michael: pleasure. Thank you.
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