The E-commerce Leader

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[00:00:30] Michael: Amazo n SEO or Amazon keyword ranking is rightly more than important. It’s almost an obsession of any focus e-commerce it sells on Amazon, especially custom products or private label products, or in fact, anybody who gets to create or country.
[00:00:45] The listing for products, getting your product listing to rank on Amazon for powerful keywords is indeed incredibly important. Having taught in the last live or the last few podcasts episodes about strategic drivers for this area. So then we’re going to talk some very practical action steps to get your products ranked for valuable keywords on Amazon, which basically divided into two parts and hence two episodes for the podcast listeners, keyword research, and then optimizing, optimizing the list.
[00:01:10] To rank for those keywords. So Jason, you ready to plunge into these exciting Tevye? That waters with me here?
[00:01:16] Jason: I’m nervous, man. And it’s the sound so hard, but, I, I know you’re an expert guide for this stuff, but let me just say why I really like the strategy of SEO optimization and that’s because a lot of people’s first response when they want to try to get sales is.
[00:01:33] Pay for advertising. And, you can do that on Amazon. You can do it off Amazon. You know, a lot of Shopify owners will do that when they, you know, have a Shopify site set up, their first response is let’s do Facebook ads, but the truth is if your listings aren’t really optimized and put together properly and really organized in such a way that you’ve, converted people when they hit your page, you’re really, really wasting money when you pay for average.
[00:02:00] I mean, you just it’s like a leaky bucket. And so, I’m a huge fan of kind of doing things in logical sequence and the first sequence is get your listing really dialed in and fully cooked. And this holds true on Amazon and it holds true in Shopify, websites as well. So that’s why I love this topic in general.
[00:02:17] So Michael, let’s break it down for people who were focused on the Amazon listing, what are practical ways you can improve? Your Amazon SEO again with just the organic efforts to copywriting efforts without advertise. So,
[00:02:31] Michael: Just really the first response to that is to respond to your previous point, which is we’ve got to think about where SEO optimization for ranking as in being discovered is appropriate.
[00:02:44] And to your point of what I’m not going to discuss today, but which is critically important is to optimize your listing for humans to convert. So absolutely a hundred percent right about that. That copywriting ability or image work to convert for humans is absolutely critical. That’s the difficulty with Amazon is that it also leads into SEO because if your listing converts better, broadly speaking, it will rank better.
[00:03:08] However, I’m going to artificially hive off the optimization piece to a different discussion another day, if we want to do it and certainly very worthwhile topic. So to your point, I absolutely agree with you. And what we’re doing today, I guess assumes either that you don’t know who you’re selling to.
[00:03:23] So we’re starting with Rocky with research, or if you have done that, that you optimize your listing to sale. And then we were really talking. Just the keywords piece today, really? Because that’s complicated enough. So I hope that makes sense. So, let’s plunge into it and hopefully it will make sense.
[00:03:38] The first thing is, a caveat, the other piece of, of listing SEO on Amazon, which is different from Google is you can’t really separate. The organic SEO from advertising driven SEO. So we’re not going to get into the whole advertising thing today because it’s huge, but the bad news is normally you can’t just do great Amazon organic ranking with a cold start.
[00:03:59] And unless you haven’t in a very uncrowded marketplace. But the good news is that if you optimize the listing in sense of organic SEO, then everything else works better. So I hope that makes it a little bit of sense. A bit of context there. So
[00:04:12] Jason: step one is to start with the focus on keywords. How do you go about that?
[00:04:15] What do you do research?
[00:04:16] Michael: Yeah, so I divide this into two phases, pick and Pyre called it some cutesy names. And so BVS is pic stands for. Product idea creation, PI sense of product to their elimination. So basically what I’m doing is separating it into more of a brain function and very broad idea gathering.
[00:04:35] And then we have to analyze it down and eliminate it down to the keywords where the metrics actually take out. So one is more imagination driven. The other is more analytical. Most people tend to want to go straight for the tools and do the analysis piece because it’s more mechanical than straight forward, particularly more mechanically minded or process driven people.
[00:04:53] And they really don’t like the fact that I asked him to use imagination, but I promise you I’ve tried skipping that over, So, you know that that’s why I do it this way around. So we start with our
[00:05:02] Jason: imagination.
[00:05:03] Michael: Yeah. And sorry, guys. I know that people want to go to the numbers. There’s so much resistance in most my clients.
[00:05:07] It’s funny. And I’m, I’m not trying to be clever. I’m like, I promise to say, I promise if this was simple, I would simplify it, but it’s not. Why do
[00:05:13] Jason: you say to start with imagination and elimination, before you go straight into just looking at analysis on, you know, viral launch or some of the.
[00:05:22] Michael: It’s a good question.
[00:05:23] And I should preface with a caveat that if you are reselling somebody else’s products in a bundle, then you know what you’re selling already where you don’t need to go too broad. But a lot of people are trying to think about keyword research for when they have no product at all to sell and they don’t know what they’re selling.
[00:05:39] So this is really geared to those people. If you already know what you’re selling, then you can skip this process. Right? So that’s probably the two things I should clarify, but if you’re creating a private label or custom product label, then the keyword research. It has to be a big part of that. And I would say, you need to understand who your consumer is and what drives them.
[00:05:56] If you try to be driven purely by the numbers, you won’t be attached enough to the product, so to really make it work. So that’s when that, that comes in. Okay. So
[00:06:03] Jason: pic stands for what again, and how do you go about doing the idea creation?
[00:06:08] Michael: Okay. What do you do? Yeah, it start with a few things thought with the obvious keywords.
[00:06:12] Like if you were going to go and look for dolls, clothes, then put the word doll’s clothes into Amazon and see what the auto-complete throws up. So Amazon or to complete is a very handy little hack. And actually you can come up with all sorts of things. Merchant words will, will produce a billion and word words for you, but I don’t think you need.
[00:06:29] To go to mad in terms of getting quantity, if keywords, because you can generate a heck of a lot anyway, so start with some brainstorming. If you have existing customers, new expanding into related product line, then talk to your existing customers. People just don’t tend to do that. If you’re starting from scratch, talk to prospects.
[00:06:44] If you don’t have any list of prospects hanging around Facebook forums, watch a friend in your target market. If you’re trying to sell something that your friends are into search on Amazon. Or get them to search while you’re recording a screen, anything to just kind of dive into the world of the consumer and what drives them to put keywords into the search bar, because that gives you also the feeling for the search intent, which is another important part of Amazon or indeed SEO, which is why is somebody searching?
[00:07:10] And you’ve really got to get a good feel for that. And start with a bunch of ideas is really what you’re going to end up with a list of 40, 50 keywords that are related around one topic that you’re then going to analyze later.
[00:07:21] Jason: And so the, the goal is to get that list of 40 to 50 keywords that you’re, you know, kind of in the universe of what you think might be the right approach.
[00:07:29] The list and creation.
[00:07:30] Michael: Exactly. Yeah. The university of Goodwill. I mean, Tommy Griffith is one of the SEO experts that I really respect to is a Google SEO guy, but he says, yeah, try and over-investing in keyword research is the first thing he says. And the second thing he says is to try and get the available university keywords that your, your, clients for.
[00:07:47] For one of a better word, you’re searching shoppers swimming in or using, you know, so that’s important.
[00:07:52] Jason: Okay. So product idea creation is the first thing you got to list of 40 to 50 ideas. And then you go for the E, which is the elimination, the
[00:08:00] Michael: plastic product idea, elimination, again, a bit of a cutesy WebEx.
[00:08:04] I think if you want to take a slice of a juicy pie, a market, you need to go and analyze it. You know that pie, it’s not the greatest analogy, but anyway, so it’s really the analytical piece and that’s when all the tools kick in helium 10 jungle scout, viral laws, and so forth. And what I would suggest you need to do is come up with a bunch of ideas and then eliminate most of them, which is con can be a bit tough.
[00:08:24] It’s a little bit like if you’re doing product sourcing, use scan, you know, 50 items and maybe find the one that’s actually potentially profitable. It’s a similar equivalent in the keyword space. You come up with a bunch of ideas. Now you need to analyze them. And really go through a set process.
[00:08:39] Jason: So what are the criteria by which you would eliminate one of the key words off of your.
[00:08:45] Michael: First thing is really, I think you need to set a budget, very, very first thing, because if you set a budget of say $10,000 to order a product line and launch it, and I would suggest that you needed like maybe 60, 40 split in terms of the, the money for the inventory and landing costs and then a launch costs.
[00:09:03] Maybe you’ve more these days, maybe it’s 50 50. So having put that money on one side, Can you afford to enter the market? And the very simple rule of thumb is if you’re going to order three months worth of inventory, if you’re importing, which for most private level custom products, still the case, India, China, for most people, et cetera, then you’re going to need about three minutes, three months of inventory, because that is the lead time.
[00:09:25] And very, very, roughly your landed cost has gotta be a maximum of a third of your selling price. So if someone you say, yeah, sorry.
[00:09:32] Jason: So when you say set a budget. A revenue goal?
[00:09:36] Michael: No. I mean an investment budget for how much you can afford to invest in the product before it starts to become financially self-sufficient.
[00:09:43] So if
[00:09:43] Jason: you set a budget, how does that, how does that, how does that, trigger the elimination of acute.
[00:09:50] Michael: So if you put the keywords in and within the, say the top six listings, you can see that the revenue is more than your budget. Normally that means you can’t afford to enter the market and just give a breakdown of, of why it works that way.
[00:10:03] For example, let’s say you’re going into market and the, the, even the sixth listing down ordered by revenue, you need to be using a tool like jungle scout or helium 10 for this. Then that, so the sixth listing down is say doing $50,000 a month in revenue. That seems really good. Right. But in order to start to compete with and rank against a product like that, that means you’re going to need to have a.
[00:10:29] Enough stock to sell 50,000 revenue over three months because you need enough stock for three months because that’s your lead time. It’s one month to manufacture two months to send it on a boat. If you’re ordering less than that, you’ll be able to stock for ages. And if you do the math more or less, you’ll find.
[00:10:43] That, that’s what you’re going to need and your budget 50,000 upfront. So it generally coincides with the monthly revenue. So,
[00:10:52] Jason: sorry, roughly most normal entrepreneurs, sorry. No, I’m not. This is funny. Most normal entrepreneurs would think is their opportunity to make a product here. Will, will anyone buy it?
[00:11:03] But what you’re saying is the exact opposite, which is people are buying this stuff at such a high velocity. You’re going to step into basically a jet stream of super expensive business creation instantly. So you’re looking for not a too big seller opportunity counter counter to what most entrepreneurs would do
[00:11:26] Michael: may be true.
[00:11:26] But I mean, I, I mean, maybe it’s kind of a weird sounding thing to say, but here’s what I would say. It depends what if you call it an entrepreneur, but somebody with. What I would call proper for want of a better word funding. Like you’ve got a hundred thousand dollars in the bank to launch a new product line, and you’ve got an experienced team on your side.
[00:11:42] Of course, you look for a big opportunity. That makes sense. But if you just starting off with a modest budget, not just for your business as a whole, but even you’ve got 20, 30 product lines already and you wanted to launch a new one. You may not have more than 10 or even $5,000 available to launch it. In which case there is in my experience, what will happen if you go, if you get blinded by the numbers.
[00:12:01] Every single person who enters these markets. When I work with them, does this, they go, wow, it’s amazing. Look, there’s a million dollars a month being made on page one in revenue. And like, yeah, well matters is not how much revenue is being made, but how much of that market you can get. So market share, but only if it’s profitable and the truth is when you go into very, very competitive space, you’ll just find you can’t rank on page one, people fit to page two.
[00:12:24] Because it’s cheaper, like you doing Google about your new search and bays three, four of Google looking for a bargain normally. And that means that the profit drops out. So honestly it may be counter-intuitive, but like going into a big market per se is not a good thing. It’s only actually actively a bad thing unless you have a budget that matches.
[00:12:40] So that’s what I would say
[00:12:41] Jason: that. So in a lot of ways you’re looking for a product opportunity that is so small, you can afford to get into it without a lot of companies. Yeah.
[00:12:50] Michael: Or you have a bigger budget. I’m not saying you should go for small or large. Yeah, exactly. It should match it. So that’s where you have to set a budget for this product line launch, basically into inventory and advertising and other launch costs.
[00:13:03] Okay. Does that make sense? I know it makes cancer and shit you’re right. That it’s, counter-intuitive, you’re absolutely right. Because everyone plunged into the biggest use of lucky markets. And I say, well, it is an operation. For someone buying Amazon’s an opportunity for a trillion dollar business, but it’s not for me.
[00:13:19] So,
[00:13:20] Jason: yeah. That’s great. Okay. So how else do you eliminate keywords? Or what else? What else are the next steps then? Yeah. So
[00:13:25] Michael: the next thing is to look at the demand side, you’ve got to size up the opportunity. What, what would be the value of winning a ranking battle? Not just the revenue, but the profits. So you’ve got to, Do the opposite side.
[00:13:35] If there’s no demand for something, this is like the opposite extreme. If once you’ve set a budget of say $20,000 to launch your product line, you may put in some keywords, you’ve got super specific about like, I dunno, fish tanks for Guppy fish or something. And maybe there is a market for that, but maybe it’s $300 a month.
[00:13:51] So there’s no, if there’s no valuable market, there is no demand at all. Then that’s another reason to leave the opportunity. Yeah. So once you set the budgets and you go shopping and you put your keywords into these tools, or even to Amazon, you quickly will see, oh, this is too big for me. Or there’s no demand.
[00:14:08] So either those are reasons to just get out and eliminate it.
[00:14:11] Jason: Okay. Okay. How do you think about the competition in that context? Does that come into the.
[00:14:16] Michael: Definitely does. Yeah. So if there is demand, then I’m worried about competition. If there’s no demand or not enough, then I wouldn’t bother. I’m not, I wouldn’t probably get into private label or custom product for something less than a couple of thousand dollars a month or, or pounds, depending on where you’re sourcing from.
[00:14:31] If you’re sourcing locally in the U S to sell in the U S you can probably have smaller amounts of stock and there’s nuances there. But the competition side really, again, I want to see, a few things. There’s a ton of metrics that can go into this, but one very important one is how dominant is any single competitor.
[00:14:46] So if I look at all the revenue per month, which is most of the research tools, we’ll give you, one of twice. And then you look at the percentage taken by any single, Out of that. Then if it’s more than about 25, 30% for a single brand, or if they double their competition, that starts to worry me.
[00:15:03] So everyone can set that bar a slightly different place, but it’s fairly obvious if you go into a market where 50% of the sales in revenue, dollar terms of being taken, taken by one brand, then that’s going to be very, very hard to compete with. And it tends to mean that you’re going to compete by being cheaper.
[00:15:20] It’s possible to compete by being much better, but. You can probably get a higher price point if you can really articulate that through wonderful imagery, but then it tends to be hard to make it profitable. So generally it’s just end of.
[00:15:34] Jason: Do you see people who do this strategy and end up going for the smaller opportunities and didn’t create like a portfolio of the smaller, I mean, they build a business out of the, the wimpy little products that no one else is really working towards.
[00:15:47] And then they
[00:15:48] Michael: end up with. The thing is, I would say people worry about the wrong metrics and worry about the size of a market. That’s absolutely irrelevant because if it isn’t your market, I mean, Amazon’s a multi-billion dollar valuation. Now. I’m not excited about that. Cause I don’t own Amazon stock.
[00:16:00] And the reason for that I’m writing now is because I thought it was already exposed to Amazon enough thing, focused on it and didn’t want to get the stock. So it’s irrelevant. And it’s just the same. If you’re looking at keywords, it doesn’t belong to you yet. So the market share you can own is the only bit that counts.
[00:16:15] So having. Big percentage of a small market is way, way, way better than being a little tailor and a massive market. So it’s the star principle, you know, find a pond. You can dominate, be the big fish in a small pond. Really it’s that’s the, the net net and, and most markets do not lend themselves to that.
[00:16:31] Particularly if you have a modest budget and to be Frank modest means at least $10,000. And that’s means you have to eliminate most seeming opportunities. Actually, opportunity’s not really,
[00:16:42] Jason: I love this. Okay. Can you summarize, and then I think what we’ll do for our recording purposes, we’re going to keep going, but this will end up being two podcast episodes, but why don’t you summarize this pie and pick process?
[00:16:52] And then we’ll keep going. Surely. So
[00:16:54] Michael: yeah, pick. If you’re starting off with a new product line, whether absolutely from scratch or you’re sort of expanding, for example, if you’ve been selling dolls clothes and you now want to sell dolls houses or something, I don’t know if that’s even relevant to that market.
[00:17:06] Cause I don’t know it, but then you probably still need to do this. So peak is product idea creation. You need to just really do your very, very best to understand your target market and the actual people putting keywords. The best you can start with the obvious keywords use Amazon also complete and merchant words if you want, but really talk to existing customers.
[00:17:25] If you’re talking from scratch, talk to prospects, if you don’t have any hanging around Facebook forums and, and friends, and then pie, is that the product earlier elimination or the analysis piece, a really important set of budget, so that you’re only shopping. So the markets you could afford to dominate as it were, make sure there’s demand.
[00:17:43] Sometimes the market’s too small and nobody’s interested. So your products will sit there forever. Even if you win the market and then evaluate the competition and just eliminate competition above all. Any household, big names. I don’t want to sell trainers against Nike, for example, or anyone who’s really dominated the market with a big percentage of the.
[00:18:02] Jason: I love it, man. Wow. Great. Start to this conversation.
[00:18:05] Wrapup: Hey folks. Thanks so much for listening to another episode of the e-commerce leader. So today we’ve been deep diving into Amazon keyword research. It’s a time-consuming mental bandwidth consuming process. And I wouldn’t claim that it’s super easy or that I’m a genius at this stuff. I think most people find that they struggle with it to certain extent.
[00:18:26] But I think it is really, really important as in any platform of SEO and the best person I know for SEO training generally is a Google SEO specialist, Tommy Griffith of click minded.com worth checking out if you’re needing training in Google SEO, which Jason and I are going to deep dive into in an episode.
[00:18:43] But even if it’s Amazon, wherever it is really over-investing as Tommy calls it in keyword research, I think is one of the keys. So you need to just get to grips with the sort of universe of keywords out there. For me, it comes down to a blend between a couple of things, but if imagination and using some brainstorming.
[00:19:01] Well, I call pic or product idea creation and then filtering with the traditional sort of Amazon tools there. When you spend so much time obsessing about helium 10 jungle scout, viral launch, et cetera. And that’s really about the, elimination. I would say of opportunities rather than adding all the time to the options, which will drive you crazy.
[00:19:19] I separate the adding options. Into the product today, creation or ideation phase, if you want to be formal about it. And then the elimination phase. So things that it’s too expensive markets to enter. If there’s no demand, if the competition is hyper-competition, then those are all reasons to decide not to enter a keyword driven market.
[00:19:39] And that kind of simplifies your life because in the end, you’ll find there aren’t that many real opportunities for private label or custom product creation these days on Amazon, unless you have a. You really enormous budgets. What’s left is the stuff that’s worth going into. So you will find, you have to do a lot of research in order to find even possibly viable, keywords.
[00:20:01] In my opinion, my experience, particularly if you’re starting from scratch. Now, the more established people out there may well find that their keyword research is not really about choosing which market’s going to, but it’s purely about refining existing listings for products. And you will find my experience with clients that are more established, six or seven figures.
[00:20:23] Is that they do find that their ranking goes up when they’ve really over-invested in keyword research, pick the right keywords and, and Regan for it in terms of updates in the listing, talking of the listing or the product detail page. We’ll be talking about that now. Episode. So stay tuned for that.
[00:20:39] If that’s something that you’re wanting to work on or refine, I’m aware that I’m not saying anything profound in these episodes that is different from what people have said before. But a lot of the times in business life, the simple disciplines are the ones you need to keep revisiting them. For me, this is one of those areas.
[00:20:56] There are sort of hacks. They come and they go. But the basics of being thorough about understanding the sorts of words that your potential customers use is never going to go away. And I think that this process overall, if you’re a Shopify focused person, while we will be talking about Google, SEO is very, very applicable to you or indeed any direct to consumer site.
[00:21:15] Woo commerce, big commerce, whatever. When I say Shopify, it’s got a shorthand for all that stuff, just so you understand. And if you’re selling on eBay, same stuff applies as on Amazon as well to a large. So that’s us today. Thanks very much for your patients. With what I know is a bit of a hard topic to get your head around.
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[00:22:07] That’s fantastic. That’s what we live for here. So thanks so much for your attention. Look forward to seeing you in the next show.
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