Amazon dominates the world of e-commerce and online retail. It’s difficult to find a product that isn’t sold on Amazon, but what are some factors that determine how high your product’s ranks?

Amazon has three ways in which it ranks items: relevance, popularity, and conversions. Relevance is based on an algorithm that considers things like customer reviews, sales history, and price competitiveness. Popularity is determined by how many people buy an item (i.e., more purchases means higher ranking). Finally, the conversion rate is the percentage of customers who purchase something after viewing it on Amazon. This determines where it appears on search results pages.

In this blog post, we’ll cover the Amazon SEO ranking factors that you can use to help your product rank higher in search results.

Amazon SEO Ranking Factors

1) Product Title

First, and most importantly, you should have a good title for your product. Then, use the main keywords in your product’s name to help it rank higher in search results. Put these words at the beginning of your title, as Amazon uses this data to determine where products appear on their site.

Keep things brief; although there is no character limit for titles, Amazon allows only 500 characters of search-related metadata per listing.

Check out: How to Optimize Your Amazon Product Title? 

2) Product Features

Include specific features of your product that will benefit customers looking for information about those particular elements. For example, if you sell women’s shoes with wedge heels, some people may want to know how much they’ll be able to walk in them.

A customer who types “wedges” into the search bar might want to see your product, so this feature should be included in the product name or description.

3) Product Description

Keep your product descriptions short and sweet. A five-hundred-word description may look nice on the front end of your listing page, but Amazon only displays a certain number of words from the beginning; after that, customers have to click “more” to view the rest.

This limits the effectiveness of extra words at the beginning of your description. Instead, it’s best just to highlight what makes your product unique and let images do most of the talking.

As with titles, Amazon limits search-related metadata to 500 characters per listing.

Also, check out: How to Optimize Your Amazon Product Description? 

4) Image Quality and Product Shots

Good images can help your product rank higher in several ways. For example, if you’re selling a red scarf on Amazon, then the color of that scarf should be represented accurately in your image. Not only does this make it easy for potential customers to see what the item is truly like, but it also helps if the colors are accurate because Amazon uses color data to determine how an item will rank among other items.

Another thing to consider when creating your product images is showing multiple angles; these are called “front view,” “back view,” “top view,” etc. While you don’t need every possible angle (5 is probably a good number), you should show enough views to give customers an idea of what your product looks like from all sides. This helps people get a better overall sense of the scale and quality of your product and shows any flaws that might not be visible in one particular view.

Amazon also uses image data for its “related images” section on the right-hand side of the page. If you have 15 different angles, you can bet those will appear there. Use this feature to improve click-throughs by including a few extra images here that are similar but situated such that they appeal to other potential shoppers with specific tastes.

5) Product Title Length and Keyword Frequency

This factor isn’t about getting your keywords in the title but rather how often those keywords are repeated. If you can fit all of your primary, secondary, and tertiary keywords into the title, then do it! However, Amazon recommends that you use these words only once each; with this information, they determine what words to automatically include when customers search for different variations of your product’s name or keywords.

In addition to this, avoid repeating the same word twice consecutively as it looks spammy. You also want to space out your keyword usage throughout your title without making it too disjointed—about every three or four words is a good place to start.

6) Product Subtitles

You have about five hundred characters; make sure they’re concise and relevant. Use your subtitles to expand on the main title, explain what this product is, or how it can help people.

Amazon uses your subtitles to determine whether you have a matching search result among all of their SKU’s (Amazon assigns unique identifiers to each item; for example, “ASIN” for books and “GTIN” for products).

7) Product Reviews & Ratings

There are specific ways that Amazon Vine members write review influences rankings reviews, and Amazon customers who bought this product also purchased are weighted more than other reviews.

Within these two groups, customer ratings may be more influential since they’re volunteered by verified buyers of the product instead of being paid to write a review by an advertiser wanting only positive words.

Check out: How to get more positive Amazon Reviews? 

8) Backend Search Terms: Synonyms & Flow

You likely already know that backend keywords can be used to generate suggested search terms. Similarly, flow typing allows you to highlight certain words within a product description to generate related phrases based on your own suggestions.

Within these suggestions, Amazon will include synonyms of the original word; if your keyword is “green iphone case,” then some flow type suggestions could be “blue iphone case,” “phone case,” and more.

In addition to this, Amazon is constantly updating its search algorithm scan the suggestions closely, and pick out any phrases that you didn’t include in your list of keywords.

Conclusion

These are just 8 key elements of an efficient Amazon SEO strategy; make sure to do your own research before starting any product listing. There are other factors to consider for products outside these categories.

We hope you found this article useful; if you have any questions, please ask in the comments section below.

Do you need any help with optimizing your product listings for Amazon, Google, and Alexa? You can check out ConversionStudy Amazon SEO Services.