How to Increase Your Product Visibility on Amazon

We are continuing our series of guest blog posts to provide you with the most interesting and useful insights from the world of SEO and content marketing. This week, the blog guest contributor is Ronald Dod, Chief Marketing Officer and co-founder of Visture: an end-to-end eCommerce marketing agency focused on helping online merchants acquire more customers through the use of search engines, social media platforms, marketplaces, and their online storefronts.

It's not quite accurate to say that there is no 'secret sauce? for Amazon visibility. Rather, there's certainly a sauce - but it's not much of a secret. In fact, it's something that your business is likely already trying to do! It's getting there that can be a challenge. 

Always remember that behind all of Amazon's secret calculations, there's a simple goal: more conversions. The more sales that get converted, the more money Amazon makes. Amazon's A9 search algorithm will consistently prioritise products that create conversions and drive sales for Amazon. 

Fortunately, that probably aligns with your goals as well! If you're ever unsure about which direction to take or which techniques to employ, increasing conversions should be your North Star. With that in mind, here are six tips you can employ to fine-tune your Amazon presence and increase the visibility of your products.

1. Make sure you?ve got great images on your product detail pages

Every eCommerce shopper who buys a physical product without the ability to closely examine it (as you would have in a brick-and-mortar store) is taking at least a small leap of faith. So, it's perhaps not surprising that the quality, number and variety of images are big factors in making your product more visible and more conversion-friendly. 

Here's a few things you should consider using in your selection of images:

• High-resolution, preferably enough to allow a customer to zoom in on the image (Amazon offers sizing guidelines on this)

• A variety of angles to give the customer a good idea of what the product actually looks like

• Images that showcase the product's biggest selling points

• Infographics that diagram the product's features and show how it works

• Lifestyle or recipe images that show the product in use

2. Use PPC ads to increase your product's prominence in searches

Building the kind of momentum that catches A9's attention can be tough, but Amazon has provided a way to do it through pay-per-click (PPC) ads. Now even if you don't necessarily have the name recognition of some of your competitors, you can get a foot in the door with PPC advertising.

Amazon's built-in Amazon Advertising software is a robust and powerful PPC tool that can help boost your momentum significantly. Even better, the platform offers excellent tools for monitoring and tweaking your ads to improve their ROI. There is something of a learning curve to the process, so it may help to look at a guide for beginners before launching your first campaign.

3. Create keyword-rich content and titles ? but don't overdo it

You won't do much business if shoppers can't find your products, and keywords are a huge factor when it comes to product visibility. Your titles, bullets and long descriptions should all be richly sown with the keywords that will enable shoppers to discover your product pages. Keyword research services and software are widely available to help discover the most productive keywords for your items.

That's not to say, of course, that your titles and content should only be parseable by a search algorithm and not by a human being. This is known as ?keyword stuffing,? and Amazon will penalise you if they think you're guilty of it. Remember that your goal is ultimately still to increase conversions, and you're less likely to achieve a sale on a page that, while stuffed with keywords, makes very little sense.

4. Optimise for mobile where possible

eCommerce is increasingly a multi-platform game. In the 2015 holiday shopping season, nearly 70 percent of customers placed an Amazon order on a mobile device. Noting that mobile consumerism is on the rise, you should be giving serious thought to how your product detail pages show up on a mobile device.

This can include shortening titles, bullets and descriptions so that they don't get cut off on mobile apps. (Many times, this will also improve readability, so it can be a win-win.) You should also place your most important keywords toward the front of a title so that they?ll be visible to a customer reading search results on a mobile device.

5. Reviews and star ratings are critical

Remember what we said about leaps of faith? Images are one major component of encouraging shoppers to take that leap, and reviews and star ratings are the other. There are numerous reasons why Amazon reviews matter, and one of the biggest is that by and large, customers believe them. 

Here, Amazon actually has an advantage over brick-and-mortar. You don't get to see real customer reviews pop up alongside products as you stroll the aisles at a department store, but Amazon gives shoppers access to that resource. That means that if your service and product inspires a glowing review from customers, you can gain a significant leg up on your competition. 

6. A brand store is a great free way to showcase your products

Finally, there's a great way to show off your flagship products that many big brands don't even leverage as well as they could. Any Amazon vendor or seller who's registered with Amazon as the owner of its brand can create an Amazon brand store, a ?digital storefront? experience that's free to create and build yourself. 

Brand stores offer a click-and-drag interface that you don't need technical training to use, and allow shoppers to add items to their basket directly from the storefront. They also feature options to add video and many other great opportunities for rich content. You can direct customers to your brand store via PPC ads, social media or the blue brand link that appears next to the names of your items on their detail pages.

If your products? Amazon search results have room for improvement, you're not alone. However, it's important to address it in the right way. Focus on the core of what makes your product appealing to customers. Then, use the tools that Amazon gives its sellers to present that as the face of your product and your brand. Working with what you're given is much more effective than swimming upstream against the algorithm - and it's much more pleasant as well.
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Ronald Dod is the CMO and co-founder of Visiture. His passion is helping leading brands use data to make more effective decisions in order to drive new traffic and conversions.

Image: unsplash.com