Strategies to Rank Products on Amazon

Amazon is amazing in its ability to connect retailers to an enormous world of consumers. However, it has also become a very crowded marketplace. These days, you need to employ shrewd strategies to make your products stand out on Amazon. To help you up your selling game, we asked industry experts to share their tried-and-true strategies for ranking in the mother of all marketplaces. Here’s what they had to say:

Andrew Buck

Andrew Buck handles content and customer support for LandingCube, a company focused on building software (landing pages and Messenger bots) that helps Amazon sellers succeed with off-Amazon marketing.

External traffic is an under-utilized way to rank products higher on Amazon. Sales velocity is a big factor in Amazon’s ranking algorithm, so anything you can do to increase this is a win for your rankings.

It’s getting harder to sell organically on Amazon because of the level of competition. Driving your own traffic from sources like Facebook Ads, Google Ads, or your own site, gives you an avenue to showcase your products without the competition from Amazon PPC ads.

As a plus, if you filter this traffic by sending it to a landing page first, you’ll end up with a really high conversion rate (on Amazon) from the customers you get on external traffic channels. You send people to a landing page that shows off your product, and people decide then and there whether they want to buy.

Conversion rate, along with sales velocity, is huge in Amazon’s ranking process. Increasing these two metrics is almost always going to be a big plus for your rankings.

Ray Sylvester

Ray Sylvester is a writer, editor, and content strategist with Buy Box Experts. He’s also a former market researcher and Amazon 3P account manager.

When it comes to ranking your products on Amazon, just as important as knowing what to do is knowing what not to do. It’s easy for sellers to become overwhelmed trying to get their products noticed on the world’s largest marketplace. And that can be compounded when they try to “game” or “hack” Amazon’s search ranking algorithm—the system that determines where a product appears in search results for a given keyword.

This algorithm is a common source of confusion and concern among sellers. Although most sellers are aware of the various factors that influence a product’s search ranking, exactly how the algorithm weights those factors is less clear. Amazon’s algorithm is largely a black box—and you can tie yourself up in knots trying to game it.

Not too long ago, sellers could see some benefit by gaming the system. In recent years, however, Amazon has made it harder to do things like “keyword stuff” product titles or run flash pay-per-click (PPC) ad campaigns to pump up sales and improve a product’s ranking.

With these loopholes closed or narrowed, the pathway to success for sellers no longer lies in “brute force” methods of ranking optimization.

Even the placement of keywords in specific fields may not be as important today as optimizing listings for conversion. For instance, Amazon doesn’t appear to be currently indexing A+ and Enhanced Brand Content. That means your focus should be on creating enhanced content that captures the customer’s attention—even if it doesn’t necessarily have all the “right” keywords.

When it comes to Amazon’s search algorithm and how it affects product search rankings, here’s what to do—and not to do:

• Don’t run flash PPC campaigns to pump up sales for products that may have questionable conversion rates. Instead, use tools like Sponsored Products to run regular ad campaigns that drive steady growth of products with already healthy click-through and conversion rates.
• Don’t overreact to reports of sweeping “changes” to Amazon’s search ranking algorithm. Amazon is a huge platform with many, many products, and your mileage will almost certainly vary from that of other sellers.
• Focus on what you can control: creating well-written, information-rich, visually inspiring content for your listings that drives customer conversions.

Remember: listing quality and conversion optimization are key. For a deeper dive, read our article on best practices for search ranking optimization on Amazon.

Jonathan Goldman

Jonathan Goldman is the president and cofounder of Quantum Networks, a top 200 Seller on Amazon and a brand development agency representing over 100 brands on Amazon. Quantum Networks creates launch and growth strategies tailored to specific brands, keeping their image and message in mind—ultimately leading to increased sales.

There are several strategies I recommend on how to rank products on Amazon that will not only produce high conversion rates, but direct highly relevant traffic to your product page.

1. Fill every possible image slot on the product page because your images are what will sell the product. Since more than 50 percent of consumer shopping on Amazon is done through a mobile device, it’s crucial to help consumers learn about products through your images. It’s also beneficial to include a video on the product page that will enhance the product and provide consumers with an alternate way of viewing the description.
2. Use the correct keywords in the title and use descriptive bullet points in the description that accurately describe the product.
3. Make sure you not only have enhanced brand content on the product page, but that the product you’re selling is in excellent condition and priced according to market value.
4. Ensure that there are customer reviews on the product page and that they are positive. As a brand or company, you must respond to all customer reviews, whether positive or negative, and respond to customer questions on the product pages.
5. Finally, it’s crucial to have a PPC advertising plan so that ads are relevant and converting at a high level.

This is a crowdsourced article. Contributors are not necessarily affiliated with this website and their statements do not necessarily reflect the opinion of this website, other people, businesses, or other contributors.