The Secrets of Amazon SEO

Dave Chesson

Jan 12, 20165 min read
Secrets of Amazon SEO

There is no denying that Amazon is a lucrative market.

That said, the ever-increasing amount of competition and the opening of new markets through Fulfillment By Amazon (FBA) and Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), it’s becoming very crowded.

Before such competition existed, it was relatively easy to get your products ranked extremely well by Amazon’s A9 algorithm. All you needed was some keyword research, good reviews, strategic pricing and structured descriptions and you’d have a fair chance of making #1 in the Amazon results.

However, thanks to the new services that allow just about anyone to create a book or sell a product, the number of competitive products that depend on Amazon’s traffic has increased exponentially over the years.

Although Amazon’s amount of traffic has risen, it is not keeping up with the increased amount of competitors. It’s for this reason that those who want to succeed, need to start thinking ‘outside of the Amazon box.’

Imagine, instead of just depending on Amazon’s traffic, you could build your own stream of potential buyers that would run straight from Google and right onto your own Amazon sales page. And let’s not forget that increased traffic helps to improve your sales conversion rate, which subsequently, is the most important factor to ranking better with A9.

However, ranking your Amazon sales page on Google isn’t as straightforward as you would think. Therefore, to effectively mount an SEO campaign, we’ll look at the following:

  • Quick overview of Amazon on-page optimization
  • Amazon link anatomy and which link to point to
  • Easy methods to build your off page SEO

On Page Amazon SEO

Like Google SEO, if your on-page optimization isn’t strong, you’ll never rank well. You can get a complete rundown on all steps to improving your Amazon on-page SEO here.

But for brevity, ensure you have the following optimized:

  • Title
  • Sub-title
  • Summary/Product Description
  • Picture meta tags
  • Amazon’s own Keyword selection in the dashboard
  • Editor’s notes
  • Questions and Answers
  • Reviews

It’s important to note that some of the above factors exist for certain product and not others.

There are lots of ways to find your Amazon product page or book page. However, it turns out that only one will help you with SEO.

For this article, we’ll use the book “ Content Warfare” by Ryan Hanley.

If you were to do an Amazon Search using the search phrase “Content Warfare”, you’d get something like this:

Amazon Search

However, as you can tell, this link is wrought with extra Amazon URL jargon such as page ranking, POSIX time, keywords are more. However, you need to think of these extra aspects as sub-sub-urls, and thus, not the place you want to send the external link juice to.

Therefore, if you want to build off-page SEO for your product page, then you need to use the Google friendly version of this product link, known as the Bare Product URL.

In the example above, this would be:

Amazon Search

The bare product URL goes from the Amazon.com and ends with the 10-digit Amazon Standard Identification Number (ASIN) for that particular product.

Don’t believe me? Let’s look at what link Google uses for this below:

Google Link

So, to use any other link to build off-page SEO would be a waste.

Surprisingly, getting legitimate links to point to your product is very easy. There are many product review sites that would be more than happy to receive your product free, check it out, and leave a review.

However, the hard part is getting someone to use the Amazon bare URL link that we talked about. Most bloggers will use their Amazon Associate links so that they can get commission off of anyone who clicks on it and buys anything within 24 hours.

Therefore, if you do work with someone to review your product or book, you should establish from the beginning that they will use the correct link at least once in their article.

If finding someone to review your product proves difficult or is not something you’re interested in doing, then perhaps doing a backlink check will shed some light on where your competitors are getting their link juice.

Just like you would with a competitor’s website, you can place a competing product’s Bare Amazon Link in a backlink checker and find opportunities.

Using the same book as above, I found that Ryan Hanley’s Content Warfare has 22 Referring IPs and 264 External Backlinks from some pretty heavy hitters like:

  • com (his own site)
  • com
  • com
  • Contently.com
  • And more.

(You can use SEMrush to discover these backlinks.)

Furthermore, after some investigating, it has become evident that Ryan was on many podcasts promoting his book and earned some stellar links that way as well – another brilliant idea for some good backlinks.

Where Content Warfare Failed

In the case above, the author of "Content Warfare" did an excellent job of receiving some powerful links. However, the author failed to think of his Amazon sales page as a webpage and instead of targeting specific keywords, using the tactics above, or doing Amazon on-page optimization tactics, he failed to capitalize on the potential traffic he could have earned for things like “Content Marketing” or “Internet Marketing.”

Furthermore, because he isn’t sending direct traffic to his book page, Amazon has no real reason to believe that his book should be ranking very high for terms like “Content Marketing” and has thus fallen off of front-page rankings and hurting his book’s potential sales.

Conclusion

Stop depending on just Amazon’s traffic to sell your product. As FBA and self-publishers grow at alarming rates, the competition increases significantly as well.

It’s for this reason, I don’t want my products to depend solely on Amazon’s traffic or else I will be like all the others and have no competitive advantage. Instead, using the tactics above, I’m able to tap Google’s traffic and help get my products out in front of more people. Now THAT’s a competitive advantage!

Plus, don’t forget that the higher the sales conversion rate, the higher your Amazon rankings. And how do you get higher conversions? By getting your own targeted traffic to point straight to your page and not a competitor’s.

So, take a couple of minutes and start thinking of your Amazon sales page as more of a post and give it the same treatment you would to your own website. The only difference is that your Amazon sales page has a DA of 97 of which I am sure your own website does not have.

Dave Chesson is an Amazon algorithm nut, but specifically stays in the Kindle self-publishing world where he runs the website, Kindlepreneur. Find out more ways to increase your Amazon sales, like through email service selection.

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Dave Chesson is a Amazon algorithm nut, but specifically stays in the Kindle self-publishing world where he runs the website, Kindlepreneur.com. If you would like to know more about Amazon SEO rankings and SERP tactics, you can download his free ebook.