Are you ready for a shocking fact?
THREE TIMES as many buyers search for products to buy on Amazon, rather than Google.
Think about it…
Where do you go when you need to know if a product is worth buying?
What about when you want the best deal on anything from a book to a refrigerator?
Amazon…
Yet, you probably don’t pay attention to it’s search engine – much less consider it as a marketing channel worth optimizing for. Even most ‘Amazon Marketers’ are still spending their days trying to optimize their Amazon Listings for Google…
But, what if you knew how to rank in Amazon instead?
You’d have THREE TIMES more ready-to-buy customers than you’d EVER get in Google – and you’d do it in a fraction of the time!
You’re about to read The Ultimate Guide to Ranking Your Products on Amazon…
But before we get into the meat of the matter, here are some basics you should know…
Introducing A9: Amazon’s Product Search Algorithm
A9 is the name of Amazon’s product search algorithm. Since this is a guide about ranking products in Amazon, it makes sense to start at the source. So, this is A9’s official statement for how they calculate search results.
[quote name=”Amazon”]Our work starts long before a customer types a query. We’ve been analyzing data, observing past traffic patterns, and indexing the text describing every product in our catalog before the customer has even decided to search.[/quote]
As we can see here, much of the work is done before the customer even touches the keyboard. Once the customer actually hits “Enter” to perform a search, the A9 algorithm delivers results through a two-step process:
[quote name=”Amazon”]Once we determine which items are good matches to the customer’s query, our ranking algorithms score them to present the most relevant results to the user.[/quote]
It’s a pretty simple process at its core:
First, they pull the relevant results from their massive “catalog” of product listings.
Then, they sort those results into an order that is “most relevant” to the user.
Now, some of you SEOs out there might be thinking, “Wait a second… Isn’t relevancy Google’s turf? I thought Amazon only cared about conversions! What’s all this focus on relevance doing here?”
The answer is simple: Relevance doesn’t mean the same thing to Amazon that it does to Google. Read this statement from A9 carefully to see if you can catch the difference:
[quote name=”Amazon”]One of A9’s tenets is that relevance is in the eye of the customer and we strive to get the best results for our users. […] We continuously evaluate [our algorithms] using human judgments, programmatic analysis, key business metrics and performance metrics.[/quote]
See that?
Google says, “What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”
Amazon says, “What products is the searcher most likely to buy?”
The difference between those two questions is the difference between how Amazon measures relevancy compared to Google.
On the whole, ranking in Amazon is more straightforward than Google because you’re essentially cutting the work in half. This is because there’s no such thing as off-page SEO for Amazon; they only use internal factors to determine how a product ranks. Backlinks, social media, domain authority… These are all things you don’t need to worry about on Amazon.
That being said, there are a few simple rules you must always remember about Amazon. These 3 rules are critically important to making the most of this guide, so make sure you read them twice:
Amazon’s top goal in everything they do is always maximize Revenue Per Customer (RPC)
Amazon tracks every action that a customer takes on Amazon, right down to where their mouse hovers on the page
The A9 algorithm exists to connect the data tracked in #2 to the goal stated in #1
So far, so good?
Core Pillars Of The A9 Algorithm
From A9’s website and from the information that Amazon makes available to us through their Seller Central (login required), we can group Amazon’s ranking factors into three equally important categories:
Conversion Rate* – These are factors that Amazon has found have a statistically relevant effect on conversion rates. Examples of conversion rate factors include customer reviews, quality of images and pricing.
Relevancy – Remember the first step in the A9 algorithm? They gather the results, and then they decide how to list them. Relevancy factors tell A9 when to consider your product page for a given search term. Relevancy factors include your title and product description.
Customer Satisfaction & Retention – How do you make the most money from a single customer? Make them so happy that they keep coming back. Amazon knows that the secret to max RPC lies in customer retention. It’s a lot harder to get someone to spend $100 once than $10 ten times. Customer Retention factors include seller feedback and Order Defect Rate.
*Note that Amazon uses both predicted and real conversion rates for product rankings. For example, if your product is priced higher than other similar products, Amazon will predict a lower conversion rate for your listing and use that rate until real data corrects it.
Okay! We’re finally ready to start talking about how to rank product listings in Amazon. What you’ll find below are 25 Amazon ranking factors that either Amazon themselves or independent marketers have confirmed the A9 algorithm to use.
Top 25 Amazon Ranking Factors
Amazon isn’t like Google where they go to great lengths to hide the factors that they use in their algorithm. Inside Amazon’s Seller Central, they’ll blatantly tell you several of their top ranking factors. You can also visit the official Amazon Seller Support Blog for some great insights. And here’s the UK Seller Support Blog if you’re interested.
Conversion Rate Factors
SALES RANK
After just a couple searches on Amazon, it should be pretty obvious that number of sales compared to other similar products – otherwise known as Sales Rank – is one of the most important rankings factors.
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