How to Conduct Amazon Keyword Research With Helium 10’s Amazon Keyword Tools

The tactics below are inspired by the information Bradley Sutton (our Director of Training and Chief Evangelist) presented during a recent Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass. These tactics could potentially generate thousands of dollars in additional revenue for your Amazon business, so be sure to check out these tactics and try them out for yourself!

Tactic #1: Identify Keywords That Competing Products Rank For

The first tactic involves identifying your direct competitors’ products, collecting their ASINs, and running them through Cerebro (our reverse ASIN lookup tool) to see all of the keywords those products rank for. Within Cerebro, you can apply various filters (Exclude variations, Match Type = Organic, Search Volume > 100, Keyword Sales > 10, Phrases Containing ‘coffin shelf, coffin shelves’, Competing Products < 1,000, Sponsored ASINs < 100, Organic Rank between 1 and 50, etc.) to start narrowing down the field, however we recommend focusing on keyword relevance at this stage and not worrying too much about all of the other data (that can be addressed further down the line). As you come across relevant keywords, checkmark them and add them to a new list.

Tactic #2: Check Search Volumes Averages, History, and Trends

Now that you have a long list of keywords that are hyper-relevant to your listing, it’s time to start cleaning the list by focusing in on the metric that matters most, which is search volume. There’s a finite amount of space where you can incorporate keywords into your listing (whether it be the title tag, product description, back-end keywords section, etc.), so you’ll need to narrow down the list to only include keywords with the highest potential to generate sales.

What you can do is pull up the list you created, and start to hone in on 4 primary metrics (search volume averages, search volume history, search volume trends, and keyword sales). Within the ‘Search Volume’ column of Cerebro, click on the graph icon next to the Search Volume and review their search trends. Look at the trends over the last year and last couple of years to see which ones offer more stability and overall higher volume levels. Also look at whether the keyword’s search volume is trending upwards over time (by checking all time data). And finally, take a look at the keyword sales estimates to hone in on ones with the highest potential.

For ones that have seasonal spikes but didn’t make the cut, you could build out a spreadsheet with those keywords and the specific months those keywords experience spikes so that you can run Amazon PPC ads during those months.

Before we conclude this tactic, we should note that there’s no magic number you should be looking for when it comes to minimum search volume levels (whether it be 1,000, 500, or even 100 monthly searches). The key here is identifying all of the keywords that are hyper-relevant to your listing and comparing them against each other rather than comparing them to every keyword on Amazon. If you’re still in the product research phase, this could be helpful to determine whether or not it’s worth selling a specific product, but if you’ve already chosen a product and ordered inventory, you need to work with what you’ve got.

Tactic #3: Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ PPC Keyword Strategies

Within Cerebro, you can copy your competitors’ PPC keyword strategy by leveraging our various filters to hone in on what they’re doing. For instance, if you’d like to see all of the keywords that your competitor is targeting on Sponsored Ads, simply change the ‘Match Type’ to ‘Sponsored Product’. From here you can get a strong pulse on their overall keyword strategy (i.e. broad match, phrase, or exact match) and use that to inform your own strategy. If you see that their product is crushing it within Xray, and you see that they’ve really honed in on 10-20 specific keywords with an exact match type for their keywords, you could bypass all the time and energy they invested into dialing in their strategy and simply emulate it. You can also use it to see where their strategy might be missing the mark by identifying additional keywords that are hyper-relevant with strong search volume and low competition with good keyword sales.

Side Note – If you’d like to drill down further and take a look at the keywords they rank in the top 10 for, you can change the ‘Sponsored Rank’ filter to be between 1 and 10 to get a pulse on the main keywords driving traffic for them via Amazon PPC.

We also include a ‘Suggested bid’ column to let you know how much you can expect to spend per click, which you could then leverage to calculate your expected monthly PPC costs (Keyword Volume * Expected CTR * Suggested bid = Monthly PPC Costs Per Keyword) and add them all up (across all of the keywords for that product) to figure out if you need to adjust your product pricing strategy to remain profitable (while still remaining competitive in terms of price).

Last thing to note in this section is the number of Sponsored ASINs. Ideally you’d find keyword opportunities that meet all of your core criteria, but also have a low level of competition in the Sponsored Ads section of Amazon Search. You can validate this by looking at the ‘Sponsored ASINs’ column within Cerebro and Magnet to get a pulse on this. If you find a handful of good keywords with a low level of competition, that means you could likely lower your cost per bid and still rank on Page 1 of Amazon Search.

Tactic #4: Find Long-Tail Keyword Opportunities

A long-tail keyword is a keyword that generally contains 3 or more words in it. Rather than going very broad with keywords that don’t accurately describe exactly what your product is (i.e. nightstand), it’s generally recommended that you find those longer tail opportunities that will also be less competitive with higher relevance (i.e. nightstand with charging station). People that are typing very broad terms into Amazon tend to be those who are simply browsing, while others looking for something very specific tend to be those who are more interested in buying within a shorter timeframe (buyer intent). Within Magnet and Cerebro, you can adjust the word count to contain 3 or more words to start honing in on those longer tail keywords.

Beyond the ‘Word Count’ filter, you can also check the ‘Word Frequency’ box (below the filter section within Cerebro and Magnet) to see how often a specific word occurs within the list of keywords that were generated to find some common themes. From here, if you find that the keyword list is still all over the place and you want to hone in on keywords that only include a specific word (i.e. nightstand, nightstands, night stand, night stands, night table, night tables, bed table, bed tables, bedstand, bedstands, bed stand, bed stands, etc.), you can apply that filter in the ‘Phrases Containing’ section. On the contrary, if there’s specific keywords you’d like to exclude because they contain irrelevant phrases or phrases you can’t compete for (i.e. an illegal drug or another company’s brand name), you can add them into the ‘Exclude Phrases Containing’ section.

Tactic #5: Find Keyword Targets That Are Low-Hanging Fruit

The quickest and easiest hack to rank well for a specific keyword is to find keywords that your competitors don’t incorporate within their product listings’ title. Within Magnet and Cerebro, you can navigate over to the ‘Title Density’ column to quickly see the number of competitors who include that specific keyword in their own title. It’s not guaranteed, but if you’re the only one with that specific keyword in the title, there’s a very strong chance your listing will skyrocket to the top 10 results for that keyword very quickly.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t use this as the only qualifying criteria for selecting a keyword; if it passes all of the other criteria (i.e. hyper-relevant to your listing, high volume, upward trajectory of search volume growth over time, a strong number of keyword sales, etc.) but there’s 20+ competitors with that keyword in their title tag, you may still want to target it, but go into it with the expectation that it’s going to take some additional work (achieving a high sales velocity through Amazon PPC, a high number of 5 star ratings through the Amazon Vine Program, etc.) to get into the top 5-10 positions. You can also use the Cerebro Product Rank (CPR) number to further inform your strategy, which estimates the number of units you’d need to sell in order to rank for that specific keyword on Page 1 of Amazon’s search results.

Conclusion

We hope that you found these tactics useful and have begun to see the incredible value that our Magnet and Cerebro tools bring to the table! For more information on how to do Amazon keyword research like a pro, be sure to check out Bradley’s 3 part Masterclass series (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) on the Serious Sellers Podcast!