#541 – Amazon Listing Optimization Gets an Upgrade!

Ever feel like you’re playing a game of chess with the Amazon algorithm, constantly striving for that checkmate which is a perfectly optimized Amazon listing? We’re peeling back the curtain on the new secret weapon that the Listing Builder by Helium 10 has that could give you that winning edge on the Amazon battlefield. Prepare to be armed with knowledge as we take you through a live optimization of the Project X “coffin shelf” listing, dissecting the art of keyword research to uncover those high-traffic phrases that could propel your product to page one of the marketplace.

Marinate your brain in the sauce of Amazon seller strategies as we stir in the nuances of listing optimization and the significance of performance scores to outsmart your competition. The Helium 10 score may not be part of Amazon’s official playbook, but it’s a valuable benchmark we explain in detail, showing you how to leverage different types of keyword matches to boost that all-important performance score. And it doesn’t stop there; we dive deeper, sharing actionable tips on how to strategically position those keywords for maximum impact, ensuring your listing is as tantalizing to Amazon’s search algorithm as it is to potential buyers inside the online shopping platform.

In episode 541 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 00:00 – Optimizing Amazon Listings With Helium 10
• 07:11 – Keyword Analysis for Listing Optimization 
• 14:17 – Amazon Listing Optimization Ranking Score
• 22:43 – Optimizing Keywords and Phrases on Amazon
• 25:26 – Analyzing Title Density for Ranking

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, I’m going to show you how to use a brand new tool that helps you understand. If your listing is optimized for best practices for the Amazon algorithm Not just for you, but your competitors Also you’ll be able to have that visibility in seconds. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. How can you get more buyers to leave you Amazon product reviews by following up with them in a way that’s compliant with Amazon terms of service? You can use Helium 10 follow up in order to automatically send out Amazon’s request or review emails to any customers you want. Not just that, but you can specify when they get the message and even filter out people that you don’t want to get that message, such as people who have asked for refunds or maybe ones that you gave discounts to. For more information, visit h10.me/followup. You can sign up for a free account or you can sign it up for a platinum plan and get 10% off for life by using the discount code SSP10.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I’m your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that is our monthly. Ask me anything. This is something we do once a month. Actually, something we do every week for our Helium 10 elite members and our Serious Sellers club members, but once a month we open this up, where we have an ask me anything for all of the listeners out there and we also give a training session to start. And today I got something special for you guys because I’m going to be going over a brand new function inside of Helium 10 that is going to be helping your listing building. It’s one of the most asked for features that we’ve had and I’m going to give you guys a brief overview on how to use it in order to really know how you’re doing for your listing optimization. I’m going to be going a little bit more in depth into this new listing optimization tool and walking through the steps on how to use it and how it can help you really optimize your listing. So we’re going to pretend that the Helium 10 coffin shelf a brand new one that I just created is your listing. So this is all of ours. So let’s go ahead and open it up. We’re going to start this from scratch. We’re going to go add a listing and we’re going to do optimize your listing. So let’s go and optimize this one. Here we go, optimize, and if you guys don’t have a product here, you can do it, create from scratch, and then you just pull in another listing Now.

Bradley Sutton:

In the meantime, it’s important that we do some keyword research. So we’re going to actually do that right now on Amazon so you guys could follow along and do the same thing that I’m doing for this coffin shelf as if it’s your product, or you can go ahead and put your main keyword in here. So my main keyword is coffin shelf. So let’s go to the coffin shelf page. Look at all of my products are just dominating the top. I’m doing a whole bunch of experimenting. I’m spending a lot of money to do this, a lot of advertising, but you can see, here’s my sponsored brand ad. Here’s one of my little scenes. This is the one that we’re going to go over today. This is like I’m doing some launch test right now. The second spot is also mine. As you can see, for my original coffin shelf, I’ve got the a lot of organic ranking here at the top.

Bradley Sutton:

But anyways, how do we find what the main keywords are for this niche? All right, if we have not done keyword research before, well, I’m going to go ahead and run Xray. And now, the first thing I’m going to do, I’m going to have a window open over here. I’m going to do this the old school way, but let’s go into Cerebro and I’m going to put my ASIN first. Okay, so always put your ASIN first into Cerebro. All right, if you don’t have an ASIN, you got to put it like a throwaway ASIN here. That’s not one of your main competitors.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one by one, what you need to do, guys, is take the, the competitors that you think are most like your product and are competing with you for sales, meaning that you’re going to be competing for the same keywords. You want to find out where they are getting their sales from. So what I’m going to do is there’s a lot of random products on here, like bat shelves and things like that, and they they still are using keywords like coffin shelf and they’re listening. But at least I want to filter out some of the non relevant products. So I’m going to hit filters here in the Chrome extension and then, under title, keyword search, I’m going to type in coffin shelf, just to kind of filter out a little bit some of these listings. Now again, a lot of people are still have coffin shelf in there. Totally fine. All right, let’s go ahead and sort these by sales and again I’m going to be just looking for what is the most relevant.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here’s very important when you guys are doing your keyword research and you need to make sure you are not comparing yourself to people who are exactly like, or are not exactly like, your product. So this is the number one coffin shelf seller. They’re selling a coffin makeup shelf. I don’t think I’m competing for all of the same keywords. All right, maybe I would include it on my generic keyword research, but in this exercise right now I just want to have the the top similar products to mine. So here’s one Aisin. I’m going to go ahead and put this. Next one is A, a tray. That’s not, I don’t think, my competitor. Here is a bat shelf. That’s not my competitor. This is my own product here.

Bradley Sutton:

So let’s go ahead and do this coffin shelf. We’ll paste this ASIN into Cerebro. And people are asking like, how many do you want to do? I like doing at least four or five. But if you can have up to seven relevant competitors, that you can compare your keywords against, this is going to be a good thing. So right now I’ve got four in there. Now let me just get one or two more. Here’s another one. This person is only selling one unit a day, so they might not be the best competitor, but we’re going to go ahead and throw them in there, just because there’s not that many coffin shelves that are doing really well right now.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so now that I put all of those ASINs into Cerebro, I hit get keyword. But what I want to do is I want to pull my top keywords. Now. This is going to be super fast. I’m not going to go into detail here on how to find the top 100 keywords. I’m just going to throw in some random filters so I can get just some of the top keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so when I’m in Cerebro, I can hit this button, top keywords, and it’s probably going to come up with a very small list. There are only two keywords came up, so I want to widen this out. I’m going to say, hey, show me keywords that have at least 200 search volume, where there’s at least two people ranking for it and everybody’s ranks is between like I don’t know one and 150. Let’s see how many keywords show up here with this set of filters 203. Almost perfect. You know what I’m going to just narrow this down slightly. Let’s go competitor rank average between one and 110. I kind of want to have this around 150 or less. Let’s see what we have here 123 keywords. This is perfect.

Bradley Sutton:

Under normal circumstances, guys, I would go through every single one of these keywords. Hey, I got. I need to make sure these are highly relevant, et cetera, et cetera. All words are not created equal, right? The way I know which are my best keywords here are the ones that have a high competitor performance score inside of Cerebro. That’s the very, very last column, whenever you do a multi-acent search. So I know which are the most important keywords. This is very important because, again, all keywords are not created equal.

Bradley Sutton:

So now let’s go ahead and go and I’m going to put all of these keywords, I’m going to copy it to the clipboard, and now I’m going to go to listing builder and I’m going to go ahead and make my list of 100. What did I say? 123 keywords, and these are the keywords that I’m going to be bASINg my listing off of. All right, so let’s add them to the bank. I added those 123 keywords to the bank and now I go to the next and, as you can see from here. It imported my listing already from seller central, all right, so here is my complete. You know it already has my title, remember?

Bradley Sutton:

You guys said you wanted to have something that would be as if you already have a product, and we’re just checking our listing optimization compared to best practices. That’s what we’re doing here in this scenario. This is a real live product on Amazon. We just took real live keywords from real live competitors. Now here’s the thing. Before we get deep into here, this is the next step and this is something that is new. All right, this is something new on Helium 10 as of, or new for Diamond members. It’s elite members have had access to this for a while. It’s right here. The listing analysis All right, and it’s going to show me my keyword performance, rank and score.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, as you can see, there is no keyword rank right here. All right, it’s because I don’t have my competitor, so those same competitors that I put in, I need to add them here into my listing analysis, all right. So let’s go ahead and do that. I was already in Cerebro, so I’m just going to copy the ASINs directly from here into listing builder, or. They’re probably right here too. They’re probably with these ones here, but I’m just going to do it. I’m just going to do it this way, by pacing, all right. So I just pasted one ASIN. Guys, go ahead and paste all of the ASINs in there and let me know when you’re done If you’re doing it for your own ASIN. After you paste in the two, it’s not going to show up anymore, at least right now. It’s probably a little fixed, but you’ll see a plus one, meaning that you have three total ASINs that you have done, all right. So now I have six ASINs and I’m going to hit Add Selected Competitors.

Bradley Sutton:

Now this is what’s cool. What Helium 10 is doing kind of like on the fly is now. It is kind of like analyzing all of these keywords and let’s go to the top here and telling me what, how I have it optimized in my listing. First of all, now, I didn’t put my generic keywords. I didn’t import those yet, so we’re just going to forget about that for right now. It’s totally fine. If this was a real listing, you’d want to also import your generic keywords, which is also called search terms before into Listing Builder. But I’m going to always have mine sorted by CPS.

Bradley Sutton:

That is our competitor performance score. The score is based on if most of the top competitors that I put are all ranking for these keywords. That’s where the competitor performance score is going to show. So it says here what is the highest score Is Coffin shelf, and that’s correct, because that is a keyword that is the most important keyword for the niche. So in this sense, the keyword performance score definitely worked. It’s not always going to show the exact perfect keywords, but it’s going to show most of them.

Bradley Sutton:

And right here, sv. What does that stand for? What do you guys think? Search volume Right, so this is the search volume of my keywords. Remember, I have 123 keywords Now up here. This is pretty, pretty cool. This is brand new, even as of today.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s showing me all of the base keywords, or root keywords that make up these phrases. So, for example, coffin shelf is made up of coffin and it’s made up of shelf, but at the same time look at this, guys there are a lot of keyword phrases that have multiple word roots, like, for example here coffin shelf, large, large Coffin shelf, coffin shelf for wall. What is a common root that is in all of these phrases? Coffin shelf. Coffin shelf itself is a phrase or a root phrase. Now, by default, it just shows me the single one word root. So I know that, hey, out of all the keywords that I said are the most important keywords for this niche, for example, coffin is in five of them. Spooky or coffin I’m using in five different keywords here. Spooky I’m using three times already. Now, if I want to know what are the most common two word roots, there’s that Coffin shelf when I mentioned Coffin makeup, gothic wall coffin shaped coffin bookshelf, and then I even have three word roots. There’s only two of them that show up multiple times. So this is what’s going to let me know Am I indexable for all of the keywords here?

Bradley Sutton:

And the answer is just looking at this, guys, what do you think? Yes or no? Am I potentially searchable for every single one of these 123 phrases? Of course I could go in here and I could run it through another Helium 10 tool index checker and I could just manually search it in Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

But just looking at what I’m looking at right now, I already know that I am not indexed for every single phrase. How do I know that? Look how many words. I don’t even have the word in my listing and it’s a word that makes up one of those 123 phrases, for example, room, I don’t have room in my listing. Coffins plural. I don’t have glass, I don’t know what keyword that was part of, but whatever it is, I don’t have it. Book, I don’t have. Spider, I don’t have. So any of these phrases. Guys, that has one of these words. What does it mean? Because I don’t have it in my listing? Maybe I have all the other keywords in that phrase, but if I don’t have one of these words, odds are I am not going to be indexed, I am not going to be searchable for that keyword phrase. So this is. I just did a couple clicks and I’m already getting this level of insight just because of how Listing Builder works.

Bradley Sutton:

Now let’s go ahead and scroll down here and look back at the ranking. Here is my competitor performance score 296,000. Now, what this is based off of, guys, is based off of a long you know this score here is based off of a long study I did about how listing optimization works for the Amazon algorithm and how slight changes and slight different forms of phrases and how many times you have a phrase and how many times a certain part of a keyword. I did a study for months. I don’t remember 50, 60 listings I launched during this time and was just playing with it nonstop, every day, trying to figure out how Amazon viewed different things and based on that, our data scientists at Healy and Ten made a score that can kind of give you an idea on are you really optimized for best practices? Now, this does not mean that Amazon is using the Healy and Ten score in order to say are you relevant for a keyword or not? No, and if you get the highest score, is Bradley Sutton here guaranteeing that you are going to rank higher than your comparison? No, there’s so much more. Obviously, that goes into ranking like advertising, and you know how is your image looking, things like that. But if all things are equal, this is what’s going to help you give you the best chance to make sure that your listing is optimized to best practices for the Amazon algorithm.

Bradley Sutton:

So what you see here on the left is my old listing quality score. That’s always what’s been on Healy and Ten and listing builder for a while, but now I’ve got my keyword performance score. So if I click on that, I can see where are my, where’s my score coming from, and it goes by where it is in the listing. That has to do with the score. Like coffin shelf is in my title, that’s where it’s giving me a huge amount of score, because it’s in my title.

Bradley Sutton:

If the first time I had coffin shelf in my listing was in the description, which is not even showing up here, I need to go ahead and put my description here. Hold on, let me go ahead and do that. Who can tell me why my description didn’t input into here? It’s because I have A plus content, which is what I should have in the first place. But let me go ahead and manually input my description here, because I am indexable for a lot of what is in my description. So it’s important that the listing builder score is keeping that in mind. So if you have a plus content, you’re like how do I copy my description over? Just pull it in from the back end of your listing, just like I did right here. Right, go into edit listing and then I copy my description and let’s go ahead and paste it into description. There we go.

Bradley Sutton:

Now you’ll notice, once I did that, look at my score my score went up to 348,000, because now, all of a sudden, it realizes I had a lot more keywords in my listing than I did before. Right, look at that. I went from like six to first. But anyways, let’s, let’s break down what is going into the score. Alright, it’s based off the title, bullet points and description and then, if I have it, across different fields. Now here’s what’s cool, guys we actually break it down for this score about how many match types I have. What is exact match? All right, exact match means the keyword is coffin shelf and the exact match that I have in my listing is coffin shelf. Alright, so this, this gives me the absolute highest possible score. The next closest is if it’s a plural or singular. For example, if it’s coffin shelf, maybe I’ve got coffin shelves, maybe I’ve got coffins shelf, right. If the keyword is bat decor, maybe a plural match would be bats decor. If the keyword is coffin shelves, that means it’s coffin shelf is a potential plural slash singular master. Alright, so that’s going to give me the second highest points here.

Bradley Sutton:

As far as the form of how I use the keyword, the third most is what we call a phrase match within a single field. We just call it for short phrase match, but it basically the long version of this is phrase match, single field. That means if the keyword is three words or more, for example Gothic coffin shelf, and in my title I have a title that says Gothic decor best coffin shelf. You see it’s not in exact form but one keyword is in one part of the listing and then coffin shelf is in one part of the field but coffin shelf is in the rest of the field but it’s split up. That is what gets you points as well, and that’s what this one is. The next one is called field broad match.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so this is hey, gothic coffin shelf is all in one bullet point or section of bullet points, or it’s in the description or it’s in the title, but it’s all spread out all over the place, like one title could be Gothic decor, spooky coffin hanging shelf. Did you guys notice that? Gothic coffin shelf? All of those keywords are in there, but they’re all spread out in any order. That is still going to get you some credit, because it’s what can help you get index for a keyword, but not as much credit as if I, for example, had Gothic coffin shelf in phrase form. And the lastly is listing broad match. That means that I just have the components of any keyword phrase somewhere in my listing.

Bradley Sutton:

So again on this, this scenario, if the keyword is Gothic, coffin shelf, if I’ve got Gothic in the title, coffin in the bullet points, shelf in the description. Well, now all of a sudden, uh, that I have all keywords in my listing but it’s all over the place. So it’s still going to get me points, but just not that many. So basically, this score is now judging me on that and it is going in and judging my competitors that I had put in. So if I hit keyword performance rank, I could see why I am first. All right, I have 348,000 points over here on this one and everybody else is a little bit less.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, this is a little bit uh. I would have to do this a little bit more uh in order to really get the full score. Because what if somebody else has A plus content? We’re probably not. I don’t think we’re pulling into the description. Maybe we are still pulling in the description from the back end. Um, yeah, we probably are actually pulling in the description if they have it available. But if they deleted the description, yeah, their score is not going to be that great. If they deleted the description, all they have is the A plus content here. But you can see where I stack up. So this is kind of like how I made this listing, which I just made this listing a couple of weeks ago, using this exact matter. I was trying to open up where I did it, but somebody messed up my listing, so shame on you whoever did that. But anyways, um, this is how you can kind of see how your listing stacks up. And, again, all keywords are not created equal, so you really need to be mindful of this competitor performance score or, because that is what’s going to tell you what are the important keywords to use. All right, now let’s go ahead and, uh, there’s also some new features coming to this. I’m going to show you guys in a couple of weeks, but in the meantime, any questions about listing optimization in general or specifically about this tool or any other tool in Helium 10, go ahead and throw into the comment.

Bradley Sutton:

Willow says do you have training for product research from scratch? Yes, we do. We have a couple webinars that we’ve done and also on our YouTube channel. If you’re watching this on YouTube, willow, just just type. Once you get to our channel, page type in product research. And we actually just did a product research for 2024, uh, one last, last month. All right, I think that episode actually dropped just last week on our YouTube channel, so make sure to check that one out.

Bradley Sutton:

Willow Uh, digital Mind says what is more important to index individual keywords or phrases? It depends. All right, if there is an individual keyword that has a lot of search volume and is super, super relevant to all of the products in that they’re getting sales from it. Yes, that is going to be super important. But usually it’s the two, three and four word phrases that are going to have the highest competitor performance score that you’re trying to optimize or listening for. So I would focus on having the full phrase. Now, if your question is I have a full phrase and what’s important to to to optimize for the phrase or the individual keywords? 1 billion percent, it’s the phrase in phrase form. If it’s one of your most important keywords, some of your keywords that have a lot like a zero score or a very low competitor performance score, you still want to be indexed and searchable for it. But it’s not as important that you get those in phrase form. You can’t put every single phrase that you’ve ever found in your keyword research in phrase form in your listing. It’s just not going to work, right. You don’t have enough room in a listing, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next question here Moto says do the most important keywords go into the product title or does it matter where in the listing it is in order to be indexed? Very good question. So in order to be indexed, theoretically, if you just get it in your listing you’ll be indexed, but in actuality a lot of times that just doesn’t work, especially if Amazon doesn’t think you’re relevant. Now what is the most front end part of a listing that Amazon will be like hey, yeah, we got to index you for this keyword. It’s the title. That is the most important part Now, the most because of that and also because of that’s what’s going to affect the you know, ranking down the road on this keyword. You want to make sure your best keywords are in the title. Right, very important that your best keywords are in your title and that’s going to help you for ranking. But bullet points a lot of times will get you indexed as well, as will the description. You know problem 50% of the time If you have a keyword only in the description, you still should get indexed for it.

Bradley Sutton:

Digital Mind says you set on the previous webinar to fill out the special features for better indexing Any recommendation of which content should go here. This is basically. It’s not for better indexing, it’s to be indexed. If you can’t index for a keyword, all right. So if you have a keyword three times in your listing and according to a healing tent index checker you’re still not indexed, then yes, I would go ahead at that moment and put it in special features and see if that gets me indexed for it. But it’s not necessarily quote unquote better indexing, it’s just it’s when all other indexing tries have failed.

Bradley Sutton:

Janak says should you avoid keywords with low title density and high competing products or high CPR? No, I look at that just briefly to give me an idea about what is going to help me rank or what’s going to be easier to rank. So that’s what title density. For those who don’t know, title density is a field that we have in, like Cerebro and others. Let’s go ahead and look up on my screen here some sample title densities. All right. So in Cerebro you’ll see a column title that should that’ll have title density, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

For example, here is one coffin shelf that has a title density of 29. Why does it have a title density of 29? It means that the last time Helium 10 check, not counting the sponsored ads, there were 29 out of the 50 listings that all had the keyword coffin shelf in the listing title in the listing title. Right Now here’s another keyword coffin shelves. Plural has a title density of one. That means if I actually search coffin shelves, let’s actually do that right now on Amazon, this number will probably be different because you know what it comes on page one is different throughout the day and depending on what browsing scenario I’m using.

Bradley Sutton:

But let’s just type, let’s just take a look here coffin shelves. I’m going to type in here and any one yeah, here’s one listing that has it right there. This one is a sponsor. That that’s me who has it. And yeah, yeah, well, the title density still works. There’s only one listing in this whole page that has the keyword coffin shelves and this is actually.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, my goodness, guys, this is super cool. Somebody set me up for something really cool here. All right, why is this so cool? Why is title density important? It will tell me that without even trying, sometimes I can get keywords on the very top of the page. Now, I actually thought this was one of my new products. It’s not. My new products doesn’t have coffin shelves in it. But look at this, I don’t really advertise too much. Before this week this keyword. I just threw it into one of my campaigns and now you can see it’s at the top.

Bradley Sutton:

But because I am the only one who has coffin shelves in phrase form in my title, look where I am ranking organically I am on the very top line of search results. So this is why I like looking at the title density is because it gives me an indication about how easy or how difficult it might be for me to get to page one. Now here is another. Let me see if I can find another one that has huge title density. Let’s look at coffin shelf 29, right? So here I am on this coffin shelf search results. It doesn’t mean that, oh, this is a bad keyword. No, this is my most important keyword out of everything coffin shelf right. Let’s go ahead and type in coffin shelf and now look at this. Do you see how every single person, almost on page one, has coffin shelf in phrase form? So it just means that it’s going to be a little bit harder. I can’t just like put coffin shelf in my title and expect that I’m gonna rank on page one right away. That’s what that means as far as high competing products. That doesn’t concern me too much. It just tells me how many people are indexed for that keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

Nitin says can I use Helium 10 to earn side income by providing services to sellers? Oh, my goodness, that’s thousands of people. Are you literally doing that? That was me, guys. Remember? I used to be a consultant for Amazon sellers before I worked at Helium 10. I wasn’t a seller and I was using Helium 10 to make money. Absolutely. If you’re interested in doing that, you probably should get certified by Helium 10, at academy.helium10.com. You can take the certification course and then show your potential clients hey, I’m Helium 10 certified. A lot of Amazon companies like say hey, we need Helium 10 certified people to work on our accounts, so that’s the one way you can show them. All right, that’s it for the question. So thank you guys very much. I hope this was beneficial to you. Thank you for tuning in.

Bradley Sutton:

Don’t forget Helium 10 Elite. Our Elite members and serious sellers club members get this ask me anything with special training every single week, all right. So another great reason to be part of the Helium 10 Elite program. It’s open right now for the first time in years or years, a year and a half. h10.me/elite can get you into that training you can have. You can book one on one calls with me h10.me/elite, but otherwise anybody we open up this. Ask me anything once a month to, usually at the end of the month. So I’ll see you guys who aren’t elite members back here with your questions at the end of next month. Thank you guys, very much for tuning in and have a great rest of your day. Bye, bye now. I’ll see you guys next week.

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