Way to Improve Amazon Keyword Rankings.

Bradley is back and has the answers to your most frequently asked questions! Are you ready? Here he’s answering the question, “How do I improve Amazon keyword ranking?”

Short answer: There’s too many to cover in one AMA!

There are dozens of strategies for increasing keyword ranking, but we’ll briefly go over the most common ones discussed here. Those include:

• PPC
• Discounted giveaways
• CPR method using Helium 10’s Cerebro tool
• Rebate promotions
• Listing optimization

PPC is a whole leviathan to conquer on its own, but when done right, PPC increases your keyword ranking organically too. Running a successful campaign not only drives traffic and generates sales, but demonstrated conversions proves to Amazon that those keywords you’re bidding on in your campaigns are relevant to your product. Amazon recognizes that relevancy and thus increases the organic ranking for your keywords.

In other words, paid and organic sales have a symbiotic relationship. They rely on one another.

Rebate promotions are another popular strategy and for good reason. Lately, giveaways (at steep discounts up to 90%) haven’t been as effective across the board as they once were; observation suggests purchases at steep discounts no longer boost ratings as effectively (if at all), and may even be flagged by Amazon as suspicious. Bradley actually suggests in another AMA to keep your “steep” discount percentage in the 20% – 50% range to be safe.

The Cerebro Product Ranking (CPR) method is a ‘more intelligent’ version of the classic giveaway strategy, which uses Helium 10’s Cerebro tool to much more accurately forecast how many giveaway units you would need to do per day and per campaign for successfully launching a product and ranking the relevant keywords. More information on the CPR method can be found here.

However, as a newly popular alternative, you can do rebate promotions where you promote a certain percentage or dollar amount as a rebate. You promote your product and drive customers to your listing via a two-step URL to imitate an organic search and buy experience.

Sidenote: extensive information on two-step URLs is available elsewhere, but for those unfamiliar, two-step URLs have information in the URL that includes your ASIN, keywords, and other information, so that when customers click on it and purchase, Amazon thinks they’ve searched and purchased through the front page.

Anyway, the benefit to rebate promotions and these URLs is that, because purchases through these URLs imitate an organic search and buy process, Amazon will recognize the keywords they ‘searched’ as relevant to your listing, and raise those keywords’ ranking. This is currently a very effective method of raising keyword ranking, and offering rebates to your customers can be done in a number of ways – as Bradley says, just like cereal box rebates back in the day.

Finally, you can’t go wrong with good old listing optimization. You can look up dozens of articles on listing optimization (and, by the way, Freedom Ticket has a lot of updated information on best practices), but it comes down to the basic principles of including compelling copy and useful information, making an emotional connection, and ensuring relevant keywords are in your listing. Your listing copy (title, bullet points, description, and backend search terms) are all valuable real estate, so try not to waste any space.