Understanding the Impact of Search Volume on Profits
If your profit is going to PPC instead of your pocket, then you’re going to want to watch this one. Now, this problem actually begins when trying to rank a product. When you’re looking to rank a product on Amazon, this is going to involve keyword research. You’re soon going to come across a term called “search volume.” Search volume is something I see sellers focus on way too much. In fact, today I’m going to explain how search volume could actually be destroying your profits.
The Customer Journey: A Scenario
Here’s a nutshell example: Let’s say a customer recently moved house, and she’s looking to purchase an organizer that you can hook onto the back of her pantry door. So, she heads over to Amazon, and like thousands of other customers, she lazily types “pantry” and selects “Pantry organizer,” and this has a search volume of over 45,000 searches a month. But then she sees the results page.
The Search Refinement Process
So, we know what she’s looking for, but these are the products that she sees. And my question for you is: Is she going to stay here? Is she going to stay on this page? No, because the products just aren’t relevant enough. So, what she’s going to do is scroll back to the top, and she’s going to refine her search further. She’s going to click here and take a look at the auto-complete. She might even click this one, “Pantry organizer door,” or she might even type at this point, “over the door.” Also complete, luckily here, then when moving through this, she sees relevant results. She’s now looking at a good consideration set. She knows she’s in the right place, and this is where she’s going to make her purchase.
The True Value of Low Volume Keywords
The major difference here is that this term here has a search volume of 68 searches a month, although that is where the purchase is going to be made. Now the problem is that sellers generally want to rank everywhere, especially where there is high search volume, and so they target both. They run ads on both, so they’re running ads on “Pantry organizer,” a big volume keyword, but they’re soon frustrated that their product is not organically ranking there, and their terrible ad performance is eating all of their profits. So, in this lecture, I hope to help you either completely altogether avoid this problem or alleviate it.
Keyword Research Done Right
Now, when clicking the like button, I mean doing your keyword research, you’re going to see thousands of keywords for your product. For “Pantry organizer,” yeah, we have almost 10,000 keywords. But out of all of those, I’m going to show you today why only around 10 of them rarely matter, and of course, I will show you how to find them for your product.
The Three Key Questions for Keyword Optimization
Now for this one to make sense, I have to start with three quick questions. Number one: What is the single goal of doing all your keyword research, adding those keywords to your listing, and running PPC? It is to organically rank your product towards the top of page one for each of those keywords. Why? Well, as opposed to your sponsored listing, if you’re running PPC, kind of paying to be there, paying per click, your organic listing is the only one that’s going to bring you sales at full profit. Cool, so we know once we’re organically ranking there, we’re making good money.
The Formula for Ranking at the Top
The second question: How do you rank your product at the top of page one? You need two things. First, a relevant listing. This is very easy because we simply add our keywords from our keyword research to the listing. But two, you need conversion. Specifically, you need to out-convert or outsell the other competitors on that page because generally, the product in the first position organically is the one making the most sales after customers type in this keyword, the one in the second organic position making the second highest number of cells, and so on. So, we need to try and outsell them. And if you put those two together, it makes sense because Amazon can then say, “Cool, we’re showing a relevant listing, which is very likely to convert after customers type this in. That is how the rankings are ordered organically.”
Identifying the Most Valuable Keywords
The third and final question: Which keywords provide me the best chance of organically ranking my product toward the top of page one? And I’m going to answer that exact question in this lecture. Let’s begin. We’re doing this very differently, actually, as per a strategy by Sellerise. You might remember this tool from automating the requester review button a while ago. But within this dashboard, we have multiple keyword options. We’re going to choose “Keyword Hunter.” We’re going to type in a term just describing our product here. This is going to allow us to generate a whole lot of keywords from that base keyword.
The Process of Selecting High-Conversion Keywords
“Over the door Pantry organizer” is a relevant, quite high search volume term describing this, so this will be our base keyword, and we’re going to search. Now, very differently from other tools, we don’t see 10,000 keywords here. We see 172 within the semantic core. The semantic Core keywords are the keywords, the only keywords actually driving sales. That is what this is showing you, so it’s not showing you the other keywords which have almost no volume or that have no sales. There’s also average Market availability; this will make much more sense as we go through this, but it’s very important. We’re going to scroll down here, we see the 172 keywords listed here in multiple columns, and in fact, once you download this, which is the next step, you get even more data. So, we’re going to download reports.
Narrowing Down to the Most Effective Keywords
Now, I’ve just dropped this into a Google sheet, but you can see we have all of our 172 keywords in here and all of these columns. Now, we’re going to apply some filters to this. We’re going to filter out the keywords that are not relevant to us. We’re going to filter out the keywords that have a low conversion rate, and we’re going to filter out the keywords that have a low sales percentage. Now, this is very important. The sales percentage is the percentage of sales that are distributed beyond the top three listings. So, if you have a keyword where the top three listings are taking all of the sales, it’s going to be very difficult for you to rank there. But if you have a keyword where the sales are nicely distributed, it’s going to be much easier for you to rank there.
Analyzing Competitors and Refining Your List
So, we’re going to apply these filters, and we’re going to be left with a much smaller list. We’re then going to take this list, and we’re going to compare it to our competitors. We’re going to see which keywords they’re ranking for, and we’re going to remove any duplicates. This is going to leave us with a very focused list of keywords.
Finalizing Your PPC Strategy
This is the list that we’re going to use for our PPC campaigns. We’re going to prioritize these keywords because they have the highest relevance, they have the highest conversion rate, and they have the highest sales potential. This is going to be the backbone of our PPC strategy.
Conclusion: Focusing on Relevance and Conversion
So, to wrap this up, we’re focusing on relevance and conversion over search volume. By doing this, we’re going to improve our chances of ranking organically and making profitable sales.