Introduction to PPC and Product Ranking on Amazon
If your profit is going to PPC instead of your pocket, then you need to read this article. 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.
The Misleading Nature of Search Volume
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.
A Customer’s Search Journey Example
Here’s a nutshell example. Let’s say a customer recently moved house and she’s looking to purchase an organizer that she 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 this results page.
The Problem with High Search Volume Keywords
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.
The Importance of Targeted Keywords
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, auto-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 Reality of Keyword Targeting and PPC
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.
The Consequences of Poor Keyword Choices
So they’re running ads on Pantry Organizer, 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.
How to Avoid or Alleviate the Problem
So in this video, I hope to help you either completely altogether avoid this problem or alleviate it. 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 here, 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 really matter.
Identifying the Right Keywords
And of course, I will show you how to find them for your product. 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?
The Goal of Keyword Research and 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, paying to be there, paying per click, your organic listing is the only one that’s going to bring you sales at full profit.
The Mechanics of Ranking and Conversion
Cool. So we know once we’re organically ranking there, we’re making good money. 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.
The Strategy for Outranking Competitors
But two, you need conversion. Specifically, you need to outconvert 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 second organic position making the second highest number of sales here and so on.
Selecting Keywords with the Best Ranking Potential
We need to try and outsell them. 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.
The Final Question: Which Keywords to Choose?
The third and final question, which keywords provide me the best chance of organically ranking my product toward the top of page one? I’m going to answer that exact question in this video. Let’s begin.
Using Sellerise for Keyword Optimization
We’re doing this very differently actually as per a strategy by Sellerise. You might remember this tool from automating the request or review button a while ago. But within this dashboard, we have multiple keyword options. We’re going to choose keyword hunter.
The Process of Keyword Hunting
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. 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.
Understanding Semantic Core Keywords
Now very differently to 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.
Analyzing Market Availability and Sales Data
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 is very important.
Downloading and Filtering Keywords for Conversion
We’re going to scroll down here. We see the 172 keywords listed here, 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.
The Importance of High Conversion Rates
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 the most important we are focusing on today. First of all, conversion. Of course, we want keywords that convert and bring sales. Otherwise, there’s no point spending on them or trying to rank on them.
Filtering Keywords Based on Conversion and Sales
So conversion over the last 30 days, you can see this for each keyword. And if you’re unaware, that just means if 100 people click onto the listing and 10 of them actually buy, that would be a 10% conversion rate. And we’re actually going to look for keywords with a conversion rate over 15% here.
Narrowing Down the Keyword List
So we’re going to filter this. We’re going to go to Data, Create a filter, and we’re going to filter by conversion rate. We want greater than or equal to 15%. And you can see this has now narrowed down our list significantly.
Selecting Keywords with Sufficient Sales Volume
We also want to look at sales. We want to make sure that these keywords are actually driving sales. So we’re going to look for keywords with more than 100 sales over the last 30 days.
Finalizing the Keyword Selection
So we’re going to filter by sales. We want greater than or equal to 100. And this is going to narrow down our list even further. And you can see we’re left with just 10 keywords here.
Conclusion: The Power of Focused Keyword Targeting
Now, these are the keywords that you want to focus on. These are the keywords that are going to drive sales. These are the keywords that are going to make you money. And these are the keywords that you’re going to be able to rank for organically and make full profit on those sales.