Optimizing Your Amazon Product Pages

Part 1 of 4 – This is the first part of a four-step guide on how to optimize your product pages on Amazon. In this segment, I will cover what elements need optimization on your product pages.

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Amazon is a massive marketplace with vast opportunities, but also plenty of competition. To capture your share of the market and outperform competitors, you'll need to optimize your product pages on Amazon. But exactly what should you focus on? SEO? Images? Text? Which elements should be optimized, and how? Let’s break it down.

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1. What Needs to Be Optimized?

Amazon product pages can essentially be optimized for two different things, and both are crucial. You can't just focus on one aspect and consider your job done, as the final result heavily depends on the combination of these two elements. The two areas you need to optimize for are:

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Amazon SEO: As I’ve mentioned many times before, SEO is an essential part of selling on Amazon. Search engine optimization helps increase the total number of views your products receive. The better your SEO, the more customers can find your products, making SEO a vital element.

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Conversion: Even if you have great SEO and your products appear more often in search results, that’s not the end of the story. Conversion is what determines how many customers who see your product actually buy it. The higher the conversion rate, the greater the sales. Plus, good conversion rates further boost your SEO.

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The Combination of SEO & Conversion

Both Amazon SEO and conversion are essential, and it’s the combination of the two that becomes truly powerful. Total sales are calculated by multiplying the number of views by the conversion rate. The number of views represents how many customers have seen your product, while conversion is the percentage of those customers who also purchase it.

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‍Number of views × Conversion rate = Number of products sold

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For example, if 1 million customers see your product and 1% choose to buy it, the total number of products sold would be ten thousand.

1,000,000 × 1% = 10,000

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How Do You Double Your Sales?

It can be very challenging to significantly improve just one of these factors. Of course, it depends on how well you’ve already optimized your product. But let’s continue using the mathematical example above. Let’s also assume that these figures are for a product you’ve been selling for a while and have tried to optimize both for SEO and conversion. Your goal is to double sales—how do you do it? You could either:

1. Optimize SEO to double the number of views from 1 million to 2 million. This is a 100% increase in views and will also generate an equivalent increase in sales (assuming conversion remains the same).
2. Optimize conversion to double it from 1% to 2%. This too is a 100% increase. Conversion increases by 100%, leading to an equivalent increase in sales (assuming SEO remains the same).
3. Optimize both areas to achieve a combined effect that doubles sales.

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But which of these options is best? And why?

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One Area or Both?

What do you think is easier? The last option, of course. Why? It’s really just simple math. Doubling the number of views or conversion rate is incredibly difficult. Making such large improvements for an already established product is not something that happens overnight. However, improving both areas slightly is much easier. Intuitively, you might think that optimizing both areas requires a 50% increase in each to achieve a total doubling. And it is indeed easier to increase two areas by 50% each than to increase one by 100%. But it turns out that you don’t even need to increase both areas by 50% to achieve the desired effect. To double the total result, it’s enough for both areas to increase by 41%.

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1.41 million × 1.41% = 20,000 products sold

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The 80/20 Rule

This is a perfect time to mention the 80/20 rule, also known as the Pareto Principle. The 80/20 rule suggests that 20% of your effort will yield 80% of the results. This means you could put 20% of your effort into SEO and achieve an 80% increase there, and 20% effort into conversion and achieve an 80% increase there. This approach is more effective than putting 100% of your effort into one area to achieve a 100% increase.

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If the 80/20 rule were to hold exactly, it would result in an even better outcome than doubling your sales. It would mean that 40% effort (20% on each area) would yield over 200% in total increase. This is because two 80% increases together would give a total result of 224%. That’s instead of putting all your energy into one area and achieving a 100% increase. Of course, the 80/20 rule is not exact but rather a guideline you should keep in mind when working both on and off Amazon. But even though it’s not an exact rule, it often closely aligns with reality.

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2. How to Optimize SEO & Conversion

SEO optimization is primarily done by analyzing and implementing the keywords customers use to search for products like yours. This way, Amazon associates your product page with the keywords you’ve included. You can find more information about Amazon’s search engine and keyword optimization here. SEO optimization also ties into your overall strategy and affects everything from inventory management to ad strategy.

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Conversion optimization relies heavily on customer insight. What is the customer looking for? What can we highlight on the product page to encourage the customer to make a purchase? This could involve emphasizing important product benefits, answering common questions, or simply having great-looking images. Exactly how you do this depends greatly on your customer base and product. Therefore, conversion optimization is generally more challenging than SEO optimization, especially for consultants and outsiders who may not be as familiar with your products and target audience.

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Other Factors That Influence Results

Of course, there are other factors that also affect conversion and SEO besides the product page itself. For example, your choice of shipping method (FBA or FBM), pricing, advertising, and much more. However, what I’ve discussed above is what you can focus on to improve a specific product page’s performance.

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I hope this has been helpful! Don’t miss the next part, where the guide continues with a focus on writing product descriptions that convert.