Introduction
Today we are going to cover the subject of Keyword Research for Amazon products. As we all know Amazon’s search algorithm A9 is keyword based; when a customer arrives on Amazon they enter a search term they think best describes the product they are looking to purchase. As sellers we need to cover 2 areas when completing keyword research:-
- Find as many of the keywords used by customers when purchasing our product.
- Make sure our listing is fully indexed for those keywords
I will cover the whole subject of indexing of keywords in my next blog post, which will cover Amazon Listing creation and optimization, but for now I want to focus on discovering and uncovering the best keywords for your product.
We have our own process of keyword research that has been learnt from other notable Amazon coaches and tweaked and improved upon as we work on our own listings and those of our clients.
Okay I am going to go through this in a step by step manner so it’s easy to follow along.
1) Identify the Main Keyword
The first thing we do is to try to identify our “Main” keyword. For some products this is very obvious and in some cases you maybe surprised to find another keyword is actually more valuable (as in it gets more search traffic) than the keyword you initially thought of.
For example: Your product might be a “spy camera” and you think this is probably the main keyword, but if you do a search on Amazon for “spy camera”, we can see that there actually may well be another main keyword. Take a look at the screenshot below.
From looking through the results we can see that this is also referred to as a “hidden camera” or “hidden spy camera”
To verify which is actually our main keyword we need to turn to various keyword tools. There are many to choose from but my current favorite is the Magnet Tool by Helium 10. The Helium 10 Suite of tools is in my opinion one of the those must have tools and you will see me refer to using it often when discussing keyword research and listing optimization. You can find out more details here – Helium 10
We use the magnet tool together with another tool called Merchant Words https://www.merchantwords.com and with both tools we will enter the two potential main keywords into the tools to see which has the most reported search volume. Usually the tools will point to one clear winner, which is then our verified main keyword.
2) Find Associated Keywords
Once we have our “main keyword” we can start to find out all the other associated keywords that relate to our product. To do this we take an in-depth look at the top 15 listings that show up when we search for out main keyword on Amazon. While we carefully go through each listing we start to take note of recurring keywords used and other patterns of commonly used terms. We then start recording all of these keywords in a research spreadsheet.
3) Expand Keyword List with Various Tools
We then take all of the keywords we have found from analyzing the titles and bullets of the top 15 listings and split them up into major and minor keywords, together with some common misspellings. We then start to expand on this by using some more tools and techniques.
3a) Amazon Suggest
The first technique is called Amazon suggest. You will have noticed that as a customer begins typing in their search term, amazon starts offering various suggestions, these are based on commonly used search phrases used by customers. For example you can see below that when I begin to type “dog toy” Amazon start showing us suggestions such as “dog toys”, “dog toys for aggressive chewers”, “dog toys for large dogs” etc. etc.
I like to begin checking out Amazon suggest manually at first as it gives us some ideas and insights into how what search terms Amazon says are being commonly used. There are also some free tools out there that can help with this task like http://tools.seochat.com/tools/suggest-tool/
3b) Google Keyword Planner
The second tool we use to expand our keyword list is the good old Google keyword planner. Use this to find other keywords related to your main search term.
3c) Reverse ASIN
Lastly we run what is called a reverse ASIN search. Using tools such as Helium 10 we are able to find out what keywords our competitors are ranking for. SO we like to run this for the top 5 competitors for the main keyword.
4) Create List of Single Words
When we have finalized our list of major, minor keywords and misspellings (these can be found from using the Misspellinator Tool inside Helium 10). We then create a list of single words from all our keyword phrases. We do this because there is absolutely no value or advantage to be gained by repeating keywords in a listing for the sake of improved ranking. Again there are tools out there for this but we return to Helium 10 and their tool called “Frankenstein Keyword Processor”. Once we have the list of single words, we then remove duplicates.
So after this process you should have a list of Major Keywords, Minor Keywords and misspellings and from those you would have created a list of single words. This list will then be used later in listing creation or optimization. I will be covering that subject in the next blog post.
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