Amazon Product Optimization: Best Practices

Transcript

Liz F: Hi, everyone. Welcome to today's webinar. I'm very happy to have our friend Liz Adamson back with us. Today, she's going to talk about product page optimization, which is something that can really help you as a seller on the Amazon Marketplace.

Liz F: I am Liz Fickenscher, I'm the Business Development Lead for eComEngine. You might know us because you're a user of one of our tools. We've got feedbackFive, Restock Pro, and eComSpy. You might have attended one of our past webinars. But either way, I'm really glad that you're here.

Liz F: I'm going to tell you a little bit more about who we are at the end of Liz's presentation, and then we'll share some special offers exclusive to attendees of this webinar. We'll be conducting a Q&A at the end too. So as we go along, please submit your questions via the question box in GoToWebinar. And we will be recording. So if you miss anything, don't worry, we'll send a follow-up email with a link to the recording. Liz, are you ready?

Liz A: Yeah, ready to go. Okay.

Liz F: There you go.

Liz A: I'm waiting for controls to come over. For some reason, there it is. Okay, are we good on your end?

Liz F: We're good. Let's go.

Liz A: Okay, well, thanks for having me. I've been working with the eComEngine team for a couple of years now. You may have seen some of my blog posts. They've been a great team to work with and great products. Just a little quick introduction about myself. I am the Founder and Lead Consultant of Egility. We are a digital marketing agency, and we specialize on the Amazon platform. So that for us means product page optimization, enhanced brand content, anything that can help your product page stand up above the crowd. We also focus on the advertising side of things and driving traffic to those pages, and which includes our sponsored products, headline search and us. We also work with AMG and AAP campaigns and platforms, so really excited to be here.

Liz A: I've been working with sellers for since 2011. And I've really loved working with the Amazon platform and Amazon sellers, and helping them get their brands launched and selling on the platform. Today, we're going to talk about a few different things in regards to product page optimization, and how that can help your total product sales. We'll start with a few levers to you, what is it that increases your product sales? What are those factors you need to be looking at to help your sales increase? We'll go into the product page which includes product images, keyword research or product copy. Enhanced brand content, which is also known A+ content on the vendor side. And we'll talk just briefly about video shorts, and the new beta opportunity that has come up for sellers in the last little bit.

Liz A: Let's dive into product sales. Sales is basically a factor of two different things; your traffic or the number of people coming to your page and looking at your product page, multiplied by your conversion rate. So of the people on your page, how many of those are actually purchasing the product? You increase one of those factors, and you increase total sales. And so, we're going to kind of break that down a little bit.

Liz A: Traffic is a product of your organic search and your advertising. So where you're placing organic search when someone searches for your product, are you popping up where they're going to see you and click on you? Same with advertising, are you running advertising? And sponsored products, headline search, Facebook, whatever it is, are you running advertising to drive traffic onto that page?

Liz A: Conversion rate, that is, I want to call it quality of traffic. Because you have to think about, who's coming to look at your page? Are you advertising to people who are actually interested in your product and in the market to buy? Or are you advertising to the wrong group of people who really aren't ready to buy that type of product right now?

Liz A: Quality of the product page, that's after a course they've landed on your page. And have you been able to convince them to buy? So if you work on those two sets of things, you can increase your conversion rate. And today's webinar, well, that's what we're talking about, is quality of the product page. What makes up a good product page? What helps them decide to buy? And some of those factors actually also will influence your click through rate and your traffic. That would be titles, and images and things like that. And so a good product page, of course, will use the right keywords that will help you get indexed in Amazon's search engine. You're not going to show up and search for keyword unless you're indexed for it. So you've got to have the right keywords on the page, and then you've got to convince the customer to buy.

Liz A: Let's see. Let's just jump into the anatomy of a product page. Well, I've tried to order this more or less on how they appear on the product page. It's a little bit different from mobile and desktop. I've defaulted it to desktop, although you should be aware that mobile is becoming increasingly more important. So when you're creating a product page, you really should be sure that you're thinking about the mobile shopping experience, and what customers are seeing on a phone versus sitting down at their desktop and shopping.

Liz A: For purposes of this, I've left it as the same order we see on desktop. So typically, the image is something a customer will see first, then your title. Price is right there at the top as well. Review, that review counts right below the title. The next section that the desktop customers will see is bullets. And as you probably know, description is way down at the bottom of the page on desktop. Now these two are flip flopped in mobile. In mobile, you'll see that description first and you'll see bullets next.

Liz A: Enhanced brand content: Now, that actually takes the place of the description for sellers [inaudible 00:05:55] using enhanced brand content, the description becomes hidden. And the enhanced brand content is that visual, those visual graphics you see in place of the regular copy, that plain text copy in the description.

Liz A: Related Video Shorts is becoming kind of more and more talked about recently, and I'll show you an example where that is on the page. But it's down the bottom of the page, and there's usually. You'll be anywhere from none, that could be none or dozens of videos in a little carousel at the bottom there.

Liz A: Then Q&A is also an overlooked part of the product page. That's down the very bottom below video shorts right above the product review section. And that's where customers can ask a very specific question about your product. And you as the seller have the opportunity to answer that, or other customers can answer it as well. So it's in your interest as a seller to make sure you're watching that, and answering any questions as they come in from customers because that is looked at.

Liz A: Before we get too far into product page optimization, we need to discuss Brand Registry. Brand Registry, if you've sold on Amazon for any length of time, you're probably pretty familiar with it... Whoops. There we go. And one thing I do want to point out is the old registry is being deprecated. So in years past, you could sign up for the Brand Registry pretty easily. You just had to show your logo, show a URL, show a few other things and you could get onto the Brand Registry. The new Brand Registry does require a trademark. And while they, I think grandfathered in when they launched the new Brand Registry a couple of years ago... I'm sorry one year ago when they launched that, they grandfathered in the old Brand Registry applicants but that is now going away. And if you're a seller on the old Brand Registry and you haven't gotten onto the new Brand Registry, you should have received an email from Amazon alerting to that.

Liz A: Brand Registry if you're not familiar with what it is or why you should take the time to apply for the new one, it is needed to make updates to your product page. Amazon pulls in product data for whatever sellers happened to be selling on that product page. And even if you're the only seller, sometimes it doesn't take your updates. There's different kind of controls in place that decides whether or not you get to contribute to a product page.

Liz A: So if you're on a Brand Registry, well, it puts you kind of at the top of that list. It says that you're the brand owner, you're the... Have the authoritative content, you're allowed to make these changes to this page. And your changes, Amazon can make that assumption. They're going to be correct, since you're the brand owner. So if you want to do all these things we're going to be talking about today, you need to make sure you're on the Brand Registry, otherwise it's going to be a lot of back and forth of Amazon trying to get changes push through.

Liz A: The other thing you need to register for is to keep those updates. You could get that update push through with the help of Amazon if you're not on the registry. But if another seller pops on, or if Amazon who does and who knows what they do on the back end, your changes could revert. And so to make yours, it's kind of lock down that content so that it doesn't update you do need to be on that Brand Registry.

Liz A: Then the last... I mean, there's several other things that Brand Registry [inaudible 00:09:08] and keep it short for purposes of this webinar. There's there's additional marketing tools that you'll get access to, and that includes EBC mobile, which we'll be talking about today. You won't be able to add enhanced brand content to your product pages unless you're on the registry.

Liz A: I've already mentioned 1.0 is being deprecated, 2.0 is now required, and you do need that registered trademark. So, let's jump into the product page.

Liz A: Product images: This is arguably the most important part of your product page. It's the first thing a customer sees, it's the first thing they're going to look at, both on your product page and in search. When they pull those search so that that search engine results page in Amazon, they're basically looking at a list of photos and titles. So, you need to have a really great image there. It should also be high quality images. Don't go taking images from your smartphone and posting them, and trying to edit them on Photoshop. It's probably not the best way to get a high quality image unless you're probably much better than edit than I am, but invest in high quality images. Invest in a good photographer, a good photo booth or a good equipment to take those high quality images of your product.

Liz A: There are some different requirements of course. The primary image is very restrictive. It can be only be the product. The product only on a white background. You can't have a lifestyle image there, you can't have infographics there, you can't have your logo there. It really needs to just be the product. And we recommend, of course that you upload a photo that's large enough that a customer could zoom in. So that would be 1000 by 1000 pixels. If you meet that minimum size, then a customer will be able to zoom into your photo and look more closely at some of the details of the product image. So, you want to make sure you have that.

Liz A: Now secondary images, there is more latitude there. You can do lifestyle. And of course, I always recommend you have several different angles of the product closer. And that's especially helpful for fabrics and things, different angles of the product front back side. If you're selling in grocery or supplements, the shots of the nutritional information, ingredient lists, things like that. If it's clothing, you'll want a picture of it on a model. You want a picture of, perhaps them doing different event, activities in it. Especially for athletic wear, you want them, maybe riding a bike. But get creative here, and try to pull them in and catch their attention.

Liz A: And you do have, you thought nine slots for your images. And Amazon data has shown that customers will click through every single photo, so you want to fill up those slots. And they will look at every single thing, and evaluate your progress using those, that, that photography that you've posted. Keep in mind that we're not in a brick and mortar retail store where they can pick up the product, they can look at it, they can examine it. We need to recreate that experience on your product page, where they feel like they understand what the product is, and it meets whatever requirements they had when shopping for that product. So get creative there, fill up all those slots. Amazon has given us data that a conversion rate does increase when with the more photos that you're using to show that product.

Liz A: Let's look at some good and bad ones. Here's what I would call a bad product image. This is probably fine if you really don't care what kind of headset you're getting, if you are truly just buying in bulk and don't care about the quality or features. But for anyone else who's more interested in features, or whether or not these headsets have volume control or microphone, things like that, that doesn't tell you any of that. And for this page, this was the only picture. This was the only picture you got of this product. To me, it's a bunch of cheap headsets that, perhaps if I'm doing some sort of giveaway, maybe I'd be interested in that. But it's not going to be for the serious headset consumer.

Liz A: A better one is this one. You can see, I believe this one was their primary image on the left. You can see that close up. I can really see what these earbuds look like, I can see perhaps some of the quality that's put into it. These other two images were secondary images. And I love what they've done here where, not just showing more pictures of the product, but they're giving more information. And this is one of the things you can do to optimize for mobile, is create. Use these images and turn them kind of into infographics. Because someone on their mobile phone, they're likely not going to plug through all of your bullets and all of your description. If you've used the Amazon mobile app, you actually have to click through the description and click through the bullets to actually get to them to read them. So, images can be a much more powerful way of catching their attention for anyone who's shopping on mobile.

Liz A: But this is great because it shows you all the features, everything it does. It shows you a close up of all those features. It shows you that it comes with all these different accessories. And it answers a lot of questions just by looking at the pictures, so the customer is not having to dig for this information.

Liz A: The next one is one of my favorites. I was at Prosper Show last week, and the seller [inaudible 00:14:26] was there and gave a presentation, and showed this search results page. So, he sells kilts. And for a while, all of everyone who is selling kilts looked exactly the same. It looks exactly like that top row. It was just a picture of the kilt. Pretty soon, everything looks pretty much the same. So, he decided to stand up above the crowd. He was going to put the kilt on a model and show that as his primary image. So you can see that in this search engine result's page that his two products really pop out, because they're different. I mean, if you had a look at the rest of the page, it's all a bunch of just kills.

Liz A: So his particular images are standing out above the rest, are capturing more attention. In addition, I can see what it looks like on somebody rather than try to imagine, oh, does it go to me? Or does that... Where is the hit? And so this is increasing click through rates, and that's one way you can use images to increase your traffic is by using that powerful image as your primary image to get their attention and get them to click on your listing.

Liz A: After you've curated your images, you're going to want to jump into the copy. But before copy, you have to get into keyword research. As I mentioned earlier, if you're not indexed for the search term, you're not going to pop up in that search results' page for that particular search term. So you need to come up with keywords you think customers are going to use to search for your product, and there's several ways to do that. And you're really, it's a combination of research and brainstorming.

Liz A: The first step is really to sit down and look at your product, and describe what it is. So we'll use, we'll go back to the earbuds as an example. If I sell earbuds, I could probably call it earbuds, headphones, wireless earbuds, wireless headset, Bluetooth. List all those features that describe your product. That's going to be your core set of keywords.

Liz A: Your next step is to expand on that, and you're wanting to come up with variations on that. One way to do that, and I'll show an example of this on the next slide is, you'll input those keywords into the Amazon search bar. You've probably noticed as you start typing, it gives you a bunch of suggestions. Look at those suggestions, though, that is an indication of how Amazon customers are searching. So use that to find more ideas. A hack, and again, I'll show this on the next side, but a nice hack. To use that search bar is just put a hashtag sign right before the keyword, and you'll generate another set phrases. And I'll show you what that looks like.

Liz A: Third party tools, I get a lot of questions about those. Are they accurate? Do they give you good information? And I tell everyone, no, none of them are accurate but they're still great tools. They're great tools for brainstorming. The part that's not accurate is that search volume. Amazon does not publish that data. I don't want anyone to think that any of these tools that they buy, that these vendors, these software providers are actually pulling actual sales numbers and actual search term volume from Amazon. It's all screen scraping, and algorithms and really very educated guesswork. So they're really good tools, but you have to make sure you're using them properly. And not using them as a brainstorming list, and not absolute truth as to what's exactly happening on Amazon.

Liz A: Relevancy is key. I see way too many sellers who start, especially when they start using third party tools, they'll see, oh, this particular phrase is ranking, has a million searches in one month. And it's not totally related my product, but I want that traffic anyway. That's not a smart strategy. What you end up doing is attracting customers who have zero interest in buying your product, your conversion rate drops. Amazon's algorithm see that, they start pushing you down in search results. It's just bad all the way around. So if there were any keywords because that really don't describe your product, even if they look attractive from a search volume standpoint.

Liz F: [crosstalk 00:18:29].

Liz A: And what you do [inaudible 00:18:30]... Yeah, go ahead.

Liz F: Isn't that accurate also that you can get a warning from Amazon if you misuse the back end keyword terms?

Liz A: Absolutely. And we'll talk about a little that... That a little bit more when we get to search terms, but they're very, especially sensitive about using brand names. Some of the big brand names is where you see a lot of the words. There is Apple, and Disney, and brands like that, but they're getting more picky about using any one's brand names. And one interesting exception is I've got a client. He sells accessories for GoPro. So he's not GoPro branded, but his accessories are used to work with the camera; the microphones and mounting equipment, things like that.

Liz A: He originally had listed his product as GoPro microphone or something like that, and his listing got shut down because he's not a GoPro brand. All we had to do was rearrange that title and we put, we used his brand,. So his brand, microphone set for GoPro camera. And Amazon was fine with that. So making that very clear that no, I'm not the GoPro brand, or I'm not the apple brand. But my accessories do work with these brands. And so, there's a little bit of leeway there. You just have to word it very carefully [inaudible 00:19:52].

Liz A: Look for variations on how you describing your product, for example, and I kind of I already said this. But earbuds can also be called headsets, can also be called headphones, earphones. All those different synonyms could be different ways that customers are using to find your product.

Liz A: Here is that example I promised you. So this is the Amazon search bar. As you can see, I typed in earbuds. And you can see all these different results, earbuds with microphone, earbuds Bluetooth wireless, earbuds with volume control, et cetera. So, all of these could be search terms that very well describe my product. And so I'm going to want to grab these, and make sure I'm using these phrases and these keywords in content. And here's an example, earbuds for kids. If your earbuds are clearly not for kids don't use that, don't use that search term. If they are for kids, and I think most earbuds probably are interchangeable. But this is just an example of, don't be marketing to an audience that your product isn't for. It's not worth the traffic, because it'll kill your conversion rate.

Liz A: And this is that hack. So I've got a on the right hand side here, I've got that hashtag right before the term earbuds. And you can see what it does, is it's giving me keywords that come before earbuds. Instead of earbuds with microphone, I've got wireless earbuds, I've got Bluetooth, I've got Apple Skullcandy, iPhone, earbuds with mic. So there's several different types of search terms here that you're going to pull up if you use this little hacks, so I suggest doing that as well.

Liz A: This is an example of a third party tool that I have used for a long time, and I love. And again, this is a great brainstorming tool. All I did was type in earbuds, and this is the list there was... I don't even know how many results I got, but I got a huge page full of Amazon search terms that we could use. And all these guys are doing is they're taking that search bar, and they're using some. They tried to explain it to me, but it was a little bit beyond me. But they're taking that search bar data, and where would you type in a word that list appears? And they're using algorithms to kind of extrapolate that data.

Liz A: So we've got... We can see that wireless earbuds and Bluetooth earbuds are kind of at the top of search volume. And this tool is, and this one particular one is merchant words. And there's a lot of other ones out there. There's, gosh, I know Viral Launch just launched one, and I think Jungle Scout launched one. There's a ton of these out there. And you can use any one, it doesn't matter. They'll all give you a pretty long list of different search terms, and you're going to want to be looking for those ones that relate to your product.

Liz A: What you want to be careful at is using this monthly search volume. So if you do subscribe to a number of different tools to MerchantWords, or Viral Launch, or whoever else is launching new tools. Sonar's another one that [inaudible 00:22:51] does. You're going to notice that the search volume varies greatly between platforms. And in my opinion, it's not that anyone is more accurate than another, than an ELO. I'm sure some of them are probably closer to the mark than others. But what I use this for is, I can clearly see that wireless and Bluetooth earbuds have quite a bit more volume than say noise canceling earbuds. And so, I look at them in context with each other. And it very well could be the Bluetooth earbuds is actually a more popular search than wireless earbuds. I think that's probably within the margin of error right there.

Liz A: But if I look at 1.9 million search results of wireless earbuds compared to 186,000 in noise canceling earbuds, I can be pretty confident that one has larger search volume than the other. And so, that's why I kind of recommend using these tools.

Liz A: So that's your keyword research. Once you've got a list of keywords, that's when you get to start writing. And your first step is going to be your product title. And there's several things to talk about when creating that title. But first off, the title is the most important place for keywords. It gets indexed more heavily than the rest of the page content. And so that's where, again... Let me back up here a little bit. There we go... So that's where you want to pay attention to this volume. So if I know that Bluetooth and wireless are the top, have the top search volume I'm going to want to make sure to get those into my title. And then other ones like noise canceling, I may, or... Unless that's the primary premium feature, I may want to put that down in bullets if it's not a huge feature of the product.

Liz A: Let's talk about the title format just a little bit. Let's see, I got ahead of myself here. Oh, well. Okay, so product title, I usually recommend just a very simple kind of formula, I guess, where it's your brand name, basically the name of your product or what the product is. Then, list one to two attributes. And within those, that product in the attributes section, you're going to want to sprinkle in those keywords. What I don't advocate is putting in so many keywords into your title that becomes very confusing. And by the time the customer has finished reading the title, they've forgotten what the product is. Let's not confuse the customer with an overly long title. It's just stuff chock full of keywords, and synonyms and everything else. You want to keep it simple.

Liz A: You do want your most important keywords in the title, like I had already mentioned before. And you want to keep the title... Again, this goes back to norm, keyword stuffing, you're going to want to keep it between 100 and 200 characters. That's kind of the sweet spot. Remembering, again for mobile and for some desktop applications, your title is going to be truncated. Especially in advertising, headline search and sponsored products, your title's can be truncated. So if you're making sure you're kind of keeping it brief and you're keeping the most important parts at the beginning, which is your brand name and the name of the product. If you're truncated in search or in advertising, customers still understand what you are.

Liz A: Here's just a quick example. So be my brand, Bluetooth wireless earbuds. I took those two popular search terms, and that's what I'm calling my product, these are Bluetooth wireless earbuds. Then, I added a couple features. I saw in my research that microphone, and volume controls seem to be higher in search volume. So I added those in and then I just added the color, so they knew what they were getting. Wow, oh my, I'm having problems here. Here we go. Oh, there's their buzz. There we go. Okay.

Liz A: Sometimes I get asked about what's called a canonical URL. And what this is, is it looks like this. This is what shows up. Say if you're doing a Google search, and you see Amazon show up in the search engine results page. And you'll see the URL, amazon.com and then you'll see the title of the post. In this case Panasonic, the model number, stereo, earphones, black and then the [inaudible 00:27:05]. If you want to, and this can be great for indexing in Google. So this is something you want to make sure you're doing, that you get this nice clean canonical title that has your product name in it. The way that's made is, is typically the first five words is the title.

Liz A: To ensure that, that happens, to have that kind of control where you decide, I want these five words to be in the URL, you're going to want to use a hyphen. Just like I did in my example up above, where it says my brand Bluetooth wireless earbuds, and that hyphen is placed for a reason. That means when that canonical URL is created, is going to use those first five words and then it won't mix it up. Because sometimes what happens if you don't have that hyphen, it'll say my brand, Bluetooth, wireless with microphone, might jump around a little bit. So I'm kind of indicating to Amazon with this hyphen, please use this for the URL.

Liz A: The last thing you want to kind of do a gut check on your title and ask yourself, does that make sense? Did I completely overstuff this? Well, right now I don't know what it is. Or am I making a very clear communication to the customer on what this product is, and why they should click through or buy it?

Liz A: Bullets and description. Let's see, bullets and description, that will be the next set of copy you're going to be writing. Bullets on desktop is going to be the first thing a customer sees. So they get the title, they see the images, they're looking at price, they're looking at reviews. then, those bullets are almost always above the fold on desktop. And if a customer wants to more information, they'll go there first. On mobile, it's a little bit further down. It's a little bit of a scroll, and then you have to click through. So they're not quite as urgent for mobile, but they are for desktop.

Liz A: We recommend about 250 characters, although you're going to want to check this limit for your particular category. I pulled up another example here. In this particular category, if you go into your back end and look at the description tab, and then hover over that little information icon under key product features, that's your bullets, it will tell you what your maximum is. In this particular category, I don't remember what category this was. But there are limited data, 100 characters.

Liz A: One of the things that I was actually emphasized on Prosper show last week when I was attending was the importance, again of optimizing your copy for mobile. And so while you could, in some categories, get a maximum of 500 characters. If someone's on mobile, they're probably that's probably too much for them to read. They'll probably appreciate it more that 100 to 250 character limit. So, keep that in mind when you're optimizing.

Liz A: These bullets, you're going to want to be descriptive and sell that product. This is your chance to convince them to buy, and you're going to want to focus on what all your product features are, what makes you different from the competition, and what makes your product special. I had a brand management professor in grad school. And his kind of favorite saying was, what makes you different, better, special? And those are the three things you need to communicate, why are you different, better, special?

Liz A: Use your keywords in a more natural way. Again, you're not keyword stuffing. But this is where you could use some synonyms. Maybe you call it earbuds in the title, maybe you're going to call it earphones in the bullets and work in all those different features. You've done your brainstorming, you've seen what customers are searching for, you know what features your product has. Make sure you're listing all of those features.

Liz A: One of the things I've seen, and I've been working with a lot of grocery and , and other kind of ingestibles lately. And one thing I keep running across is a lot of them are non GMO, vegan, gluten free, soy free. All those kind of minor points, not so minor to some customers. But maybe the brand is feeling like they're minor, and they're not listing them in the bullets. They don't have them and copy anywhere else. They just have them maybe in their pictures, and so they're not being indexed for things like non GMO, and vegan, and gluten free. And so make sure you're calling out just all those features that could be even remotely important to your customer. So that when someone's searching for vegan protein bars, they'll find you because you mentioned that, oh, we're vegan friendly, or whatever it is.

Liz A: Your description, so that's below the fold on desktop. It's a little bit more prominent in mobile. And this is where you can write your essay. Again, keep in mind mobile, they may not appreciate an essay but that's where EBC comes in.

Liz A: 2000 characters, you're going to go into more depth. Keep using some more keywords. Anything you can get the bullets, sprinkle in here. Or it's okay to reuse keywords as well. It's not like Google, where you have to reuse keywords. Google kind of gives you some points on how often the keyword's been mentioned on a page. Amazon's not like that. Once it's there once, you're good. But that doesn't mean you can't repeat them, because that's actually kind of does that psychological has a psychological effect, where someone has used a particular search term and they see that search term and copy a couple of times. They'll kind of reinforce to them, yeah, that's what I was looking for.

Liz A: Use basic HTML. One thing I hate seeing is when there's a 2000-character description, and there's absolutely no formatting and it's one giant, long paragraph. You can use paragraphs, you can use bold, you can use even lists. Just really super basic HTML is the only kind of HTML Amazon will accept. So use that, its just makes it more readable.

Liz A: Back end search terms, I get lots of questions on these. If you've been paying attention, this has gone and undergone some changes in the last year. It went from 1000 characters to 5000 characters, and then got scaled back, way back to 250 characters. Amazon's doing this because they saw way, way too many irrelevant search terms in the back. People were keyword stuffing the crap out of their back end, and using all sorts of irrelevant stuff. So they're forcing you as sellers to be very relevant. The other thing it forces you to do is using your keywords on the front page where they should be. First of all, you're forced to be relevant. Second of all, it does help with conversion rate.

Liz A: So this is really almost an afterthought now, these back end search terms. This is where, okay, I didn't have room on the front end, or it didn't feel natural. Or I want to use a synonym, or a really strange misspelling that Amazon might not pick up on. I think I'm getting ahead of myself here, but let's back up a little bit.

Liz A: Again, keep them relevant to your product, because that's why Amazon kind of trimmed this all up. And you don't have room to be irrelevant anyway, so keep them very relevant to your product. We touched on this, do not use brand names, including yours because you're already indexed for it. So, there's no reason. Don't waste that space, so don't quit brand names. The exception can be if you're an accessory for something, you can say for Apple, whatever. But that should probably be on the front page.

Liz A: Do not duplicate your front end content, that's another big mistake I see a lot. If you've got the word earbuds on your front page, you don't have to put it in the back page. This is, it's not necessary. You don't have to repeat. You're just wasting space again. What you want to do is use synonyms, spelling variations, and other keywords that are not on the front end. And here's an example of what that string looks like, because I get asked if you know how this looks like when you put it together. So, you can see it's just one long string. I'm not trying to do very specific phrases where I'm repeating headphones over and over again.

Liz A: I've got headphones listed out three times and kind of different spelling formats, that's very helpful. And that spacing is important. I've had clients where they have a product name that can be with a space and can't be without a space. And unless you have both versions, I've seen them not get indexed for the second version. So if you've got a product where it can be spelled with or without a space, make sure you've got both of those in there. They've got F instead of pH.

Liz A: Then I put in... And this is something you don't often see on the front end, and for a lot of products. And so, we put it on the back end. So this product is for because we saw in that search term we saw, for example, earbuds for kids. I may not want to advertise that on the front page, because that's not the primary function of the product. But if it still works for the product, I could buy my kid just about any earbud on the market and it would work.

Liz A: And you can put this in the back end for men, women, kids, adults, children, so you can do all sorts of stuff and that will help with search as well. Then even these activities, so if this will index for running or for walking, for exercising. So, it does mix and match. The fact that I've got for in there one time is okay. It will match to that to all those different words that follow it.

Liz A: Here is what the back end search terms look like. If you're not sure where to find them, it's in that keywords' tab. And depending which category you're in, this page is going to look different. It's different for every category. Usually search terms is up towards the top. One thing you're going to want to ignore that's not in this particular category about the screenshot from is, there's a field called Platinum search terms. That has nothing to do with anything. It's only for Platinum sellers. Just ignore it. I see people filling that out, and you're just wasting your time. It's not going to be indexed.

Liz A: What you do want to do is fill out all of these other ones; intended use, subject matter, target audience, other attributes. And we have seen, we've done a lot of testing where we'll put a word like entertainment or something in one of these fields. And we'll find that that does affect indexing quite a bit if entertainment's not anywhere else. And so these are a few examples of just kind of different ways you can put, different other ways you can add in some more keywords and help with kind of the search and browse feature in Amazon. I've put in other attributes, waterproof, sweat proof. And some of these may have been listed on my front page, but I'm putting them back in these other... I'm just filling in all these fields. I always recommend you fill as many fields on the back end as you can. There's also the more details tab at the top there. Go in there, I see find the fields, fill out anything you can. It will only help you in search, it will help customers find your product.

Liz A: Let's jump into enhance brand content. Enhanced brand content is also known A+ content for vendors. And as we mentioned before in Seller Central, it's available to brand registered to, and that's going to be 2.0 products only. And I'll show you an example of enhanced brand content here in a minute if you haven't seen it before. It's basically a graphic, a more graphic, a description that uses much more graphics than... It's not just plain text, you can use images, and infographics, and logos, and things like that.

Liz A: We have seen that when we have lost EBC, it does measurably improve conversion rate. And I suspect, and I wish Amazon would break this out for us. But I suspect a lot of that's mobile. Amazon has one of the highest mobile adoption rates of all eCommerce shopping sites. And again, EBC looks great on mobile. If you've designed that correctly, I should add. It helps optimize parody page for mobile, and uses those visual elements to communicate features and benefits of a product.

Liz A: This is what it looks like on the back end of Amazon, you've got several templates to choose from. So you can see there's all these different places that you can drop in images, and then there's places for copy throughout kind of those images. You can also customize your own template if you want to have a different idea of something you want to do. This is an example. This is about half. I couldn't get a full screenshot, and have it show up well. So, this is about the top half of an EBC that I found that I really liked.

Liz A: What I really liked about this is, I've seen kind of two different kinds of EBC. I've seen versions where a customer really has only, you pulled in a bunch of stock photography, or they're just pulled in more pictures of their product. And you're just basically, it's not providing a whole lot of additional value. This, however, is providing a lot of additional value in the sense that you can see they're using icons and symbols to communicate different things.

Liz A: And so what they're doing is they're acknowledging the fact that a customer, especially on mobile, I keep bringing that up. A customer may not take the time to read your copy. As much time and effort you put into that copy, they really just may not read it, or they skim it at best. And so using these symbols will kind of aid them in making that quick visual scan of your product page and [inaudible 00:39:30] oh, yeah, that's exactly what I was looking for. It's non GMO, it's really important to me. Or it's gluten free, and I can see that with these symbols really easily.

Liz A: I can see there's 20 grams of protein, it's full of veggies and greens, and just relatively low calorie. So that, that through these are all great ways to communicate quickly what your product sells. And this type of EBC is what improves conversion rates. One thing I'd probably change on this is, again, with the title at the top of page, and probably the better idea what this is. But looking at this alone, I'm actually not totally sure exactly what format the product is. So I'd probably repeat a little bit more clearly what this product is, is it a powder that you mix in? Is it... What is it exactly? So you want to make sure you haven't... You're kind of reiterating what your product is. Here's another one, Garden of Life, same idea. He's using icons to communicate the features and benefits of this product.

Liz A: Video Shorts, this is down at the bottom of the page. You can see it, this screenshot here. It's down below this product details, and there's a number of videos in this particular page that I pulled up. These are syndicated from a number of different sources, so anyone could actually syndicate a video to your product page. And you may as well as the seller be syndicating your own videos as well if you've got you know videos that talk about your product. You can see there is one here from... Well, that's Amazon prescription drugs. That's interesting, but it's Garden. It's specifically about Garden of Life meal replacement, which is the product that this page is on.

Liz A: To do that, to do these related video shorts, you do have to use a third party service, Jen.video is one. There's a couple others I could probably mention, but I'm blanking on the names right now. But there's a number of different third party services that will syndicate this video to you. You do either a monthly fee, you can do a flat fee, and they'll send that video to the related video short's page. And you can do multiple videos. It's not just one. And you can do as many as you want depending on the plan.

Liz A: What we're seeing now is a beta has started to roll out through more and more sellers, and sellers are now able to do this through Seller Central. The limitation is you only get to upload one video. So if you have more than one, you're going to have to use that third party service I mentioned. Or if you're not in the beta yet, you don't want to wait. Use that third party service.

Liz A: The nice thing about the Seller Central beta we're seeing roll out is it also finally, finally as that video to the top of the product page [inaudible 00:42:01]. So it'll add it there at the top, and it will drop it into the related video short's section. So we're hoping, and Amazon hasn't communicated anything. But I'm just hoping and expecting that, that video for sellers should roll out by Q3. Don't take my word for it, but that's my hope.

Liz A: Let's just review everything we've gone over. We talked about kind of the levers to increase your sales, which is basically a function of traffic and conversion rate. Increase your traffic, increase conversion rate, you'll get that boost in sales. And optimizing your product page will attack both of those items. Traffic can be done through that keyword indexing or SEO. So we talked about doing that keyword research, and making sure it's in your copy. Traffic is also affected by images, because that's how customer decides to click through onto your page. Your title also influences that click, your reviews, your price. And that's part of the algorithm as well, review some price pay a little bit factor in there that will also influence that click. And then advertising, can send any traffic, if you're struggling or need additional traffic than what you're getting organically.

Liz A: Conversion rate; you can influence that, again, through images and title, and reviews and price. Those will all influence your conversion rate. And then the rest of your product page content, which is your bullets and description, enhanced brand content, video shorts. I didn't go way into depth into QA, but just know that, that's there, know that you should be responding to it because it is read by customers. I think I'll hand it back over to you, Liz.

Liz F: Okay, thank you so much, Liz. That was a tremendous amount of great information. And we have, boy, do we have questions for you. I'm going to switch roles back over to me real quick, and just take us a couple of seconds to tell you guys a little bit about eComEngine. We're totally committed to seller success. I like to say that at Amazon, they say you need to be customer obsessed. But here word like totally seller obsessed. So our tools offer you a lot of automation in terms of your seller reputation, feedback and product review monitoring, solicitation. We have Restockpro for supply chain management, inventory control and restock needs. Sourcing Intel wIth eCommerce buy, and the list goes on.

Liz F: But even when we don't necessarily have a software solution for a particular area of interest, like product page optimization, which matters to you guys, we still want to provide best in class thought leadership. And that's why we're such good friends with Liz because she's awesome, and she can help you on your seller journey too. So that's my spiel. I'm going to switch over, and show you our special offers. But we're going to dive into the questions now, because we have so many of them.

Liz F: Those are our special offers. They can be in front of your face while we tackle your questions. So luckily, Liz I think if it works best for you, we're going to go by category. So images, we have someone who asked that their primary images have backgrounds and logos, why would Amazon allow that?

Liz A: If Amazon's allowing that, if you've got product images loaded as your primary... If you have images loaded as your primary image with backgrounds and logos, it is technically against Amazon's terms of service. But the reason why you're able to run with it is they simply haven't caught you yet. At some point, when their little bots catch it, they'll probably close the listing and alert you.

Liz F: And I think you said the best image resolution, can you repeat those pixels for [crosstalk 00:45:35]?

Liz A: Yeah, 1000 by 1000.

Liz F: Okay, cool. Great. Then somebody commented, I think they were a little bit confused about the good product image where it was the earbuds. I think that you meant that the first one on that slide of just the earbuds on the white background was the primary image, and the secondary images were the ones where you're kind of telling your infographic story, is that correct?

Liz A: Exactly. Yeah, those were three different discrete images. To start, that was confusing. Those are three totally different images. That first one on the left was the primary image, and the other two images on the center and right were it's secondary images.

Liz F: Cool. Then I think there were some questions about using a model for the apparel, for the kilt example. Is that still considered the product on a white background? Or does the addition of the model kind of walk the line between not being the product on a white background?

Liz A: Yeah, the Amazon apparel category has its own set of rules. In fact, when you're accepted into apparel, they'd require that you understand and read through those rules on what to do with images. One of those rules is you have to have the clothing either just flat kind of like as you saw, or on a model. So, models are allowed in in apparel.

Liz F: I would hope so.

Liz A: Yeah. Yeah, it just looks better.

Liz F: Then someone commented that they had nine slots for images, but only seven would display. Is that something that you're hearing, or is that...?

Liz A: Yeah. Yeah, when you do more than nine, there's, you get that little icon at the very bottom of the image list. There's like a little plus sign and you click on that, and then it goes into that pop out screen where you can see all the images.

Liz F: Oh, okay. Cool. So Brand Registry, we have one question. It says, when you have Brand Registry, is it easier to get unauthorized sellers taken off the listing? And if so, how do you go about doing that?

Liz A: Yeah, that's a good question. There's been a lot of misconceptions about Brand Registry. A Brand Registry is not for policing unauthorized sellers. Amazon is happy to have as many sellers as can be on your product listing, selling your product as long as it's not counterfeit, inauthentic, or illegally sourced. And so, there was a lot of talk after Brand Registry. The new one rolled out that oh, this could be the gateway into brand gating. The brand gating tool is only in response to counterfeiting. You only get brand gated if you can show you have the counterfeiting problem, and that it's extremely, and hurting customers.

Liz A: So Amazon is in the camp of, we don't care who sells it as long as it's authentic. And so they're not going to help you kick unauthorized sellers off your listing. Exception is counterfeit, if you can show that it's a counterfeit product, that is not yours, it's not genuine, or it's used or something like that, they will kick them off.

Liz F: That's good to know. Regarding EBC and A+ content, someone has asked, regarding the keyword fields, many of these are pulled down lists. Should we use options available or just type our own relevant keywords?

Liz A: Right, good question. If the options available to you are relevant, yeah, go use them. Because we're actually still a little unsure of how everything's been indexed and used in those fields. And so if the default option is applicable to your product, it's relevant, use it. There may be a little bit more [inaudible 00:48:53]. But often, like I think there's one intended use or something. One of the fields, that drop down menu, it lists a bunch of holidays, which really has nothing to do with hardly anything I'm selling.

Liz A: So like that particular field, I completely ignore it and just type in whatever I want that's applicable to my project. Because a lot of those pull down options, they're so limited. So if it doesn't apply to you, use something else.

Liz F: Great. Is having A+ content better than EBC? A+ content can get pricey for multiple products.

Liz A: Yes, it can. A+ content, there's actually two versions of it if you're a vendor. They have just made it free, and I don't know if it's rolled out everyone. But I have a couple clients with Vendor Central, and it is now free to them. It was content is now free. It has a slightly different set of templates, so you get a few different options. One is not better than the other. If you are... If your brand is being sold through Vendor Central, you likely will not have access to EBC on the seller side if you've got both accounts. And also kind of have that locked down.

Liz A: I've been told they are actually working on that, because it's been a problem if you historically been a vendor and now you're a seller, and now you can't access anything. So, I think they're working on it. That's what I've been told anyway. But really, one is not better than the other. Both of them are free. There is a premium A+ content that's rolled out. If you want to see what that looks like, go Google or... Sorry... Go on Amazon and search for some of the Bose products. Not all of them have it. But when you find when you'll know it, when you see it. It's really cool. [inaudible 00:50:28] A+ content, but that's the one that costs a premium right now.

Liz F: Awesome. My friend in the Pacific Northwest asked, how about the fact that EBC content is not indexed? Basic product description is indexed but not EBC, so?

Liz A: Good question. Yeah, correct, EBC content is not indexed. Whether or not that's going to change, we don't know. But obviously, if you've got a graphic with words in it, but that's going to index anyway. What we do for that and the reason why I still teach product descriptions is because, even though that product description is no longer visible on the front page, after EBC have been published, that product description is still in the back end, and it's still indexing. And so if you write that keyword rich product description, even when you're planning on using EBC, it will still benefit you for keyword indexing as it sits in your back end.

Liz F: Awesome. One seller has an EBC 1.0, but notice some listings video in place of images. Would 2.0 do automatically have the option to add in video.

Liz A: EBC 1.0, so Brand Registry is 1.0 and 2.0. EBC did, and I don't know if this is what you're talking about. EBC did just overhaul its template format, so maybe that's what the questioner is referring to. That those templates rolled out for everybody. The video that rolled out, it's still in beta with just select sellers. It is part of the EBC, like you go to the advertising tab and then enhanced brand content. You click on that, and that brings you too. Then you put in your skew, it asks you for a skew number, you put that in and submit it. And then it pops up, are you adding EBC, or are you adding a video? And so yeah, accessing that video is through that that EBC page in Seller Central. I hope that answers the question.

Liz F: All right, moving on to search questions. What does it mean to be indexed for a keyword or search term?

Liz A: It basically... So Google... This is the same way any search engine works, whether it's Google, or Amazon, or Bing or whoever it is, there's kind of... And I know anyone who's listening to this who's more technical than I am will probably laugh at my explanation, but here we go... There's, basically bots crawling your site, and it's reading your content. For example, if we're like... I'm just going to use the page you have up now. It says eComEngine coupon codes for extended free trials. So this bot is going to read that sentence, and it kind of creates like a, I like to think of a library with its... 20 years ago when I was in college, and you had to go and look through the cards to find which books were in that particular library.

Liz A: And so, it basically files away in its cataloging system that this particular site has extended free trials. And so now the customer searches for that, Google, or Amazon or whoever pulls up a list of the thousands of sites that use that term, extended free trials. Then how it ranks it, whether you're in the first spot or whether you're in the thousandth spot, will depend on a number of different factors put down in the search engine.

Liz A: In Amazon land where you rank on the page for your keyword on that search engine results page. Where you rank on that, whether you're spot number one or spot number 100 is going to mostly depend on your sales history and your conversion rate. So if you want to rank for Bluetooth earbuds, you better have some sales. So it's kind of a catch 22, but that's something we could definitely dive into on another webinar on marketing [inaudible 00:54:00].

Liz F: Awesome. A couple of people have asked, how many keyword inputs can you use per product?

Liz A: How many keyword inputs can you use per product? Not too sure I understand that question. I mean, you can use as many keywords as you can come up with that's relevant to your product. Your only constraint is going to be that character length. So you've got anywhere from 100 to 500 characters in the bullets, and 2000 characters in the description and 250 characters in the back end. And then plus your title, which is another [inaudible 00:54:29] of characters.

Liz F: Right.

Liz A: [inaudible 00:54:31]. Okay.

Liz F: Someone also asked, even with a max of 100 characters for bullets, they still let you add more characters. And does that hurt you in a search? I guess that's, if you can use as many as you want, how many can you use until it hurts you? Or does it ever hurt you?

Liz A: If you exceed those limits, like you have those warnings, you'll get 100 characters but it's letting you put in 250 or whatever. I think that's what you're asking, right?

Liz F: [crosstalk 00:54:56].

Liz A: Yeah, because I've seen that happen where it tells you, you got a limit but you're actually able to push it. I think it's kind of funny. We've seen that be policed more heavily by Amazon. Where it'll hurt you is if Amazon sees that and decides, oh, you've exceeded the limit. I'm shutting down your listing. We've seen that happen, especially around titles. We haven't seen that happen a lot around bullets. And so bullets, I haven't seen a whole lot of penalties happen when you exceed it, other than sometimes I'll upload a file, or I'll try to put it in the back end, and it won't save because it's too long.

Liz A: So the only safeguards they have in right now for too long of a description and bullets is they won't let you save it to the system. It'll say error or too long, then you have to shorten it. If you're able to push it through, I haven't seen any drawbacks unless Amazon crawls the pages and just like oh, you can't do this. We're going to shut you down until you fix it.

Liz A: Now, the exception to that is the back end field. That's 250 characters. If you exceed that back end field because you can't put in like five lines and who knows how many characters, they don't kind of shut it off for you on the back part. If you put in more than 250 characters on the back end field, what happens is Amazon kind of starts picking and choosing from that long list you put in of what search terms is going to index for. And you don't want that. It could miss your most important keyword in favor of a less important keyword. And so in those backend search terms, you have to keep them below 250. And if you're not sure if everything's being indexed, you can use a tool.

Liz A: One of my favorites is, it's called Keyword Index Checker. It's just a Google plugin, a Google Chrome plugin, I should say, or an extension. And you can just plug in your back end search terms, or whatever keywords you want to index for. And you plug in your [inaudible 00:56:42] and it will tell you if you're indexing or not. If you're not sure if you've over gone a limit somewhere, if you're not sure if everything's indexing, you can use a tool like that to just double check.

Liz F: Super. There are a lot of questions about keywords. So maybe we can address some of those in our follow-up blog posts, since we were down to the last four minutes.

Liz A: Yeah.

Liz F: So let's hit a couple of the general, bigger questions. One person asked, how do you become a platinum seller, and what are the benefits?

Liz A: Benefits are, you will... A platinum seller, I worked with a retailer, and we were a platinum seller. I started my career with a startup, and we were one of the top 200 sellers, I think in the platinum sellers. I think, there's just some minor benefits. One was, we got paid weekly instead of bi-weekly. And the other one was, you got a storefront, which now Amazon's rolled out to everybody. And that's what those Platinum search terms are for. They were designed for those Platinum storefronts. There were only four Platinum sellers.

Liz A: I think there was another benefit, but I had no idea what it was. It wasn't like, it must not have been all that creative, I'm forgetting it perhaps. There's let's say, there's really nothing there anymore. They've rolled out. The only main thing was that storefront announcement rolled out to all sellers. And platinum sellers were, it was based on volume. You got to be like a top 100 200 seller on Amazon.

Liz F: Super. Then this one was really intriguing to me. This is a friend of ours who asked, any tips for a wholesale source seller who has 500 plus skews to manage? How can you optimize all of those product pages when you've got that many skews?

Liz A: That many skews. I get that a lot. And it's a net that actually we're trying to crack ourselves for my company, because that's one of the things we specialize in is product page optimization. And I have clients with hundreds and thousands of skews, and we're trying to figure out how best to roll that out. I suggest starting with your... But first starting with, taking pieces. Start with your first, your top 10, 20 sellers who top 20% of your skews. Those are going to be very in the majority of your volume anyway. And if you move the lever a little bit on those high volume skews, it will have actually really big results.

Liz A: In sales, you increase that conversion rate by one, or two or three points. And if you've got hundreds of thousands of impressions or sessions, traffic, you'll increase sales quite dramatically. So the first step is focus on just the top 20% of your catalog, your top 20% of sellers. Then from there, that's still a lot of a big number. Start grouping them into categories. For example, if you sell swimsuits, and you maybe you've got 100 skews in women's slip suits and they come in five different sizes each, and 20 different colors and that, that gets to be a lot of swimsuits all of a sudden. Really a swimsuit is a swimsuit is a swimsuit. So you can write one set of copy, and apply it across all of your swimsuit product pages, making some changes for size, and color and design, and bikini versus one piece for things like that.

Liz A: So that's one way we've been working on scaling, is finding all those like products, grouping them together, writing one set of copy that describes the product without being too generic, and rolling it out across sizes and variations of things.

Liz A: The other, for hundreds and hundreds of skews, the next step is just, again to keep grouping those products. And just kind of trying to find those top keywords for each kind of product segment. Then just make sure you're... Whoever's writing that copy, because someone's writing that copy for your page. Whoever's writing it, make sure they're a good writer. Make sure they think about how they're describing products and using the right words because a lot of keyword research again, that was the first thing I pointed out in keyword research is the first step is to brainstorm, what are all the features of your product?

Liz A: So if you are using a good copywriter who is articulately explaining all of the features of your product, you will be optimizing for search. And you just can't. It just is not quite in depth as maybe if you're only working on 10 products. But for 500 products that just focus on that; you get that product launch, get a good copywriter, make sure they have a list of all your features and benefits, and they're including it in copy.

Liz F: Awesome. That puts us right at four o'clock. There are still some questions. So if your questions didn't get answered, don't worry. We will be writing some follow up content to this, and you can always schedule a 30 minute consultation with Liz with this link. It's egility.co/contact. And because you attended this webinar or listened to it, you can schedule a free 30 minutes with her, which is super nice of her. And she can help you optimize your product pages.

Liz F: Thank you so much, Liz, this has been great. Thank you everyone for attending, and we'll see you next time.

Liz A: Okay, thanks, guys.