Helium 10 Buzz 5/25/22: No More Back End Search Terms??!!

We’re back with another episode of the Weekly Buzz with Helium 10’s Chief Brand Evangelist, Bradley Sutton. Every week, we cover the latest breaking news in the Amazon, Walmart, and E-commerce space, interview someone you need to hear from, and provide a training tip for the week.

Amazon is planning to sublease some of its warehouse space now that the pandemic-fueled surge in online shopping, which helped the e-commerce giant rake in soaring profits in the past two years, has eased.

Amazon is testing a new service that uses gig drivers to deliver goods directly from stores at shopping malls.

Walmart announced the arrival of Walmart+ Weekend, an online savings event exclusively for Walmart+ members that stretches over three days. The fun begins on Walmart.com on June 2, with the deals ending on June 5.

We also talk about why it seems like your back-end search terms are missing in your Amazon listing.

Bradley closes out the episode with the Pro Training tip of the week on how to use the all-new Cerebro one-click filters.

In this episode of the Weekly Buzz, Bradley talks about:

• 00:50 – Amazon Subletting Warehouses
• 02:50 – Prime Delivery From Malls
• 04:30 – Walmart+ Weekend Prime Day Rival
• 05:30 – Back End Keywords Gone?
• 09:30 – Freedom Ticket Walmart Module Sneak Peek
• 15:05 – Pro Training Tip: Cerebro One-Click Filters
• 19:12 – How To Get Notified About Amazon Search Glitches For Free

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. My name is Bradley, and this is the show where we get you familiar with the latest news in the Amazon and e-commerce space. We interview people in the industry you need to hear from and provide a Training Tip of the Week so that you can have serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon or Walmart world. Let’s go ahead and see what’s buzzing this week. Today, we’re gonna be talking about some very, very interesting changes going on on the back end of Amazon listings. We’re gonna give you a sneak peek at some new Walmart training content, plus show you a new way to get the most important keywords for your Amazon listings. All right, let’s go ahead and go to our first news article of the day. And this is actually from the Chicago business newspaper, and it was entitled Amazon Sells, or is trying to sublet 10 million square feet of their warehouses.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, right off the bat. This is something that a lot of people were kind of like worried about and they’re like, what’s going on is like Amazon in trouble. Or why are they trying to sublet or lease out 10 million square feet of warehouse spaces? Is this gonna cause concerns? Let’s first of all, put this into perspective. The article brought out how this only represents about five, 5% of the square footage, not even all of their square footage, which by itself is a small number. It’s only 5% of the square footage that they added during the pandemic. So if my mathematics is right here, all right, Amazon during the pandemic actually increased their square footage overall by 400 million. All right. Or by 200 million. I’m sorry. So if that means their total square footage is probably around 400 million and this is only 10 million square feet that they’re trying to go ahead and sublet.

Bradley Sutton:

So first of all, that’s like 2.5% or 2% of all of their square footage. So this is not like something that really Amazon sellers are gonna see a big difference. The other thing is this to me is a good sign. What was one of the biggest struggles we had as Amazon sellers last year? It was probably those inventory restrictions, right? Remember how at one point they changed it so that we had those sized tiers and like, Hey, you’re standard size. You’re at the peak. You can’t send anymore. Cuz you know, we’re completely full. Hey, the oversized, you can only send this much. I don’t know about you guys, but on Project X and Project 5k, I haven’t hit one of those limits in months and months, even though I actually have way more inventory in Amazon’s warehouses and it’s because they have so much space.

Bradley Sutton:

So again, this to me is not a bad or scary thing. This is actually a good thing. Next article is from the New York post, and this, it was entitled that Amazon is letting delivery of packages come directly from shopping malls. This is a pilot that they’re doing. And they have flex drivers. What Amazon calls flex drivers, who actually don’t use those Amazon trucks, but they actually use their own cars. Maybe you guys have seen Amazon packages delivered to your house by people in like their Toyota Camry or something like that. But anyway, they’re actually testing this out where they’re storing products at shopping malls, right? And then these flex drivers are picking up their products at local shopping malls and then delivering it, instead of having it come from Amazon warehouses and this speeds up the time that it takes to get to customers’ doorsteps, the company had told the post, now this pilot involved shopping malls in Vegas, Arizona, and Virginia, according to Bloomberg, who first reported this.

Bradley Sutton:

Now under this program, Amazon customers are given the choice of getting an item quicker if they opt to have that merchandise shipped directly from the local mall instead of the warehouse. So what do you guys think about this? Like sometimes maybe when I used to get like Walmart packages via door dash and things like that, like during the pandemic, it seemed kind of like not professional. Like when some shady person just driving up to my house and like leaving this plastic bag, do you think this is a good move by Amazon Prime or you’re kind of scared that the customer experience might suffer? The one positive side on this is like, let’s say you have a shopping mall close to and your products are stored there. I mean, you could start, even if you’re like living in the suburbs and not in the main city, you might be able to now get your packages within like a couple of hours of ordering it. So that’s cool.

Bradley Sutton:

The next article comes from thestreet.com and it’s talking about Walmart plus day. All right. So Walmart now is having their own Prime day rival. All right. Their prime day is called Walmart+ weekend. All right. Walmart plus weekend. And it’s exclusively for Walmart+ members and they’re gonna get free shipping, like Walmart+ and prime due and discounts on a lot of products. Now it was actually interesting. The article brought out that, that Walmart plus now membership is in the first year is up to like 30 million members. Now that’s still dwarfed by Amazon Prime, which has over 150 million, but that’s pretty impressive that they were able to tighten the gap that much in just one year. So the Walmart+ weekend is actually scheduled for June 2nd, at 3:00 PM Eastern Standard Time and runs through June 5th at 7:00 PM.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you’re selling on walmart.com right now, make sure that you have enough inventory ready to go, and you might see some increased sales from June 2nd through June 5th because of this. All right, the last article of the day or news piece is I have a question for you. When’s the last time you checked the back end of your Amazon listing? That means you just went into seller and then you hit edit listing. Well, if you haven’t done that in a while, the next time you do that, you’re gonna notice there’s now some mandatory fields that need to be filled out and you are not gonna be able to save your listing anymore. Like your make updates to it, unless you fill these out. Now some of these changes, this could be, by the way, if you’re using Helium 10 Listing Builder, you might have an error message if you don’t have these filled out inside of Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

So some of these new fields that you have to fill out one is called number of boxes, country of origin, dangerous goods, regulations, and fabric type. And that’s super weird. You’re like even on the coffin shelf and egg tray, obviously it’s not in the apparel category, but still all of a sudden it became mandatory that we filled out this fabric type field. So make sure to go into the back end of all your listings and get those updated. Now for some even more interesting changes along those lines. We first talked about this actually last week in the Helium 10 elite Facebook group, we always give them like the new breaking news first here, but now we’re gonna break it to the rest of you guys. You’re gonna notice probably in a lot of those listings, there is no longer a keywords tab, right?

Bradley Sutton:

You know, how there’s product details and keywords where that’s, where you have your search terms. And for some of you, you still had subject matter that has disappeared. As a matter of fact, there are no longer Search Terms field, which is the backend keywords. It actually still exists, but now it has changed its name. It moved now to the Product Details Tab. That’s where your bullet point and description is. And instead of being called search terms, it’s actually now called Generic Keyword, which is weird. You can still put multiple keywords, but it’s called Generic Keyword. I’m not sure if that’s a typo or not. They might change that, but that’s what it’s called right now. So if you’re like freaking out that your backend search terms are gone, look on your Product Details Tab, and now it is called search term or Generic Keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m sorry. And do you remember how before there used to be a way to get more than 250 bytes in your search terms? It was by using the brand registry tool called the search terms optimizer. If you use that, you could go above the 250 bytes since it didn’t count spaces. So you can get some little extra real estate and get like 280-290 total bytes. Then last year, actually everybody could do that even just directly into Seller Central, Amazon stopped counting spaces as nytes in the back end of your search terms. And so everybody could go ahead and use more than 250, if you did that. And now you go into your listing, it’s gonna give you an error message and says, Hey, you are now over the 250 bytes. You need to go ahead and, and edit this down. So that’s something to keep in mind there no longer is a Search Term Optimizer in Brand Registry and you no longer can go above that 250 countings the spaces now, what do you think of these changes?

Bradley Sutton:

Do you think this is gonna maybe impact how important the backend search terms or the backend keywords are to the Amazon algorithm? What do you think? I personally, I wanna do some testing of this because I wanna see if it’s still as impactful. And I wanna also see if the subject matter is even working at all. All right. That’s it for the basic news this week now next up instead of having an interview, I wanted to give you guys a sneak peek at a completely new training program that we have in Freedom Ticket that is dedicated to Walmart. So here is a short clip from one of the episodes so that you guys can have an idea of the quality of training you guys are gonna get in our new Walmart Freedom Ticket training. Here we go.

David:

In general, there are categories that do sell better on Walmart. The Walmart customer is looking for more specific categories. A lot of home products do really well on Walmart. There are a lot of reports done that have like the list of which categories do like from best to worst. So there’s definitely a lot of data out there. In general, like home products are just very, very good things. A lot as Michael kind of mentioned in previous videos, anything that’s kind of repurchased items, toiletries, toothbrush, anything really that is something that you’re gonna go always come back for. Now, that’s not to say that other products aren’t gonna do well on Walmart, but those just are the ones that you kind of, the Walmart customer is more accustomed to. So let’s kind of jump into Walmart and take a look at some products to really see how we can look at a keyword to see if it’s something that we’ll do well on Walmart.

David:

Something if it’s already too competitive or if there’s room to grow in the space. All right. So let’s look for an example of a product that has a very high search volume. We know it’s a very competitive product, just so we can take a look at what it looks like on Walmart compared to Amazon. So here we have vitamin C from one of the biggest keywords out there these days. And we could see right off the bat that the top row over here this is obviously a competitive product cuz the first product immediately has 2000 reviews, which is a very high amount for Walmart. You typically won’t see items with over a thousand reviews. It typically means that there were syndicated reviews, but it could be organic. I mean, this is an emergency. It’s a huge product it’s been around for a while and everyone knows it.

David:

So it could be that it’s just generated those reviews just because it’s been around for so long. But you will notice that even in the first row over here, we do have a product with 159 reviews. We have this sponsored listing over here and that has 159 reviews, which is significantly less than everything over here. But even in, in the second row, you have 180, you have 192 and these are four and a half star rated products. And if we continue down over here, we could see similar products over here was just like, not as good reviews under a hundred reviews already over here. We have these four and a half stars, a lot of them. And here we have an even eight reviews with four stars. Like this is a front page vitamin C result on Walmart like that.

David:

There’s an opportunity over here compared to Amazon. We’re gonna jump that on a second, but it’s definitely from the more competitive sides of Walmart. As you can see over here is another product with over a thousand reviews. Now you will notice that there are also not that many sponsored listings for vitamin C. Typically you’ll see the first two results are sponsored as well as a few more down the page. In this case, there’s only two on this front page. There’s one over here in the third spot. And then you have another one down here as well. Aside from that, there are no other sponsored listings for vitamin C. If we do go to the second page, we will see more. Let’s just take a look here. We have again, the third spot and then we’ll have it a little bit down here as well.

David:

And you will see like some of these banner ads, like in the middle or you’ll see them on top as well. And those are for one brand that’s exclusive right now for them. It’s not available to 3P sellers. So that’s something that we should see down the line but just something to make a note of. But just, we could see that there is competition for this. We could see that there’s definitely listings that have thousands of reviews, hundreds of reviews. Like it’s a very big product. We’re gonna take a look at a very niche product comparatively. But before that, let’s just take a look at Amazon for vitamin C just to see Walmart versus Amazon. So let’s go back and just go page one versus page one, just to kind of get an idea.

David:

So as you can see, first product, 2500, 600, 159 sponsored and like 643 compared to Amazon over here, we have the top row all sponsored. I mean, this is Amazon’s product. And look at these review counts each in the thousands in the 10,000, 20,000, 31,000, 57,000. Like these, this is way more competitive. You have, you have just an insane competition difference between these Amazon listings compared to these Walmart listings. I mean, look at these 43,000 reviews. Look at what you’re competing with on Amazon compared to trying to launch something on Walmart.

Carrie:

And the star reviews are like five stars, and like pretty much all.

David:

Exactly, exactly. These are all variables. I mean, you do have some four and a half, but like the ones at the top are all gonna be, they’re all gonna be like, I mean, it’s also a crazy amount of.

Carrie:

4.7 outta five is incredible.

David:

This is crazy like five stars with 32,000 reviews. Wow, crazy. So there’s obviously even for a product like a vitamin C such a big product, there is an opportunity at Walmart.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So do you guys learn something right there? I mean, I think all of you who are Amazon sellers pretty much know that, Hey, I probably shouldn’t sell vitamin C on Amazon because that’s pretty saturated right there. But this just shows how kind of wide open it still is on Walmart. Not saying, Hey, everybody go sell vitamin C on walmart.com right now. But you can see how fresh that market is, where something vitamin C is not even saturated yet like it is on Amazon. So that’s just one of the over 25 different training modules that you guys all have access to now inside of Helium 10 for Freedom Ticket. So make sure to go there. It’s on like week 11 bonus week, go into your Helium 10 account and get into Freedom Ticket and start learning how to sell on Walmart.

Bradley Sutton:

Now our pro training tip of the week is about how to find the top keywords for your listing. Helium 10 has always been the pioneer in that field and we just added something last week. That’s going to help you even faster get the top keywords for your listing or for your new niche. So let’s show you how to do that right now. As you guys know, Cerebro is probably my favorite tool at Helium 10, and it just got better with the introduction of One Click Filters. Let me explain exactly how this is gonna help you find your top keywords. All right. So let’s just say I’m doing a regular multi ASIN search here for Cerebro to find the top keywords on a new niche. I just picked a whole bunch of products here that had to do with collagen gummies. All right. Now, as you remember, sometimes tens of thousands of keywords come up 74,000.

Bradley Sutton:

Now I’ve done videos on how to find the top 15 keywords that are most important to the niche that are generating the sales and also how to find the keywords that maybe some of your competitors have completely missed. But now we have these One Click Filters where instead of having to go one by one and doing a whole bunch of filters in here, I can just click this. I’m gonna hit this top keywords and watch what’s gonna happen. It’s going to immediately narrow it down. Look at this. It gives me the top 24 filters. Now the top 24 keywords. Now is this really the top keyword? Let’s take a look at a couple of these collagen gummies. All right. The average competitor rank average is 13 and six out of those top are all ranking for it. Now, why is this competitor rank average 13?

Bradley Sutton:

Look at this. Almost everybody is right there on the top of page one. So absolutely that’s one of the top keywords. Now you might still see a, maybe 100 or 200 or 300 keywords here. What I would do to filter this down more is I would filter by the Competitor Performance Score. Remember the higher number here on Competitor Performance Score, which means that more competitors are all ranking for the same keyword and they’re ranking highly. So I could go in here to the competitor performance and you’ll put minimums and maximums here as well. All right. So what I wanna do right now is show you the opportunity keyword. So let’s go ahead and clear all of these. And this is kind of like what I would talk about in the other video where I said, Hey, here’s how you can find some keywords that maybe only one or two of your main competitors are ranking for and not all of them.

Bradley Sutton:

And these, we call opportunity keywords because they might be easier to rank for if you’re only competing with a couple of them. So let’s go ahead and hit opportunity keywords and what we are gonna come up. It came up with 762. Now let’s just take a look at a couple of these so you can kind of understand why it came up here. Like for example, women’s multivitamin gummy. I mean that’s 11,800, right? But take a look right here. There’s five ranking competitors here, but their competitor performance score is only 1.6. And the reason is take a look here. There is only one of them that is on the top of page one. And the rest of them are all unlike page 3, 4, 5, or six. So this is definitely an opportunity keyword. Now what I could do is I can go up here and I can go ahead and filter some of these down.

Bradley Sutton:

Like maybe I wanna put this to only the top 10 and maybe I wanna do 1500 search volume. And if I hit apply, it’s gonna narrow that list down even more so I can really get some great keywords here. So guys, this is not necessarily a different concept of doing keyword research. If you have gone through all the videos in the learn button here of finding the best keywords for your listing, you would’ve gone through this process, but just manual. You would’ve had to manually enter in all of the filters. And it might take a little bit of time. You can now get these top keywords with just one click. And that’s why they’re called One Click Filters. So make this part one A and part one B of your keyword research, these new One Click Filters to help you quickly get to your best keywords for your product.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So lastly, I wanted to remind you guys about the Amazon Anomaly Tracker. This is something that monitors Amazon’s search glitches, and you can find it at helium10.com/asa. If that’s too hard for you, remember just go h10.me/asa. Now what are Amazon glitches that it’s tracking? Well, there’s times where there’s tons and tons of listings on Amazon. All of a sudden get de-indexed for many keywords. I remember de-indexed means that it’s not even searchable doesn’t mean that necessarily the ranking changes. It means it’s not ranking at all. Right. Now this tool, if you sign up there, it’s completely free. You don’t even have to be a Helium 10 member to use this tool. It’s gonna notify you if that happens. And it’s like I said, it’s completely free to you.

Bradley Sutton:

So make sure to check it out. h10.me/asa or helium10.com/asa. Actually, the last couple of weeks, if you look at it right now, we have detected above average glitches happening across the board. And we haven’t even seen numbers like this of all these glitches that are happening. It’s still not in the red, zone’s kinda like in the yellow zone, but we haven’t seen this level of glitchiness if that’s even a word like in at least six months now, could this be because of those new backend search terms, updates that’s going on right now? It like started right around when that started happening. Who knows, but still, if you want to know, if this is kind of like happening across the board or if something’s just happened to you, make sure to just go to this page, helium10.com/asa, and put your email there so that you can get email notified when there’s a glitch happening. Or you can just go to that page and view the graph in real time. Anyways, guys, this is all that we have here this week for the Helium 10 Weekly Buzz. Hope you were able to learn something from this. And I hope you guys have a great rest of your week. We’ll see you guys later. Bye-bye now.

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