How Can I See What’s in the Backend of My Competitor’s Listing?

Bradley Sutton, Helium 10’s Director of Customer Success and Training, is back with more answers to your most sought-after questions. In this episode Bradley is answering the question, “How can I see what in the backend of my competitor’s listing?”

Short answer: It doesn’t matter.

Once upon a time, you might have cared about whatever keywords were hiding in the backend of our competitors’ ASINs. Or maybe you were worried that your competitors were using your brand name in their keywords to piggyback off of your success.

Now, we know better.

The idea that your competitors could be keeping ingenious keyword gems to themselves is a fun conspiracy theory to ponder but has little feasibility, and zero use to you.

After all, what if they have garbage keywords? Irrelevant terms that just take up precious real estate? Bradley’s example is – if you’re selling a phone case, what if the competitor has the keyword “ballpoint pen” in their backend? This information doesn’t help either of you (as there’s no point in you including irrelevant keywords in your listing), because nobody searching for a ballpoint pen is going to purchase a phone case when it comes up in the search results.

What really matters for the both of you is the keywords they’re converting for. As a reminder, those would be keywords through which customers find their product via a search, and then actually follow through with the purchase. The fact that that initial keyword search ended with them purchasing the product is a conversion – and this is what Amazon values highly when considering keyword relevancy and search terms.

So, again, it’s not important for you to be concerned with your competitors’ backend keyword dump; what IS important is that you know which specific keywords they are converting for.

The only way your competitor is maintaining a page one position for a keyword is if they are continuously converting – meaning garbage keywords meant to play the system (like the earlier “ballpoint pen and phone case” example) won’t help in any way. (And if your competitors do have those garbage keywords – fine, let them waste precious characters on them).

So instead of worrying about what keywords they have in their backend, focus on what keywords they are ranking/converting for.

Luckily, you can use Helium 10’s Cerebro tool for that.

Plugin your competitors’ ASINs and gather some deep insights on what keywords are converting for those ASINs. Can those keywords potentially bring you sales? Choose the ones that can, and add them to your listing.

(And remember, when studying the competition, make sure to choose competing for products that are similar enough to your product, or with a similar audience).

Meanwhile, if you’re still worried about your competitors using your brand name in their backend, run their ASIN through Index Checker on all three match types. If all three types show that the brand name is indexed but you don’t see any mention of the name in the listing front end, then yes, most likely they are using your brand name in the backend.

On the other hand, if they’re indexed only in the “Field ASIN Index Check,” it means they probably don’t have it in their backend, but converted for it via PPC.

In summary: don’t worry about the keywords your competitor is hiding in their backend. Focus on keywords they’re converting for – which you can find through Helium 10 Cerebro and Helium 10 Index Checker.

Happy selling!