#328 – 2022 Amazon Listing Optimization Workshop Part 1

Listing optimization’s general principles may always be the same, but there has been a lot of changes and updates in the last couple of years as far listing optimization goes, like indexing, photography, PPC, and how it relates to your Amazon listing. Today, we are going to focus on how to optimize your listings on Amazon in the current year.

Make sure to listen to the very end as Bradley shares his newest never before shared strategies in this podcast.

In episode 328 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 01:50 – There Is A Full Workshop Version Of This Podcast
• 02:30 – Your Listing Optimization Is Important
• 03:40 – Small Changes Have A Big Impact On Your Bottom Line
• 07:20 – Focus On Your Written Content For Your Amazon Listings
• 09:00 – The Most Important Fields To The Amazon Algorithm
• 11:00 – Getting Your Product Indexed On Amazon
• 14:40 – Use Helium 10’s Frankenstein And Listing Builder
• 16:00 – Helium 10’s Index Checker And How It Can Help You
• 24:00 – Using Magnet’s Smart Complete
• 26:00 – The Don’ts For Amazon Titles
• 28:00 – The Do’s For Amazon Titles
• 30:00 – How To Optimize And Change Your Canonical URL
• 34:00 – Best Practices For Search Terms And Subject Matter

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, we’re gonna go over all of the latest and greatest strategies having to do with optimizing your listening in 2022, including some things I’ve never, ever gone over here on this podcast. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Sellers have lost thousands of dollars by not knowing that they were hijacked perhaps on their Amazon listing, or maybe somebody changed their main image or Amazon changed their shipping dimension so they had to pay extra money for every order. Helium 10 can actually send you a text message or email if any of these things or other critical events happen to your Amazon account. For more information, go to h10.me/alerts. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS-free unscripted, and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the Amazon or Walmart world. Today, we’re gonna be focusing a little bit more on Amazon, and in particular, it’s gonna be all about optimizing your listing. Now we had just done an online workshop that we do, like once every year and a half.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s like a webinar that we do usually supposed to be like once every year, but it’s been so long since we updated it, that we just did it a few weeks ago. And so you guys wanna see the whole thing and be able to watch it like on a video and see nonstop screen shares and things like that. Go to h10listings.com and you should be able to cash it there, but I’m gonna give you guys an overview here on this podcast that hopefully, even though maybe you can’t see exactly what I’m doing, those of you who aren’t watching the video of this, you’ll be able to understand what I’m talking about. And maybe you can go later to that video, to get some more details, because there’s a lot of stuff guys that has changed over the last couple of years, as far as indexing goes, as far as what is indexed, what’s not indexed, you know, photography, just tons and tons of different things, PPC, how that relates to if you’re indexed or not.

Bradley Sutton:

And it’s long overdue that we did one of these. So I’m happy that we’re doing it now. Like I said, there’s a lot of things that has changed as far as listing optimization goes, but there’s also a lot of things that have stayed the same, and one is just the general principle. You know, I’ve said this once I’ve said it a million times, you know, we ere at Helium 10 obviously help you through our tools to find great products, whether it’s through Black Box or Pinterest Trend finder. And then you can maybe find a great supplier from the Alibaba supplier finder. You know, you might have the best product in the world. The second step, you might have the best keywords in the world, thanks to the research that you can do in Cerebro and Magnet and other tools that we have.

Bradley Sutton:

But all of that is useless. If you don’t have a well optimized listing, right? First of all, if you don’t even get the keywords into your listing, you know, how are you gonna be searchable? How are customers gonna find it and then know that you have an amazing product and give you five star reviews, right? And if you don’t have a, you know, a product that can be found and bought it, doesn’t matter how amazing your product is, it’s useless, it’s just gonna be sitting there and collecting dust in Amazon warehouses. Now one thing I went over in this workshop and I think is important, to understand is how just small changes and small impacts can have kind of a big impact on your bottom line. All right. So small changes to your listing can help your conversion rate and that can have a big impact on your bottom line.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Let me just explain it, let’s just say, pretend you, you, your product is the coffin shelf, the Project X coffin shelf, all right, that actually retails for $29.97 on Amazon. Now let’s say you’ve got a hundred daily sessions or a hundred people are viewing your listing every day. Okay, and your conversion rate is 8%, which is actually not that great. It’s pretty bad. If your conversion rate is 8%, all right. But watch what a little bit can do. So if your conversion raise 8%, that means every sale you’re doing $29.97, as I said, that comes out to in a month about $7,100 or $7,200 is what you’re grossing. Now, what if you could just, you know, tweak a few things here and there on your listing, your sessions, doesn’t go up. Everything else stays the same, but your conversion rate goes up just 2%, 2% to 10%.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, what that means is you are actually now selling 10 units today instead of eight, right? Still, at $29.97, you’re now grossing $9,000 a month. That’s an increase of almost $2,000 just from that 2% increase to 10%. What if you increase it another 5% guys, we’re talking single digit number increases here. We’re not, we’re not talking about, Hey, increase your conversion rate 20% or 30% we’re talking single digit increases. All right, let’s just say, now you go up to 15%. You still only have a hundred daily sessions. Now, you’re selling 15 units a day, right at that $29.97, you’re now grossing $13,500 a month from your original conversion rate from 8 to 15, you are now just by optimizing your listing. And if it has this effect, grossing $6,300 a month more, all right. So you see what kind of effect, just a small bump on your conversion rate, 2%, 3%, 4% can have.

Bradley Sutton:

And, and that’s just the beauty of it. Now, what happens though, is listing optimization. Isn’t just about changing your conversion rate, but the people who are already gonna see your page, right, it’s about, you know, getting more keywords into your listing, knowing how to put the keywords in your listing so that perhaps you can actually be seen by a wider audience. So imagine this double effect, not only can you increase your conversion rate, but you can increase your session. So remember in those scenarios, I was giving you a hundred sessions. What, if you can increase that to 150 sessions and increase your conversion rate to like 10%, 12% from that 8%, you can see how it’s kind of a snowball effect. And so that’s the power of listing optimization, just a little tweak here or there, and little tiny increases to your conversion rate and little increases to the exposure of how many people are seeing your product and it can have a huge impact on your bottom line.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, in that workshop, I told you h10listings.com, you actually can see a whole bunch of detailed strategies on your photography. We’ve actually gone over that recently on the podcast with Lailama. She was actually the one who was on that workshop with me. Again, if you guys wanna see that part, make sure to go to h10listings.com, you can see that part there. I’m not gonna talk about it too much on here, because we just did that, you know, about a month ago, but we had some great info on what are infographic images 3d imaging things of that nature. Now let’s focus right now again on the content of an Amazon listing, as far as the written content. All right. And now there’s two things that you’ve got to keep in mind.

Bradley Sutton:

Your listings should be optimized for number one, the Amazon algorithm, but then number two, your target customer. I’ve said it before so many times at one of the biggest mistakes that Amazon sellers make sometimes is they get too caught up in the metrics and then thinking like a seller, they have their seller’s hat on instead of the buyer’s hat. All right. What do I mean by that? Obviously, at Helium 10, we give you so many tools. We give you so much training, like, as we tell you, what’s important to algorithm and about max characters and Title Density and all these like metrics and Magnet IQ score and things like that. And then sellers get so focused on that stuff, which are important, but they forget at the end of the day, they’ve got to sell to an actual customer, an actual human being.

Bradley Sutton:

So it’s a balancing act. If you are selling on you’re optimizing a listing, you’ve gotta make two people happy. I remember the first person I heard who said it like that about keeping two people happy was Brock Johnson who’s been on this podcast before. But number one, again, is the Amazon algorithm. You gotta make the Amazon algorithm happy so that you can get that exposure, but number two, and even more important, you have got to make your buyer happy. All right, because if all you had to worry about was the Amazon algorithm, you could just throw a whole bunch of random keywords and stuff, titles and stuff, bullet points, and all this stuff. And you could be fully optimized for the Amazon algorithm so that the Amazon algorithm loves your listing, throws you up on page one. But at the end of the day, if a customer is just gonna see this whole gobbledygook of a listing they’re not gonna buy it.

Bradley Sutton:

So remember to balance that out. Now, let’s talk about the order of what aspects of a listing are important to that first person that we have to make happy, the Amazon algorithm, and this has not changed as far as I know. And in my test, I still see it kind of working the same way, but this was something that actually kind of like got out of Amazon a while back where it actually showed, there was something that showed, there was a document that showed what they view as the most important parts. And the number one most important is the title. You know, number two, the backend search terms. And number three, I kind of call this two A and two B actually, cuz in my experience, in my test, it kind of interchangeable. The impact of both of these are very similar.

Bradley Sutton:

So two A and two B for me would be the backend search terms. And then the backend subject matter if your listing has it. Now, the next one would be the bullet points, and then lastly, the description now just because that description is all the way at the end, doesn’t mean it’s completely not important. I mean if you’re in a niche where you want to be indexed for as many keywords as possible, well, you need to make sure that you take advantage of all of the different aspects of a listing. Now let’s talk about getting indexed. All right. Now I’m gonna go a little bit deep in here and action. I’m gonna talk a little bit more than I did even on that workshop that I did that webinar because some, some things I’ve discovered in the last few days are kind of like blowing my mind about how things are different than even like 2020.

Bradley Sutton:

Right? So index, what does index even mean? You guys have heard me talk about this a lot of times, how, how Manny Coats, one of the first ones to talk or use that word in kind of the common vernacular of an Amazon seller where being indexed means, are you searchable for a keyword, has Amazon related your listing to a certain keyword so that it’s potentially possible that you could show up in the search results or perhaps the sponsor results for a certain keyword. Now, now what does that mean? Well first of all, if you type a keyword, is it possible that you show up at all now here’s the thing you could be indexed for something but not ranking for it and invisible if you were to search even going to the last page. Well, because years ago, Amazon kind of stopped in most categories showing like all 30 or 40 pages of the results, right back in the day you type like 2017, you type an iPhone six case or whatever it was the iPhone case then, and it’ll say 1 of 50 out of 20,000 results or something like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Well, you could literally go page by page to almost all of those to the end, to see all of them now in most categories now in search results, you can only see the top seven pages usually. So which is about 300 results, organic results, right? So just because you’re indexed does not always mean you’re showing up in the search results. So that’s important to understand there’s a differentiation there. You know, sometimes I hear people say Helium 10 Index Checker says I’m indexed for this, but I checked and I don’t see myself anywhere. Well, that’s because Amazon only shows like 306, but there are many search results where it’s up to tens of thousands of results show up. So if you wanna know how many different products are indexed for a certain keyword, just type that keyword in.

Bradley Sutton:

And then at the very top of the page, it’ll say something like, Hey, this is 1 out of 48 for 500 and, and 26 results for coffin shelf. All right, now, now why is bean indexed so important guys? You know, this is important because you want to show up, you wanna be found either in sponsored ads or organic ads you have got or organic results I should say, you want to be able to show up for a certain keyword. You know, that’s where 50% of sales come from search. And so if you’re not searchable for a keyword, well, how you going to get found by that customer that you are targeting? So how can you get indexed is the next question. And of course, you know, there’s just common sense things, right? Put the keywords in your listings, right?

Bradley Sutton:

This bottom line. If you want to be indexed the easiest way, get those keywords into your listing. Now you do not need to have every single keyword phrase in your listening to get indexed. Now, we always suggest having your most important phrases usually, about 20 to 25, if you can get them in phrase form, you’re listening. And again, phrase, form means like if the keyword is black coffin shelf, you know, you have black coffin shelf in that exact phrase, somewhere in your listing, perhaps even multiple times. We’ll talk a little bit about that later, but that is actually important for the phrases that again is making the Amazon algorithm happy, but to be indexed for a phrase like that, you do not necessarily have to have it in phrase form. I like to only save those for my most important ones.

Bradley Sutton:

For example, you can have black in the title coffin in the bullet points shelf in the description. And theoretically speaking, most of the time, as long as Amazon thinks that you relevant to it, you will be searchable or indexed for black coffin shelf, even though it’s not in phrase form. So the process that you should do in order to get indexed is when you’re doing your keyword research. And again, we have other, you know, podcast episodes we’ve done about that as far as the details go, but you might come up with, you know, thousands and thousands of keywords that you potentially might want to show up for, right? Pick your top 20, based on what’s the most important and the highest search for your exact niche, the most relevant to you put those in phrase form, right? Keep those on a separate list.

Bradley Sutton:

And then all the rest of the 1,000, 2,000 phrases, what you do copy all of those and put it into a tool called Frankenstein. All right. Now, with Frankenstein, with just a couple of clicks, you’re gonna be able to take all of those thousand phrases and then extract out the single unique keywords. Because if you have a thousand phrases that are related to coffin shelf, I guarantee coffin is in like 200 or 300 of those phrases, right? You only need it once in your listing though, in order to be searchable for it. Right? And then what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna get those phrases or those phrases split up into the individual keywords. And then you copy your individual keywords to our tool Listing Builder. All right. Now, with Listing Builder, you are going to be able to make sure that you have all of your individual keywords that you wanted to get in your listing and all of the phrases as well, that you wanted to get into your listing.

Bradley Sutton:

And then, so even though you might only have 300 individual words you tell, could be index for up to a thousand or thousands of other keywords that those individual words are part of. Now here let me get a little bit into something that I didn’t talk about. All right. Now, as you guys know, you Helium 10 members, we’ve got Index Checker. One of the first tools that Helium 10 ever came up with great tool, it’s the only index checking tool that I know of that does three checks. Now, if you don’t have Index Checker, you can still do these checks on your own. All right, the first check that Index Checker is doing what we call the traditional way of checking of your index. And this used to work a hundred percent of the time before, but then it kind of stop being the only check that you could do about three or four years ago.

Bradley Sutton:

So, you copy the ASIN and the keyword, and then you put it into an Amazon search result. So if you wanna say, “Hey, is this coffin shelf index for the word coffin shelf?” I would get that the ASIN of that product and then space and then put coffin shelf the search bar, and then, you know, see if it actually comes up all right. Now here’s the thing that stopped working completely as far as being the only way to check. Like you could be not indexed there, but still, be indexed on Amazon. So we came up with two more checks that you can do. The secondary check is what we call the storefront check. Now on Index Checker, we don’t automatically do that. So if you guys are familiar with Helium 10, you’ve got, got to actually enter the storefront ID into a field there before you press enter on the Index Check to make sure it’s doing that other check.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. So storefront check though, if you’re just doing it on your own, without Helium 10, you would go to the storefront of a listing, all right, you do that is, let’s say you’re on a listing. And then it says shipped by Amazon sold by Manny’s Mysterious Oddities or whatever is the name or How cool is that? I think is our storefront name there, click there, and you see the storefront ID in the URL at the top of that page. You’ve gotta take that storefront ID. It’s a long number of digits, more than an ASIN, and then paste it into Index Checker. All right. Or you could just go into Amazon and go to that storefront and then actually click the next page, which is their storefront, where it shows all of the seller’s products, and then just type in the keyword and the ASIN there, and that’s the storefront check.

Bradley Sutton:

Now the third one is kind of difficult to do. It’s called the field ASIN check. And it’s what we’re doing is we’re just checking some URL that is just another way of checking if you are indexed. And so again, there’s three different ways that you can check if you are indexed. Now, here is some of the new stuff. Number one, one thing I’ve been noticing for months now is that the traditional index check gives a lot of what I like to call false positives. All right. And it’s not that Index Checker is wrong. This happens if you just check in Amazon yourself, but if you put in the ASIN and the keyword, it’ll show up your product, but it doesn’t always mean your indexed. That’s why I always suggest doing two or three checks or just using Index Checker because a lot of results now you can put in a random keyword plus the ASIN and it’ll show up, but it does not mean your indexed. Why Amazon is doing that?

Bradley Sutton:

I have no idea. But it’s really weird. Like you’ll enter in your product and then a random keyword and then 15 results will come up including your product, but it doesn’t always mean that your indexed. So if I’m using Index Checker, I usually like to try and make sure that at least two of those checks are going through. Now, here’s the other thing that’s crazy guys. Sometimes times you could use Index Checker you are not indexed or you’re using not Helium 10. And you try three different ways and in no way, your indexed, but you are ranking organically and in sponsor ads, I had this happen with a Coff shelf. I’ve been doing all lot of testing lately.

Bradley Sutton:

And there was a keyword. It was spider web shelf right. Now spider and web are not in the coffin shelf listing anywhere. So from day one, I was not indexed, but I checked spider, web, shelf, and all those three words together, not indexed in Index Checker, not indexed on Amazon, but I was ranking for it on page one. All right. And I’m like, what in the world is going on? I had never seen that before. And I started looking into other listings. There are a lot of listings out there where if you check these traditional ways, it is not indexed. It will say that you’re not indexed, but sure enough there you are in sponsor results. I tried this for some other keywords that I knew I was not indexed for. And I tried to even run sponsored ads on it.

Bradley Sutton:

And sure enough, I got impressions. And this is, I don’t know if anybody’s talked about this guys, but this is kind of impactful before you could not run a manual sponsored ad for a targeted keyword that you were not indexed for. And we’ve given you hacks and different things that still work on how you can get index for keywords that aren’t on your listing, you know, by relating yours to other listings, et cetera. But now in the last few months, this is just really interesting. You can now even run exact manual ads on keywords that not only are not in your listing but you are not indexed under the true additional way. And so I started diving into this to try and see if I can figure out, you know, what was causing this. And it was very interesting is that related keywords had some activity in sponsored ads.

Bradley Sutton:

So I had never targeted spider web shelf in sponsored ads before, but in an auto or broad campaign, it was like spiderweb with no space in the middle, and something else came up and we didn’t get purchases on it. Nope, no purchases on these keywords. But we had impressions from like an auto or broad campaign and we actually had a number of clicks. And so it looks like what is happening is Amazon in the backend maybe kind of like loosening their, their criteria for what gets indexed and not indexed. You know, like I said before to get indexed, you would always have to have like at least a couple of conversions for some kind of keyword. And then only that keyword would be now indexed, thanks to that PPC from the auto or broad campaign, but now even just clicks inactivity and impressions can get you indexed, but not only for that keyword but like other versions of the keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

So I looked in our sponsored ads as a matter of fact, let me try and show that to you guys here again, if you’re our watching this on YouTube, you’ll probably see it. Yeah. So  I’m here in Adtomic, as you can see. And I did a search for all of the spider, the keywords with spider in, and you’ll see here, there is not, you know, on the right column here, if you guys can see this, you’ll see that there are zero orders, but there is a couple hundred impressions here for all these keywords related to spider. And we had a total of 60 clicks. So because of all these clicks, I guess, for things like spider coffee mug and spider mirror and spiderweb rug and Spiderman bathroom decor, and here’s one spider shelf, it’s not spiderweb shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

But because of that, what happened was, is that Amazon is like, you know what work is gonna go ahead and kind of like, make sure you’re searchable for all these keywords. You know, you’re not gonna know that we’ve made you searchable, but it’s happening. All right. So you know, you’re gonna see some things in Helium 10, that’ll help kind of like let you know if there are keywords that you’re not even indexed for, but that you are still searchable. You know that’ll be coming down the road, but this is, this is all kind of new. So just beware guys that the traditional ways that you check, like, “Hey, am I indexed, am I not indexed? And then am I gonna be able to be shown for PPC?” They’re not necessarily foolproof ways. I guarantee you guys are able to target keywords in PPC that you probably didn’t even think that you could target because you indexed in any traditional index.

Bradley Sutton:

And so, you know, some different ways to kind of know, if this is happening, is run your PPC reports. If you’re you’re using Adtomic, or if you’re using your Seller Central and see where you’ve gotten clicks. And then what you do is you check those common words like, I showed you before there was 33 different words that had spider in it that I was getting clicks and activity and happened was now long tail keywords that had spider. I was now showing up for Amazon search results. So tools that can help you do that. If you see a certain keyword that you seem to have activity on and that you know, you are not indexed for, or that you don’t have in your listing take that root keyword or root keyword phrase, put it in the Helium 10 tool Magnet, and then sort it out for smart, complete in Magnet.

Bradley Sutton:

And that’s gonna show you a bunch of long tail keywords that have that root keyword in there. So again, guys, this is the first time I am ever saying this in any public form, cuz this is kind of new discoveries that I’ve just recently been making. Now some of this again is kind of like we’ve talked about this for a couple years like getting indexed for keywords that aren’t in your listing, having activity related to it. But this is the first time where now you can actually start getting index for these variations of keywords that you haven’t not only do not having your listing, but you haven’t even had purchases from these keywords. I think this is really cool. It’s given you more ability to show up for more keywords. And so it makes it that much more important that all of the root keywords you do have in your listing, because the more you have that, the more things that Amazon is gonna like show you for in broad and auto campaigns.

Bradley Sutton:

And all it takes is a couple of these other like kind of big keywords that have a lot of other long tail variations of it to have activity and boom exponentially, you have the potential to come up for a lot more you know, keywords in both PPC and organic. So really cool stuff that is happening right now in the indexing world. And I’m sure I’m gonna be talking about this more later on. Let’s talk a little bit about going back to the rest of the listing. We said before that the most important one is the title. So let’s talk about some don’ts for the title, you know don’t keyword stuff, guys. I’ve talked about this so many times before this is going back to making the customer happy, right.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, no customer wants to see some crazy, crazy keyword stuff, title, you know, like there was one I found the other day that I used for the workshop. And let me read you, this title guy says “asuwish compatible with Samsung Galaxy S four wallet case and temper glass, protect your flip cover, cardholder, sell accessories, phone cases for galaxy” that’s a misspelling. And it goes on and on and on that’s literally all the title. That’s ridiculous. You know, if you’re a customer do you wanna see a title like that? You know, nobody wants to see something like that. Another thing you guys should not be doing is promotional phrases. You know, some of the keywords that Amazon actually marks and tells you not to do are keywords like free shipping, a hundred percent quality guaranteed, hot item bestseller and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Another don’t is don’t go over the max characters. If possible, all right, now I say if possible because this is really weird, there’s, first of all, there’s tons of different max characters that you’ll see and different listings, you know, some say 50, some say 80, some say a hundred, some say 250. But you know, I actually have not seen listings get suppressed by going over, some even top sellers do it. Like there is this shampooing conditioner from, WOW. And if you actually put it into your own Seller Central Account, you’ll see that it, Amazon is telling you don’t go over 50 characters. Right? However, this top seller that’s doing like millions of dollars a year. It’s got like almost 200 characters in it and obviously, nothing has happened to it. So, you know, I know there’s smart Alex out there who say, Hey, Bradley, why are you saying not to go over the max characters?

Bradley Sutton:

I do it and I haven’t had any trouble. I get it. You know, there’s a lot of times where, where, you know, Amazon does not always enforce it. I’m just saying what Amazon is saying. It’s probably best to try and keep it under, especially if it’s 250. Now, if it’s 50, you know, that is like super, super low. I probably would go over, if everybody else in the niche is going over, I’m probably gonna go over too. But yeah don’t go over 250 because that just doesn’t look that great. Another thing not to do is to use all caps. You know, sometimes people say, oh, I’m gonna use all caps in my title so that I can stand out more in search results. Actually, that’s against Amazon’s terms of service to that. What are some of the things that you should do in your title first thing, get your most important keyword phrases in your title?

Bradley Sutton:

All right. You know, I’ve talked about this before we call it keyword stuffing without keyword stuffing. You know, for example, let’s say your main keywords are egg tray, wooden egg tray, rustic wooden egg tray, egg tray decor. If I started off my title, rustic wooden egg tray decor, guess what? All of those four phrases is all there, in phrase form, because they’re kind of like feeding off of each other. It’s all in phrase form. You’ve got rustic wooden egg tray. You’ve got wooden egg tray. You’ve got egg tray and you’ve got egg tray decor all in one. Alright. So this is great to do. If you want to get some important keywords and make that path to page one, easier for those keywords, get those in your title. Another thing we’ve talked about is having in mind title density, right?

Bradley Sutton:

We have that in almost all of our keyword research tools now, where you can actually see how many times on page one, the last time we checked a certain keyword is in the title in phrase form in those search results on page one, and if you find a keyword that is really, really relevant to your niche and, you know, decently searched, and it has a low titled density number, like three, meaning there’s only like three or less products on page one that have that title, or that have that keyword in the title. It’s gonna be a lot easier for you to get to page one, as far as when you’re trying to get that initial activity. Another thing that’s important is to optimize your Canonical URL, right? Optimize your Canonical URL. How can you do that?

Bradley Sutton:

This is one of the ones that kinda like bonus tips I gave. And I’ve talked about this before. Nothing new here, but for those of you who don’t know first of all, what your Canonical URL is, let me just show it to you, those of you watching on YouTube here, what your Canonical URL is, the URL that Amazon assigns every listing and it’s the one that’s indexed principally by Google as well. So if, if you look, if you search for any keyword on Amazon, you click it and you look at the URL, it’ll say amazon.com and then there’ll be a forward slash and then usually five, six or seven words separated by a dash, and that’s your canonical URL. And it’s what shows up in Google as well. Now, the way that you can kind of lock in your Canonical URL from day one get five full words.

Bradley Sutton:

This doesn’t work a hundred percent of the time. For me, it’s like 90% of the time, because sometimes I’m not sure what Amazon considers a full word. I know numbers are not considered full words and then like end and two, and the are not considered full words, but sometimes it’s like a gray area and it’s hard to know which Amazon considers a full word, but if you put five keywords right there and then a dash, space after the last keyword and then a dash, and then another space, usually those first five keywords will lock in as your Canonical URL. Pro-tip, you can actually change it later on like I’ve done it before six months after I had a listing, I changed those first five words, boom, 24 hours later, my Canonical URL changed without having to do anything else.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, sometimes that doesn’t work. And sometimes that doesn’t work for me. So what’s plan B, plan B is go ahead and change it. But then if it doesn’t work after like 24 to 48 hours, all you have to do is open up a case to Seller Central and just say, “Hey, seller central. I’d like to optimize my Canonical URL to accurately represent my product. Could you make it this?”And then actually give them the Canonical URL that you are wanting to change it too with like five ever six keywords separated by dashes. And as long as it’s relevant, it’s not something crazy. They’ll be like, “oh yeah, cool, no problem”. And, and I just did that a couple of weeks ago, still works and they change it on our test coffin shelf listing more tips.

Bradley Sutton:

Hey, put your brand name in the title guys. You know, I know this is a controversial topic. A lot of people don’t want to do that, but that’s what Amazon says they want you to. And they even say that “Hey, if you don’t put your brand name in the title, we have an algorithm or a bot, or I forgot what exactly they say. But it says will sometimes go ahead and put it for you”. Now, here’s the thing. They don’t tell you this. But if that happens a lot, I’ve seen it happen before. What happens is if they have to go change your listing title, it’s gonna change to something super short and not optimized. And then once they change it, you’re not able to change it anymore.

Bradley Sutton:

Like it’s locked in. So be on the safe side, guys, go ahead and put your brand name in your title to kind of save you from having to deal with that issue later on. Now, another thing that a lot of sellers don’t do is they don’t keep truncation in mind. Truncation means that sometimes in search results on a desktop or in mobile, Amazon cuts off the title after a certain number of characters. All right. So take a look at where your listing or how your listing is showing up in mobile. You know, I gave a couple of examples on the webinar. There was one where there was this like moon shelf. And then the very last part of the title says, moon Fapha and then dot it got truncated, right? It got truncated to moon Fapha and that’s, you know, it’s like a Vietnamese soup, right.

Bradley Sutton:

But it really was trying to say moon face design or something like that, but half the word was cut off. So it just looked really weird. The other example I showed was this like hook, this coffin shaped hook, but then it got cut off, right. Where after it says in the title coffin shaped towel. And so you’re looking at this maybe in search results, you’re like, what am I buying a coffin shaped towel? Like, what the heck is that? So again try not to have your title cut off in some random, random place, all right. It’s really important to make sure that, you know, in search results your listings make sense and that people actually do want to click on it. All right. So that’s the title. Now let’s talk about the search terms and subject matter some best practices there.

Bradley Sutton:

First of all, use all characters available. Now, this is important because this is valuable real estate. You know, like the title, you’re very limited with the kind of space you can use. So usually traditionally for search terms, it’s about 200 and 50 characters or 249 bites, I should say. Now, now here’s the interesting thing. For the search terms, for the longest time, it was only 249 characters. Then it became like 5,000 at one point and went back down to 1000. And then now for a few years, it’s been like 249, 250 around there now, before if you brand registered. And this is one of the things that we talk about in our last workshop, whew, about a year and a half ago, if you’re a brand registered, the cool thing was, was that Amazon would not count the spaces. So if it said you had 249 bites, if you’re a brand registered, you can go into the brand registry part of of your Seller Central and use the search term optimizer and actually put in extra keywords that you could not put in the regular backend of your listing, because in that field, it would not count the spaces as bites.

Bradley Sutton:

You know, bites include spaces for those who don’t know. Now, the interesting thing is now everybody, whether you are brand registered or not. And when I say now, this has been like a few months, it was late 20, 21. Were they made this change where now everybody can go ahead and put extra beyond 249, not counting the spaces. So you know, how many that is. It depends on how long your words are, right? But, you know, usually, you can get like about 280, 290 bytes now, because Amazon is not counting the bytes. It’s only in this field, in the other fields. And Amazon still counts, bytes the normal way to count bytes and characters which includes spaces. But for some reason, in the search terms now for everybody not just brand registered sellers, you have a little bit more real estate that you can do it.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s not anything earth shattering, but Hey, search terms is important. You, you can get a good 2, 3, 4, 5 more words in there. If not more with them not counting the bytes for subject matter, you can do usually about 50 characters per line. All right. And usually, you have three lines or up to five lines sometimes of subject matter that you can use. Well, talk a little bit about subject matter later and how you can get that if you don’t have subject matter. Another thing is don’t duplicate words in just one field. I don’t really like that. You know, there, I threw up an example. I know people do that guys, and they probably do it for the Amazon algorithm. But again, I just can’t see buyers liking this, like one of the hop collagen peptides out there, check out this title says “collagen powder, purely inspired collagen peptides powder, collagen supplements for women and men collagen protein powder.”

Bradley Sutton:

Guys, that was all one title. If you notice, I said collagen four times and powder three times all in one title, I do not like to duplicate the same word in the same exact field. Now I’ll talk a little bit later about duplicating want something in your title and in the search terms or subject matter. We’ll talk about that a little bit later, but don’t do it in the same exact field. Like one line of subject matter one field of search terms, one bullet point, don’t be using the same word guys. It’s Amazon doesn’t like it. And I can imagine that Amazon buyers would like that either. Another thing is you should use misspelled words and foreign language words. All right. An example I used when I did the workshop was you know, you type in Magnet, you type in collagen, you see a bunch of misspellings, like COLAAGN, and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

Use those that you find in Magnet, put it in the back end of your, of your listening. I don’t like putting those in the front end because it makes it look like you can’t spell. Right. Spanish words, you know, put those in the back end and other language keywords too. Sometimes they’re Spanglish. You know, like for example, “colágeno for women” is a keyword word. That’s Spanglish, there’s one word, that’s Spanish, one word that’s English. So like if it’s a really high search one, that one actually has 27,000 searches a month. I’m gonna put that in phrase form in the back end of my listening to get that extra juice. Another thing that’s happening now is there’s a lot of non-Spanish and non-English keywords being searched on Amazon. Like for example, the Korean word for hoe like a garden hoe is a homey.

Bradley Sutton:

And if you look in Cerebro on some of these gardening hoe’s, you’ll see actual Korean words, kinda like the shirt I’m wearing now, I’m wearing a shirt from Reply 1988, my favorite Korean drama, but it’s in Hangul, which is, you know, the Korean alphabet. So people are actually typing with a Korean keyboard into Amazon USA and typing in these Korean words for products that they want. And his is a great example. If you type in hoe into Amazon, the English word, you know, there’s a thousand gardening hoe products that come up. That means there’s a thousand products index for this keyword. If you type in the Korean word for hoe homey in the actual Hangul, the Korean alphabet only 148 products are indexed for that keyword. So guys use like magnets are able to find these other language keywords, get those into the back end of your listing in the search terms or subject matters so that you can be indexed for it, you know, 148 results come up.

Bradley Sutton:

That means pretty much you just get your listing in there, or you get that into your listing. You’re gonna be on page three instantly. If you don’t have access to subject matter, if you’re in you know, foreign country, I’m sorry, you know, like Germany, UK, the last I checked, they’ve never had subject matter available to most of the categories, if not all the categories in the USA, more and more and more listings now, have it disappeared from the backend of the listing. So if you were to like, look in the backend of, for example, our coffin shelf, you’ll see all it shows right here is the search terms. There is no space for the subject matter. So if you guys wanna get subject matter into your listing, if you have a USA listing, and if you’re a Diamond member of Helium 10, what you have to do is you just need to go into Listing Builder and then in the subject matter, go ahead and enter in 3, 4, 5 of lines of subject matter and then hit the sync to Amazon button.

Bradley Sutton:

And what we’re doing is we’re actually syncing with the back end of your listing, and you’ll never see it in the backend of your listing under subject matter. But trust me, it works. I’ve done this time and time again, where I check if it’s updating and sure enough, it does words I wasn’t indexed before 15 minutes later after syncing my listing with Listing Builder and putting something in the backend for that subject matter there, I now have subject matter. So at least 150 characters, three lines of 50 I would use, and then I would go ahead and try and do all five to just to see if you can get that. So great little hack there that unless you have a Helium 10 and the Diamond plan, you’re not able to do for some of you guys that the Diamond plan, a lot of people use just so they can have Adtomic and they can have sub-users and a bunch of other things, but if you have a lot of listing, just the fact that you can get subject matter, which is so important for, for super important indexing issues, that’s worth the extra a hundred bucks, in my opinion, for the Diamond plan to get those ranked juice from your subject matter.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, another thing not to do in subject matter in search terms, don’t use brands, other competitor brands, trademark words, ASINs. This is against Amazon service service. I always get asked that “Hey can I put, you know, the brand name and my competitor in the backend? You know, they won’t know. I have it. So I just wanna get like indexed for it.” No, don’t do it guys. I don’t think it helps that much anyways. And secondly, it’s literally against Amazon terms of service. You wanna get your listing shut off. So guys we’re gonna have to split this into two parts because I’ve already been at this for like 45 minutes or so. I apologize, but we’ve got a lot of information to go over. Now, in the next episode, I’m gonna give you guys more tips on some, A+ Content and some other advanced strategies that I’ve been studying as far as listing optimization, but I hope this gets you on the right track for optimizing, at least the copy of your listing.

Bradley Sutton:

A lot of new stuff we talked about today, like things that are happening with indexing that have not happened before. And some other cool tests about like 1000 on the bullet points and other things, if you guys have been testing anything cool, you know, let me know, you know find the Instagram for this podcast, @H10Bradley, send me a message on there or comments somewhere on there. Let me know if you found some new stuff or tag me in the Helium 10 Facebook group, I would love to hear what is working and not working for you as far as your listing copy goes. This is something that’s rapidly changing. You know, in the past few months, we’ve already seen multiple things changing on the Amazon side, as far as how they do listings and indexing and PPC and things like that.

Bradley Sutton:

So I’d love to hear what you are seeing out there, and then, you know, we can incorporate it in future trainings. Look forward to seeing you guys soon at the Prosper Show. You know, if you’re listening to this and it’s before March 15th or March 14th, I believe, make sure to drop in on our booth at prosper show or go to our Helium 10 Social hangout with us, h10.me/prosper2022. Anyways, guys, thank you so much for tuning in, and we’ll see you in the next episode, and we’ll give you some more great strategies for listing optimization. We’ll see you then.

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