#506 – 2024 Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass: Part 1

Video of the episode at the bottom

What if you could unlock the potential of keyword search volume to exponentially boost your sales on Amazon? Imagine using a comprehensive tool like Helium 10’s Cerebro to not only identify the keywords a product ranks for but also understand the demand of a keyword, observe products gaining the most clicks and purchases, and even keep track of your competitors’ PPC strategy. In this Seller Strategy Masterclass episode, we break down these complex strategies, which, if utilized wisely, could lead to extra sales amounting to thousands of dollars. 

In the realm of Amazon selling, understanding search volume and history is paramount. We guide you on how to capitalize on these essential metrics using Cerebro’s robust features. Ever wondered how to leverage the power of reverse engineering the success of your competitors? We’ve got you covered! We dive into how to identify hot keywords in your niche, understand your competitors’ PPC strategies, and find common roots among relevant keywords, all by harnessing the power of Helium 10’s Cerebro tool.

In our quest to empower Amazon sellers, we reveal new features and how to use the Cerebro IQ Score to identify profitable keywords and optimize their impact on your business. Plus, learn how the Amazon Recommended Rank can revolutionize your product listings. From the USA to Canada, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, UK, India, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, United Arab Emirates, and even the Walmart USA marketplace, these strategies are designed to supercharge your Amazon-selling experience. So, buckle up and join us for this riveting masterclass on Amazon seller strategies!

In episode 506 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

• 01:13 – A Seller Strategy Masterclass For Cerebro
• 06:11 – Using Helium 10’s Cerebro to Analyze Amazon Keywords 
• 12:38 – Understanding Search Volume And History 
• 19:18 – Understanding Competitors’ PPC Strategy 
• 22:59 – Finding Common Keywords on Amazon
• 26:35 – Optimizing Title Density for Amazon Rankings 
• 30:59 – Amazon Keyword Indexing 
• 45:02 – Frequently Bought Together Products in Cerebro

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’re going to be doing a seller strategy masterclass where we do a deep dive into Amazon keyword research using Cerebro. And the strategies we go over today, if implemented, could potentially mean thousands of dollars of extra sales for you. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. 1, 2, 3, go. 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 dimensions so they had to pay extra money 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 forward slash alerts. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Cereous Sellers podcast by Helium 10. I am Rehose 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 e-commerce world. Today is another in our series of seller strategy masterclasses where, once or twice a month, we go deep into just pure Amazon strategy and different aspect of it, especially using Helium 10 tools. So today’s theme is about keyword research. We’re going to be diving into my favorite Helium 10 tool, which is Cerebro. Now, if you don’t have Cerebro or don’t have Helium 10, you know, don’t tune out maybe you’re using another tool and there’s some functionality that’s similar. The strategies that you’re going to learn today are going to be, you know, important for you to implement, whether you’re trying to do keyword research on your own or whether you’re using Helium 10 or whether you’re using another tool. So I’m going to be focusing on, like, how to do something, not necessarily a step by step, like, oh my goodness, all right, step one, do this, step two, do this. You know, in a certain tool, it’s more like, all right, what is the goal that we’re trying to reach? Like, one of the things we’re going to go over today is how to see the history of search volume or demand of a keyword, and then what we’re going to do is we’re going to go into well, why is that important, you know? Why is it important to know that? How can that make money for you? There’s not one of these strategies that you can say is going to make, you know, $5,000 just by itself, but each of these strategies we’re going to go over, it’s going to give you a little bit of a bump and, yes, it could potentially add up to thousands of dollars of extra revenue for you. If you haven’t been implementing these strategies before, there’s some here that maybe you guys already are doing, but I’m positive there’s going to be some things here that you probably didn’t even know you had the power to do. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

So first, everybody, let’s get into an introduction and overview of what Helium 10 Cerebro is. It’s actually my favorite tool in the entire suite of Helium 10. It’s one of the most powerful tools ever made for keyword research. Pretty much within seconds, I’m going to be showing you strategies such as you can find all of the keywords that a product or products are ranking for, organically or in sponsored ads. You can do special filters where you can see hey, where am I ranking, like on page three or four, but my competitors are getting sales from keywords on page one. I’m going to show you how to look at which are the products that are the most click and the most purchased for a keyword. Where are competitors really spending their money on PPC? What are they advertising for that? Maybe I’m not. What is one of these seasonal products? Where was it ranking? Where was it getting sales from this one product, maybe last year, last summer, last Christmas. You’re going to learn how to do a lot of these strategies and a lot more. Now, all of the demos that I’m going to be doing today are going to be based in the Amazon USA marketplace, but if you guys are using Cerebro out there, you can do it for the Canadian marketplace, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, UK, India, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, United Arab Emirates or even the Walmart USA marketplace. All right, so the same strategies that I’m going to be going over is going to be what you could use regardless of which of those marketplaces you are selling on. So let’s go ahead and hop right into the first strategy how to find the keywords that an Amazon product is ranking for. So, first of all, why is this important? How can this make you money? If you are a new seller on Amazon, how are you going to get sales? Of course, you’re going to use advertising, but you have to know what keywords to advertise for On Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

The beauty about selling on the platform, as many of you know, is Amazon has tons and tons of traffic already. Every day, millions of people are going on the platform, and how are they looking for products? They’re using search terms. They’re typing in college and peptides or coffin shelf into the search bar on their mobile phone or on desktop and then they’re looking at the search results of what is you know what comes up so that they can see if they find a product that they like. Now you know, for most of you guys, you probably don’t scroll through too many of the search results when you’re buying. You know, maybe you’re only look at page one or page two.

Bradley Sutton:

But it’s important that if our product is relevant to a keyword that we are showing up at the top of the search results or at least it’s possible that we’re going to show up at the top of the search results or anywhere in the search results, so we need to know what keywords to put into our listing, right? So that’s why it’s important. It’s going to make you tons of money because if you’re not searchable for a keyword, you will never, ever make one cent of a sale from that keyword because you’re not going to be indexed for that keyword. All right, so let’s go ahead and hop into the strategy so you can see how to do it. You start off by analyzing your product or maybe your competitor’s product. You can copy their ASIN, that’s the identification number for every product on Amazon and then you can just paste it right into the Cerebro search bar and then you are going to go ahead and hit get keywords Now. Once you do that, after a few seconds the entire list of keywords are going to show up.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one thing to keep in mind is that when you run a search, there is a button here on Cerebro I’d say exclude variation. Here’s the first thing that probably 90% of you don’t realize. If you enter in an ASIN that has variations, that means it has different colors or there’s maybe different sizes, and you don’t select exclude variations, when you hit the get keywords button, it’s going to show you keywords that any one of those variations are ranking for. Like if there’s a green coffin shelf, a pink coffin shelf, a black coffin shelf, the keywords that come up in the results are where any one of them is ranking for. So if you’re like hey, you know what, I only want to see what the pink coffin shelf is ranking for, guys, make sure to hit the button exclude variations. Super, super important for that. All right Now, as you can see, I didn’t select that here on this example that I’m showing in the video here and I got a total of 1749 keywords that came up here.

Bradley Sutton:

It says 1600 and 16 are organic and then there’s another 333 paid. So the organic means those are just regular search results. The paid, those are sponsored kind of results. Now if I wanted to see all of the keywords that this product was organically ranking for, it’s going to actually show me from anywhere where we have detected this product, from one all the way to 306. And the reason that this is is because that that’s pretty much the only products that show up in the search results. All right, you might see search results that says hey, one to 50 out of 10,000 products, but really only usually the first 306 products show up, or seven pages.

Bradley Sutton:

So what we are showing in Cerebro here for the organic rank are all of the keywords that sometime in the last 30 days helium 10 has detected in the search results. It doesn’t mean it’s going to match your search result. You know from your browser Because you know you’re searching today. Maybe we searched a few days ago. If you want to know from what time that the search happened, just put your mouse over the last column organic rank at the rank, and then it’ll say something like less than seven days, or between seven and 30 days. All right, it’s never going to be beyond 30 days. So these are this is not an estimate, these are exact ranks that were taken sometime in that time period.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, as I said before, you know probably you know that, hey, if this is a competitor Aisin you’re looking at, or even your own that you maybe want to know what keywords these products are getting sales from. We can kind of do this, because of the way the Amazon algorithm works, that it’s getting sales from keywords that it’s towards the top of page one. So what you would do is you would use the organic rank filter here the minimum and maximum and say, hey, show me the keywords that are between one and 50. And if you do that, it’s going to go ahead and filter out the any keyword that is showing up in the top 50 results. The last time helium 10 checked and a lot of these keywords, especially the high search volume ones. The only way that it could have gotten here to the top of the search results is probably it got some sales from this keyword. Now, I said high search volume. We’re going to talk a little bit about search volume later, but if you want to do a filter for search volume, you could go ahead and put minimum and maximum search volume.

Bradley Sutton:

One last thing is, if you want to filter out Only the keywords that are showing up organically, you would go into the match type filter and then select organic. There’s all kinds of other match types here. You guys are going to see I’m going to be going over each and every one of these in later strategies. So that’s the first strategy you’re going to learn today and that’s probably what you should do. If you have your own product, that’s what I want you to do. If you’re just getting started with helium 10, put your own product in a Cerebro. Take a look at all the organic words that you are ranking for. If you don’t have a product or you’re doing some product research, take a competitor agent, stick it in there and play around with those filters and see where that product is getting its sales from.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s get into the next strategy how to check the search volume history of an Amazon keyword. Search volume is a metric that is frequently used inside of helium 10. What does it mean? Wherever you see it, basically it’s a velocity of how many searches that this product or a keyword has in about 30 days, all right, or the last month. So, based on the velocity of what was happening in the in that week, what would the monthly search volume be for that keyword? How many times did people type that into the search bar, hit enter? It’s an estimate that’s based on Amazon data. It’s highly highly accurate.

Bradley Sutton:

Now what if you wanted to check the history of a search volume? Well, first of all, again, as we do with all these strategies, why is that valuable? Well, you could have two completely relevant keywords to your product. All right, they describe your product perfectly. But if one of the keywords has only 50 searches a month and the other one has 500 searches a month, which one do you think is a more valuable keyword? Maybe you only have enough room to put one of them in, or maybe you want to make sure to put the most important keyword in your title. Well, how would you know which one to put? A lot of times, if the relevancy is the same, this is a very important keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

The way that you can prioritize your keywords is by the search volume, all right. So where you see the search volume inside of Cerebro is one of these columns. Right here it says search volume. Now why would you even want to see the history of this search volume? Well, search volume we just determined is important, but you also want to see the history, because search volume goes up and down throughout the year. There are newer keywords that start getting more popular. There’s seasonal keywords that maybe peak during a certain holiday, like Christmas, or a certain time of year, like summer or winter, right. So it’s important to kind of seeing the ups and downs of search volume. So I showed you how to find the search volume inside of Cerebro.

Bradley Sutton:

How do you find the history of it? Well, anywhere where you see a search volume number, you can actually hit the graph that is next to it and what comes up is the search volume history of this on Amazon. So you can see right now it’s got 1,854 search volume. That means about 30 days almost 2,000 people have searched for it. But then you can kind of see last year around December that number spikes all the way to 6,000. I can actually go back all time to however far back that Helium 10 has data and I could see that there are similar spikes every year coming up to Christmas time. This is showing me Amazon search volume history. But if I hit the drop down menu in this box I can actually see the Google search volume history and the Walmartcom search volume history for any of these keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Now a question I get a lot is what’s the magic number for search volume? What should I be looking for? There’s no magic number and it’s also different by marketplace. You know, if you want a keyword that’s probably going to get you some sales might be on the minimum at least 500 searches. But you know there’s keywords that only have 100 searches a month and they still might get you one sale here or there. If you’re in the UK market or the Japan marketplace you might want to drop that minimum number right, like a keyword that only has 100 search volume, that actually might not be that bad in one of the smaller marketplaces.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing to look at is the search volume trend. That means, is this keyword growing in popularity from last month or is it going down? We also have that right here in Cerebro. There is a column that says search volume trend. You could see that this one keyword paint coffin shelf has gone down 31% from last month. So maybe I see here I’ve got 2000 keywords here. Maybe I want to know what are all the keywords that are increasing in search volume trend. Like, maybe there’s some new hot keywords that I need to keep an eye on. Well, I can use the filters at the top of Cerebro and I can put a minimum and maximum search volume trend so that I could, you know, perhaps see what are the hot keywords in a certain niche.

Bradley Sutton:

I had mentioned to about search volume kind of correlating with keyword sales, but it’s not a one to one basis, all right. That’s why we have this column here keyword sales. These are estimates of approximately how many sales the searches for keywords are generating. This is an estimate, again based on Amazon data, and you’ll notice that it’s not always consistent. Like, here’s a keyword that had 200 searches and it had estimated eight sales. Here’s another keyword that had 200 searches but it had estimated 16 sales, all right. So this is another cool metric to look at in order to kind of estimate, all right, how powerful is this keyword, how many sales is it generating? So again, guys, search volume, super, super important metric in helium 10 in Cerebro and very valuable to you because it’s one of the important ways that you can kind of prioritize which are your most important keywords and which are the keywords that could potentially bring you the most sales.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s get into the next strategy how to find the keywords that an Amazon product is advertising for. Why would you want to know this and how can this bring you money? If you have a newer product, of course, you can just start blindly and make an Amazon auto PPC campaign and see what keywords work for you and what keywords don’t work for you, but that’s going to cost money. Why not start from day one? Reverse engineering what your competitors, who maybe have been selling for months or even a couple years, reverse engineer their PPC success. All right, how can you do that? Let me show you.

Bradley Sutton:

After doing your regular Cerebro search, just like you found the organic keywords it’s the same exact search and you want to look at the column that says sponsored rank. Basically, what that means is the last time helium 10 checked, where was this product ranking for in the sponsored results? All right, these are sponsored product ads. Now, sponsored product ads these are specifically the ones that come up throughout the Amazon search results and you’ll see a little tag that says sponsored on it, whether you’re on mobile or desktop. So this would be position one sponsored, position to sponsored, and then three, four and so on would be kind of further down the list. But for any product you are now going to be able to just go in there and enter in to the filter at the very top under sponsored rank and say, hey, show me all the keywords that this product was detected in the top, let’s just say 10 positions in sponsored rank. And then, once I hit apply filters, I can see now every single keyword that this product had shown up for in sponsored ads. If I want to filter out the match type of only PPC keywords, I would select sponsored product, which is the second one, and it’s going to show me any product or any keyword that this product was showing up in search results with any rank.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, one interesting kind of hack here this search results that I was doing for this coffin shelf. It actually came up with over 300 keywords Right now. Just that in itself gives you some information. You can kind of tell that, okay, this person is probably doing maybe an auto campaign or broad campaign. That’s why he’s showing up in sponsor results for so many keywords. But guess what? Sometimes when you run Cerebro on one of your competitors, asins, you might notice that the sponsored keywords is only like 10 or 15. And what does that tell you? That’s going to tell you that you now know their exact PPC strategy, because it means they’re not running a broad campaign, a broad match campaign, they’re not running an auto campaign, otherwise hundreds of keywords would show up. So then now you know that they’re only running exact match campaigns and you have their exact 15 keywords, the only keywords that they’re bidding on. So you know you could kind of deduce if they’re a very successful seller. Well, wow, you know, this seller must see a lot of profit on these 15 keywords, which is why these are the only ones they’re focusing on. And now you get to benefit from probably all their trial and error and money that they spent to get that information. So that’s a super cool kind of like mini hack there as well, when you’re looking at the sponsored results.

Bradley Sutton:

One other column you’re going to see in Cerebro is suggested PPC bid. If we have enough data for a certain keyword, we’ll give you a bid range that gives you the best chance, according to our estimates, to get on page one of the sponsored results. All right, it’s based on the Amazon bid suggestion, but then we layer on top of it, our own AI and algorithm to try and get that a little bit closer than what the Amazon bid is suggesting for you. One last column that you see here is sponsored ASINs. All right, that means the sponsored ASINs in Cerebro means the number of different products that we detected in the last 30 days advertising for a certain keyword. So, for example, you’ve got one product here a coffin shelf or one keyword here is coffin shelf and we’ve detected over 1000 different ASINs advertising for this keyword. But then here’s a keyword in our own brand here Manny’s Mysterious Audities Only 22 products have been detected in sponsored results. So sometimes you can find keywords potentially that maybe have some search volume, but not many products are advertising for it. Probably those keywords, you can keep your bid low and still get some fairly good placements. All right, guys, how much money have you made so far with these strategies? These are some of the biggest impact ones that I focus on in the beginning, but we’re going to get down and dirty and get even deeper into the strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

The next strategy how to find long tail Amazon keywords and also Amazon keywords with common roots. Let’s ask our question that we always do why is this important and how can it make you money? Now, long tail keywords historically have a lot more of what we call buyer intent. All right, if somebody searches decor, right, you know, maybe that keyword has some search volume. But do you think the word decor is going to get many purchases? No, it’s too broad. There’s going to be so many different things on page one. Usually somebody who might be searching for that kind of keyword, they’re just kind of browsing. They’re not going to buy something from the search results. But what if it was a longer tail keyword that was like three or four words and it was like, often, decor for bedroom? Now that all of a sudden is a lot more specific. The odds that somebody searches that long tail keyword and buys it is a lot better than just one of those generic keywords. So that’s one of the ways that if you can find these highly relevant long tail keywords for your product, it helps you find those keywords that have a lot of buyer intent.

Bradley Sutton:

The reason why you might want to find common roots is you want to see maybe in all of the relevant keywords for a product what are the common single words. That’s like a base, because now you can have an idea of what you might want to run sponsored ads for in like a phrase or broad campaign. You know, like if all of a sudden you had 30 keywords that had the word coffin in it, you know you might want to go ahead and target coffin as a broad or phrase campaign, knowing that a lot of coffin related keywords are very relevant to your niche. Maybe you know you have a coffin shelf but there’s some long tail keywords like coffin shelf for kids or something like that that you didn’t know about. Well, looking for those long tail keywords with a similar root, that’s also going to help you. So how do you do that? Hopping into the tool after your just regular search that you do into Cerebro.

Bradley Sutton:

There is a section here called word frequency. So whatever shows up at the very bottom of the search results of all your keywords, this word frequency shows how many of these keywords have a certain single word in it. So you could see here the last time we check decor, there was 668 of these keywords. All have decor in it. 323 of them have coffin, etc. Etc. Now if I want to see the keywords that maybe had at least two words instead or let’s just go three words, I would enter that into word count in the minimum, all right. And then maybe I want to see keywords that contain the word coffin. So if I do this, I’m going to do that, I’m going to put the filter of phrases containing, I’m going to put the word coffin and under word count I’m going to put minimum three. Now this is telling me, hey, out of all these keywords, how many keywords here have at least three words in it and contain the word coffin? And take a look, two hundred and twenty one keywords out of all these keywords came up. So it’s a wide, wide variety.

Bradley Sutton:

Now let’s say there’s a it’s Christmas time and or Christmas just passed, and I don’t want to look up any Christmas keywords. Maybe I’m just trying to find what keywords I want to advertise for. I should use this exclude phrases containing and I could put Christmas here. Or or maybe there’s in your niche like a certain keyword that is forbidden, you know, like a drug related keyword, and it might show up still in helium 10 because people are searching for it. But you know you don’t want to put that in your listing or get confused. So maybe you can put that into the exclude phrases containing and then that will help you with your filtering as well. So again, whenever you do searches in cerebro, just like we did here, you might have hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords coming up. You’re not going to be able to put thousands of keywords in your listing or put thousands of keywords into an Amazon PPC campaign. Your strategy is really going to hinge on how you can filter it down to get what you’re looking for, and using these techniques about looking for certain root words or looking for longer tail keywords, this should help you narrow those down to get those money making keywords for you faster.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, moving on to the next strategy how to find Amazon keywords that are easier to rank for. Alright, why is this important? How can it make you money? You can’t just make a listing and magically you’re going to appear at the top of page one for every single keyword. But guess what? There’s ways that you can actually have a chance to show up on page one almost from day one, and one of these ways is by looking for keywords where almost nobody has that keyword in their title. But you do. Now I’m not saying, hey guys, just throw any keyword into your, your title, just so you can rank for it If it’s a highly relevant one. That’s what you should do.

Bradley Sutton:

But the way to find if there’s keywords that not many people have in their title it’s by using a metric in cerebral called title density. So title density means, out of all the listings on page one, the last time helium 10 checked how many of these keywords had that search term in the title? So for example, this keyword here, coffin bookshelves the title density number is zero, because the last time helium 10 check nobody had that. What does that mean? That means if I put the word coffin bookshelves in my listing, in my title and I’m the only one, there’s a really good chance I could be on page one from day one of me searching even before I get any sales. That’s the way the Amazon algorithm sometimes works.

Bradley Sutton:

Now take this other example. Here on this page we have a keyword coffin treat boxes. The last time helium 10 check, there were 28 listings on page one that had keyword coffin treat boxes in it. Now does that mean, oh, I shouldn’t put that keyword in my title if that’s what I’m selling, because it’s going to be hard to rank. No, if it’s your most important keyword, you still need to put in your title. But you now at least you have the visibility that. Okay, you know what it’s. Probably I’m not going to be on page one from day one. There’s 28 other listings that have the same keyword in the title. It might take me a little more work to get to page one. Now you’ve got that visibility Thanks to this title density column.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, if you wanted to like filter in, like hey, show me all the keywords from this list where title density is below five, well, we have a filter for that, a min max that you could set for the title density. Now, one other metric that we have that has to do with ranking is what’s called the CPR number, the cerebro product rank. Now, this is the number of units that it takes for people to buy your product after searching for a keyword to give you the best chance of getting to page one. So you could see that here’s a keyword called coffin letterboard and the CPR number is 34. That means that if you’ve got a listing and you want to get on page one for coffin letterboard, you need, like about 34, at least 30 people over eight days to search for that keyword, find your product and then buy it. You know, like, how are you going to do that If you’re not even on page one, probably from PPC is, is a good way, but that’s the number that’s going to give you the best chance at getting to page one.

Bradley Sutton:

Now I’m going just very lightly into this topic. Amazon launch is a very, very deep topic. If you want to really do a deep dive into ranking and launching, we’ve got a couple modules and freedom to get about it and also some deep dive podcast episodes. So I highly recommend going to episode 466 and 467 of the podcast. You can find that at h10.me forward slash 466 or forward slash 467. And for the full launch strategy, the latest episode we have is episode 500. And we call it the Maldives honeymoon launch strategy h10.me forward slash 500. And then you can get the breakdown of the strategy on how to get to page one. But again, these two important metrics title density and CPR.

Bradley Sutton:

Why is it important? Well, you want to be able to know how you can get to page one in the most economical way. And it’s going to make you money because, instead of you wasting your money on a keyword that maybe you’re, it’s going to be very competitive and you might not have a chance to get to page one. It allows you to focus in the beginning on those less competitive keywords, so that you’re getting the most bang for your buck when you launch your product.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, next strategy how to find Amazon keywords that not many products are indexed for. What is indexing mean? Why is it important? How is this going to get you money? Indexing means you have the potential to show up in the search results. You have the potential to rank. It’s not the same as rank. Indexing means Amazon has tied your keyword to a certain or to your listing and that you are in the index, or its potential that you can start ranking for. All right. Now, if you can find keywords where not many products are indexed at all, guess what that means. Like, if you have less than 300 products indexed for a certain keyword, or less than 200, that means just by you putting that keyword in your listing, guess what you’re already showing up in the search results. You’re already showing up in the first seven pages without even doing anything. So here’s how you can do that. When you do a search in Cerebro, you’re going to want to go into the filter competing products and once you get there, you can put a min and a max. So, like, maybe you want to see hey, show me all of the keywords where, the last time helium 10 checked, there was only 200 search results, or 200 keywords that were indexed for the product. And here we go. We can see some different keywords like coffin, shaped chair pop up coffin, here’s it. Here’s a Spanish keyword, a thought about a Halloween or a Spanglish keyword, and so now I know which keywords that, hey, this one only has. Here’s a keyword that only has 35 competing products, meaning that there’s only 35 search results. Last time helium 10 checked, if I put my product or if I put a key, that keyword, if it’s relevant to my product in my listing, I’m already going to be on page one, because there’s only a 35 other products that are even indexed for that keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

Another metric that sellers like to look at is well, where, what are some keywords that really have a strong relation, where there’s a lot of searches but not many competing products? All right, uh. And people like going the opposite way too. Some people like to see hey, I want to see the ones where there’s tons of competitor products but maybe not a lot of searches. Well, the two columns that you want to look at in that situation is search volume and then competing products. But if you don’t want to have to calculate it out to find out which ones have a big ratio of search volume to competing products, that’s why we have this metric called cerebral IQ score.

Bradley Sutton:

Now let me tell you right off the bat, there is no such thing as a good score or a bad score. This cerebral IQ score is only a comparison of the search volume to the number of competing products. All right, it’s. If you see a high number, that means there’s a relatively high number of searches compared to how many products are showing up in the search results. Here’s an example here this keyword, beetle juice decor, has a cerebral IQ score of almost 2000. Well, just by that number now I know that there’s a kind of a decent ratio here, and so I can see that there’s actually over 3000 searches but only 2000 competing products. Now take a look at this other product, goth decor. It only has a cerebral IQ score of 68. Again, that doesn’t mean necessarily bad, depends on your point of view. But the reason why it’s 68 is because, look, the search volume is 5000, but the number of competing products is way higher 70,000. So this is a good metric.

Bradley Sutton:

Why is it important? How can it make you money? You might want to to see keywords where there’s tons of people searching for it, but there’s not a lot of people ranking for it, meaning that you could start making money on that keyword a lot faster, as opposed to one of these other keywords where thousands of people are competing for a low search volume on it. All right, let’s get into the next strategy how to find the keywords that the Amazon algorithm thinks is most relevant for a product. Guys, this is one of the most important strategies I’m going to give out, and it’s something that’s fairly new in importance. Now, why is it important? How can it make you money? You could do all the best keyword research in the world using Cerebro here, or using whatever tool you’re using, but if Amazon itself, the Amazon algorithm, does not think that your product is relevant for a keyword, it’s a potential that you’re not going to be indexed for the keyword, even with it in your listing, or you might not even be able to show PPC, get PPC impressions for that keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

It’s important to understand how Amazon views your product, not just that you know you put the right keywords, but does Amazon know these are the right keywords? How can you do that? Let’s hop right into Cerebro. The metric you are looking for is Amazon recommended rank, and you can do this for any product, and this, this Amazon recommended rank, is coming directly from Amazon. This is not a helium 10 metric. We’re one of the only ones who knows where this metric is and Amazon recommended rank. If you have a recommended rank of one, that means that that is the keyword that Amazon thinks is most relevant, especially in the sense of advertising, to their product, and if it has a very high Amazon recommended rank, that means that it’s Amazon doesn’t think that keyword is that important. If there’s no Amazon recommended rank, that means that Amazon definitely doesn’t think that keyword is important. So if you want to make sure that Amazon knows what your product is, sort your you know, run Cerebro on your product, sort it by Amazon recommended rank and then take a look at the keywords. This is especially valuable if you just launched a new product, because that’s when Amazon usually is the most confused.

Bradley Sutton:

This here is a coffin shelf that I’m looking at here in Cerebro and it’s been on Amazon a while. I just sorted it by Amazon recommended rank and take a look at some of these top keywords Manny’s mysterious oddities. Coffin shelf small coffin shelf All right, so it pretty much knows what this product is. Now one thing that’s been happening is me personally, I’ve had some issues ranking for my main keyword, which is coffin shelf, and I’m looking. I’m like, wait a minute, why is coffin shelf not one of the top five Amazon recommended rank? It really should be. It’s my number one keyword, but if I look, it is all the way down here, number 26. So again, now I’m not confused as to why I might be struggling getting ranked for this keyword. Amazon thinks it’s only the 26th most important keyword, but I think it’s my most important keyword. So I’ve got to start looking into why is my recommended rank so low? Is my conversion rate low on this keyword, or do I need to optimize my listing in a different way to make it more relevant for this keyword to Amazon? There’s a lot of different ways you can impact your relevancy, but again, unlike any other tool out there, this is the only tool right now We’ve had this for years where you could see what keywords that Amazon thinks you’re relevant for, so that you make sure that you start off with a bang, especially when you have a new product and again back in that uh, serious Sellers podcast, episode 500, make sure to give that a listen. I go really deep into this Amazon recommended rank filter and how it can help you during launch, so make sure to check that out, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next strategy how to find closely related products to any Amazon product. Why is this important? How can it make you money If you’re brand new into a niche with a product your own product or number two, maybe you’re just researching competitors and you’re not even selling in this niche yet you want to know who are the competitors you need to monitor or who’s the competitors that you want to get their keywords from. This could mean the difference of having great keywords in your listing or not even being indexed for important keywords because you weren’t even running Cerebro on those listings. So how could you see what are some of the products that are closest to a certain product that you have put into Cerebro? It is super easy. Once you put in an ASIN into Cerebro, there’s a button right here to the right that says get competitors. You just hit that button and it’s going to show you 10, up to 20 or even more competitors that are very close to this product. And how is Helium 10 actually determining which ones? These are the 20 products or so that are ranking for the most similar keywords as whatever product that you put into Cerebro. So this is just again a great way to kind of understand who are your competitors, who is in your niche, and then you know. In a later strategies I’m going to be showing you how to analyze multiple ASINs, multiple products at the same time. This is one of those ways that you can get more than one or two products into a Cerebro search without having to go search on Amazon. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next strategy how to find which products have had the Amazon’s choice batch. Why is this important? How can it make you money? A lot of buyers out there sometimes base their purchase off of Amazon’s choice. So by seeing who’s got Amazon’s choice for certain keywords, you kind of know who might be dominating in that niche and who might be the sellers that you need to really go after, and which keywords are certain sellers really dominating on. So it’s very easy the way to do that.

Bradley Sutton:

I did a search here for collagen peptides. Now here in the search results there’s an Amazon’s choice button and the first filter says analyze product. If I select that I’m going to show all of the keywords where the last time Helium 10 checked this product had the Amazon’s choice. Now, the way you can kind of differentiate that in Cerebro is if this little Amazon logo here is fully colored black, white and orange, that means that the last time Helium 10 checked this product had Amazon’s choice. All right, here is how Amazon’s choice looks. Now, sometimes in the past it would say actually Amazon’s choice. Right now, at the time I’m making this video, it actually says overall pick. Maybe you guys have seen that, but, as you can see, right now, this collagen peptides that I ran Cerebro on has the overall pick and that’s what it shows in Cerebro. It doesn’t always match though, because, again, this might have been done seven days ago or three days ago, and maybe today or in my browser it might be a little different, but a lot of the times it’s going to be the same.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, if I were to select under Amazon’s choice dropdown filter here, other product, that means that the last time Helium 10 checked there was an Amazon’s choice for this keyword, but it was not this product that I’m looking for. And then the last option here is no badges, and what that means are these are the keywords where, the last time Helium 10 check, nobody in the search results had Amazon’s choice. So all three of these things, there’s different reasons why you might want to search for each one of them. If you’re looking at one of your competitors and you notice they’ve got Amazon’s choice for almost every keyword, you know that’s going to be a tough, tough competitor to compete against. Another thing is, maybe you find a whole bunch of keywords that had some decent search volume but the last time Helium 10 check, nobody had Amazon’s choice. Who knows, maybe those are keywords that you could potentially be the one to get Amazon’s choice on. There are a lot of different ways that you can use that method.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, last strategy of today how to see which products are frequently bought together with any Amazon product. Why is this important? How can it make you money? Well, amazon PPC product targeting is when you target other products and then you kind of put your ad for your product on that page. This is a great way to kind of look for who to target instead of just blindly.

Bradley Sutton:

If you’re selling a coffin shelf, let me go ahead and target other coffin shelves. You might notice that there are other products being frequently bought together. What is this? How does this look on Amazon? Well, if you go to any Amazon listing, we will go ahead and go to this coffin shelf right here, the product that we’re looking at. If you scroll down, there is usually a section that says frequently bought together. That means that people are buying this product with another product in the same shopping cart, the same shopping experience. This is a great way to kind of understand how customers are buying and it could give you ideas on other products you can sell.

Bradley Sutton:

Potentially also, maybe you want to make a bundle in the future. You saw here there was a bat shelf being bought with a coffin shelf. Maybe in the future you’re going to sell a bat shelf coffin shelf combo. At the very least, you’re going to want to target those bat shelves, even though you’re how you have a coffin shelf, because you know that people who buy bat shelves also buy coffin shelves, and what you’re going to notice is a lot of the people who don’t have helium 10, they don’t have access to this information. If you look at the bat shelf pages, maybe the only other products advertising on that page or other bat shelves, which is, of course, what you should do. But then imagine if you’re the only coffin shelf that’s on that page. You’ve got a great chance to get that sale, because you know that there are people with coffin shelves buying bat shelves at the same time.

Bradley Sutton:

So how do you find what are the frequently bought together for a product? Well, if you already searched it in Cerebro, you just go right down here to this product page and, by the way, if you put your mouse over any product that shows up in Cerebro, you’re going to have this whole section. This is a brand new feature, by the way, that just got done at the end of 2023, where, if you just put your mouse over the product picture, you can see the monthly unit sales, the price, the FBA fee and a lot of stuff. But anyways, if you have the product here in Cerebro, you want to hit these three dots that comes up under the title and hit frequently bought together and once you do that, the top three frequently bought together is going to show up, and then, if you want to view them all, you just hit view all in black box and it’s going to open up black box and then you could filter out the frequently bought together, the top ones for this product, the history. So, again, this is great to use for potential bundling ideas for Amazon, ppc and just for some just general knowledge to understand what people in this market are buying.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, guys, this is the end of part one. I’m not sure if we’re going to have to have two or three parts here, but this is the end of part one in our Cerebro seller strategy masterclass, all about keyword research. You guys have some homework to do. We just went over 11 different strategies, but potentially more if you consider the substratages I gave. How many of these are not part of your game plan right now? How many of these haven’t you done? Go back, listen to this, watch this if you’re watching it on YouTube and start implementing these strategies today and start making that money that you might be leaving on the table. We’ll see you in part two.

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Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started: 

• Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business. 
• Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
• Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
• SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.