5 Best Techniques to Rank Your Products on Amazon

Amazon is quite possibly the largest e-commerce platform in the world. It operates in over 50 countries and is responsible for almost 38% share of the US e-commerce market in 2023. The runner-up was Walmart with only a 6.3% share. What that means is that Amazon is quite possibly the best place to sell your product due to the sheer amount of exposure it will get.

However, its popularity also means that there is a lot of competition on the platform. As such it can be a very difficult task to make your products and your store stand out. We are here to tell you that it does not have to be this way.

In this article, we will teach you actionable ways of ranking your products higher in Amazon listings. We will discuss some required background information such as how products are ranked on Amazon and then we will tell you techniques for ranking high. So, let’s begin.

Understanding How Amazon Ranks Products–the A10 Algorithm

Amazon SEO is extremely different from standard SEO. There are similarities of course, but the gist of the matter is that most SEO techniques won’t work here. The basis of SEO is understanding how the particular platform ranks the entries. Ranking is usually calculated with the help of some proprietary algorithm. In the case of Amazon, it is the A10 algorithm.

Since it is proprietary, Amazon has not made public how this algorithm works. However, experts have hazarded many guesses and some things have come to light. The A10 algorithm pays a lot of attention to the following elements/factors surrounding a product.

• Relevance of a product to the customer search query
• The number of people who buy the product after visiting the product page i.e., the conversion rate
• The rating and reviews of the product
• The rating of the seller itself
• The product price and availability

The relevance of the search query to the product is understandable. It is a common factor in all kinds of SEO. The conversion rate is important because Amazon is an e-commerce platform, and it needs to generate business to stay profitable. Amazon takes a 15% cut from all sales. So, the more a product converts, the more valuable it is to Amazon. Keep this in mind because anything that can affect the conversion rate is an indirect factor for ranking high on the listing.

The ratings and reviews of the product and the seller help customers decide to buy or not buy the product. They affect the conversion rate and are important for the listing. Finally, the price of the product and its availability (which also affect conversions) are important. Amazon will rank a product lower if it is too expensive compared to its competition because it is less likely to convert.

Now that we have understood what main factors are important for the listings, let us look at some techniques that can help us to rank our product higher on the listings.

5 Techniques for Ranking Your Products High

All the techniques that we will discuss now are related to the factors that the A10 algorithm considers important. That’s why they have a high chance of success. Now, let’s check them out.

Adjust Keywords for Amazon SEO

You probably saw this one coming a mile away. Keywords are the lifeblood of all SEO. It does not matter what type of SEO it is; keywords will always be an important part of it. Basically, keywords tie into the relevance factor. How does Amazon know if a product is relevant to the search query? Through keywords. If the product name has a keyword in it, it will be shown for searches that use that keyword, simple as that.

You need to use the relevant keywords at least once. You can use them in the name, description, and details of the product. Since you only need to use one keyword once to rank for it, you can adjust multiple relevant keywords at once to broaden the search queries your product shows up in. For example, if you want to sell a keyboard, you can add general keywords to its description such as “PC accessories”, “PC peripherals” and “RGB PC accessories”.

The more keywords you use the more entries your product will rank for. Just make sure that all keywords are relevant to the listing. You cannot put irrelevant keywords in there because Amazon will penalize you for doing so.

To find some Amazon keywords you can do two things.

• Go to Amazon and type the name of the product you want to sell. Amazon search’s autocomplete will give you the most trending keywords related to the product.
• Secondly you can use some keyword research tools for finding Amazon-specific keywords. Ahrefs has an Amazon keyword research tool. It is free to use, and it can give you 100 top-ranking keywords related to your product.

Now, you know how to find and adjust keywords for your product. However, this is merely the first technique. Let’s check out the other ones too.

Focus on Getting Good Reviews

The Amazon A10 algorithm checks customer reviews of products. If a product has better reviews than its competitors, Amazon will list it higher and show it to more people. Why? Because good reviews drive conversions and Amazon wants those conversions to get a profit. How do you get good reviews?

Well to start with, you must offer a good product at a competitive price. Make sure that the pictures, product description, and details paint a true and honest picture of your product. This will ensure that there is no confusion on the buyer’s part when they buy your product. When they receive the product, encourage them to give a review. If they are satisfied they will give a good review.

Some customers have questions about the product. As long as you deal with them amicably they will leave a good review. Thank the people who leave good reviews as that will encourage others to leave reviews too.

What you must never do though is buy reviews. Review buying is a black hat tactic. Now, we don’t know how Amazon does it, but their A10 algorithm can figure out when the reviews are fake. The best thing that can happen after that is that your product is ranked lower but mostly, you will just get banned.  And that will take away your capability to be a seller on Amazon. So avoid buying reviews.

Provide Excellent Customer Service

Good reviews don’t come just by selling a good product. The customer service surrounding the product is the main driver of good reviews. You should have safeguards in place that ensure that none of your customers get a bad experience. For example, the first thing conducive to a good customer experience is competitive pricing. If your product is available at the same price or cheaper than your competitors, more people will come to you.

Once customers are at your product page, they will peruse the product description and details. Make sure these are highly readable. If they are difficult to understand, then that will result in a poor experience. So, providing good descriptions, details, and images can be considered part of the customer experience. Naturally, once they have read the details, customers might have some questions. They will ask them. Here is where you can provide them with great customer service.

Your answers should be clear, and precise, have an amicable tone, and most importantly, correctly answer the question. Here you can use some copywriting skills to masterfully craft answers as well as nudge your prospect towards buying the product. Don’t just type out an answer and be done with it. Review it and see if you can paraphrase it a little bit. Use a reworder to see if you can make it better somehow. Only then you should finalize it.

A part of good customer service is to follow up on bad reviews. It is possible that some error happened, and the customer had a bad experience. For example, the product got damaged in transit, or it was faulty to begin with. Here you can use your silver tongue (well… hands) to admit fault and offer a replacement. You can use a reworder here too if you are not too good at being a cunning linguist. Anyway, once you fix their problem, bad reviews tend to be edited and become good reviews.

Use High-Quality Images

Images are extremely important in online stores. The customer has no way of checking the product online. They can only see what you show them through the images. So, you need to add real images of your product when you create its listing. These images should show the product from all angles, and you should not embellish them digitally. This is because you want to stay honest and truthful.

If customers get a product that is different from the images, they will be angry and upset. That will only result in them leaving a bad review and bringing your listing down. Now, we are not saying you should not add embellished images that have a great copy. You can add one or two such images, the rest should be real photos of the product.

Another thing that you want to do is to use high-resolution images. Images on Amazon product pages are tiny, especially when viewed on a phone. That’s why there is a zoom-in feature, where the part of the image that is under the cursor shows up larger than the rest of the picture. If your image resolution is too low, the zoomed-in image will be of terrible quality and very blurry.

This is enough to turn away a customer. Amazon will only see that your product is not converting and lower its ranking in its listings. We don’t want that. So make sure that the images are of the real product, and they are of high quality.

Utilize Parent-Child Feature

The parent-child feature lets you add all versions of a product on one page. As you know many products have different colors and sizes. Your customers may want one specific type. Instead of creating a separate product listing for each variation, just use the parent-child feature to add all the variations on one page.

This has one very big advantage; all the good reviews come to one page which massively boosts its ranking. It is also much easier for customers to browse your store when products are neatly bundled together like this. A popular example of this feature in action is clothing. Clothes almost always have different sizes and colors. With the parent-child feature, customers can browse through different sizes and colors on one page.

Another way in which this technique helps you to rank your product higher is through customer experience. When all customers come to one page and buy any variation of the product, it all counts as conversions towards one page. Amazon ranks that page really high because of all the conversions and profit generated by it.

Conclusion

Amazon is a giant in the e-commerce industry, and as such it has a lot of traffic; both sellers and buyers congregate on this massive marketplace to conduct business. That is also why there is a lot of competition. To stay ahead of the competition, a good understanding of the Amazon A10 algorithm is required. By applying these five techniques that we discussed in this article, you can do that easily. Of course, do not limit your research to just these five techniques. There may be many others out there for you to discover.