Amazon Search Term Optimization Guide (2024)

Why Search Term Optimization Matters and which Techniques Still Work in 2024

In the competitive world of Amazon selling, optimizing your product listings and ad campaigns for search terms is crucial for success. 

Targeting the right search terms influences the visibility or your product listings in Amazon search results, click-through-rates (CTR) to your product landing pages, the effectiveness of your PPC campaigns, and also your conversion rate. 

In this guide, we’ll break down the differences between keywords and search terms, discuss the importance of search term optimization in 2024, and provide you with a practical guide on analyzing and optimizing your Amazon search terms.

What are Amazon Search Terms?

Amazon search terms are the words or phrases that Amazon users type into the Amazon search bar when looking for products. 

On Amazon, the beginning of the buyer journey will often start with the Amazon search bar. For the Amazon A9 algorithm to pick up on your product listing, you will need to have the right keywords so the A9 algorithm can match the search term with the listing. Your listing keywords give the A9 algorithm signals that your listing is related to the current customer search term on the search bar.

Optimizing for commercially relevant search terms is thus important, because optimizing your ads and product listings will determine whether your products appear in the search results or not.

What is the difference between Search Terms, Search Queries and Keywords?

Many Amazon Sellers use the terms “search term”, “search query” and “keyword” interchangeably. While “search term” and “search query” are essentially the same thing, “keywords” are very different from “search terms”.

• Definition of Search Term / Search Query: These are the actual words shoppers input into the Amazon search bar.
  
• Definition of Keyword: Keywords are the terms or phrases that sellers add to the backend of their Amazon product listing or use in their Amazon PPC campaigns to target potential customers. They represent the words that sellers believe will lead to conversions.
  
• Search Term vs Keyword: While a search term always refers to the exact word(s) a user has searched for, for PPC campaigns, a keyword can also include partial matches, synonyms, or even similar words. Think of a keyword more as a “target word cloud”. For Amazon Ads the keyword type can be further broken down into “exact match”, “phrase match” and “broad match” keywords. As these denominations indicate, the constraints of the target keyword “word cloud” are more narrowly defined when “exact match” keywords are used and most broadly defined when a keyword is added to a campaign as a “broad match” keyword. More about this topic in our blog post on Amazon keyword match types.
  
• Example: For example, if a seller selects “running shoes” as a phrase match keyword, the search terms might include queries such as “best running shoes for women,” “cheap running shoes,” or “Brand name running shoes.” As this example shows, understanding the distinction between search terms and keywords is crucial for optimizing your Amazon PPC campaigns effectively.

What is the Difference Between Search Terms and Backend Keywords?

Backend keywords are manually added by Amazon Sellers the backend of a listing. They are not customer-facing and not included in the Amazon product listing copy. You will fill in the backend search term field within 249 bytes limit restrictions, excluding spaces or punctuation such as a comma.

So while backend keywords are technically a different thing than the search terms users input in the Amazon search bar, ideally the backend keywords should reflect on the search terms that you target with your listings. That is because backend keywords are also one of the data points picked up by the A9 algorithm that it uses to match your listings with customer searches. You will fill in the backend search term field within 249 bytes limit restrictions, excluding spaces or punctuation such as a comma.

Since there is a 249-bytes limit (normally 1 byte is a character) it is important to not repeat words inside the search term field. Also, you have to make sure that the characters you are using are also not in the title and bullet.

Another thing to note is that the text inside the search term field does not have to be in a sentence structure and there’s also no need for punctuation. Therefore, you do not need to use filler words such as “for” or use any periods or commas to separate words.

You can use your 50-60 keywords list to develop words that you have not added in your bullets, title, and descriptions to fill out the search term field.

How to Review Search Terms of Amazon Advertising Campaigns?

At this point you are probably wondering how to review the search terms of your existing Amazon PPC campaigns. The answer is: by reviewing your search term report (Related post: How to download the Amazon search term report).

What is the Amazon Search Term Report?

The search term report of a campaign provides you with a list of all the different search terms that have triggered your Amazon ads. When analyzing campaign performance, the search term report provides the most granular and undiluted level of reporting. Whereas a single keyword can, depending on match types, include many different search terms, each search term really is a representation of the exact search query an Amazon shopper has used. 

Which Metrics and KPIs to Monitor in the Amazon Search Term Report?

The search report provides important metrics such as impressions, clicks, conversion rates, click-through rates (CTR), and cost-per-click (CPC) or sales. 

Naturally metrics such as sales, conversion rate, or cost-per-conversion are most critical. Search terms that drive bottom-line performance are obviously most critical. Secondary metrics that are a good indicator of performance are CTR and also CPC. A high CTR indicates that your product listings are relevant for a given search query and a low CPC makes it more likely that your ads can hit desired ACoS goals as advertising costs are not too high (What is ACoS?).

In practice however you may face these two common issues:

• Converting search terms are “brand” searches: This shows that shoppers who are already looking for your brand name also end up buying your products. This behavior is to be expected because these users have probably already done their research, knew your brand before, or are repeat buyers. So while this is great, there is not much you can do from a search term optimization point of view.
  
• There are not many impressions or clicks for many individual search terms: Keep in mind that statistical significance is very important when it comes to PPC. Concluding that a search term with 50 impressions and zero clicks is “not performing” does, statistically speaking, not make sense. The underlying data sample is too small to arrive at this conclusion.
  
  Same goes for search terms that had quite a few clicks already but have not yet brought in any conversions. This is one of the main advantages of working with an Amazon PPC agency: At SellerMetrics, we manage a significant total ad spend spanning many different ad accounts and can aggregate learnings across all these accounts for the benefit of our clients. Learn more about our Amazon PPC services and our Amazon Product Ads Management services to see how we could help you grow faster and run your ads highly profitable.

How to Optimize your Amazon PPC Campaigns using your Search Term Report?

You can use the search term report to identify:

• Keywords you should exclude from your ad campaign by adding them as negative keywords. This will typically be search terms with many clicks AND not sales, search terms that are just contextually irrelevant, or search terms with very high CPCs.
  
• Keywords that you should prioritize in your campaign by either specifically targeting as exact match keywords, or by increasing bids for these keywords. Basically this applies to search terms that are driving either sales or at least quality traffic (high CTR at low CPC). You want to make sure that you maximize your search exposure for these search terms.

How to Identify New, High Potential Search Terms?

No matter whether you are starting out new on Amazon, or are an experienced Seller, identifying and targeting new profitable search terms is an absolute key priority and an essential part of ongoing optimization (more about our Amazon listing optimization services and our Amazon SEO services). Here are three ways you can use to identify relevant search terms for your listings.

1. Product Driven Search Term Research

If you are selling a product that you have not personally used, this step of the procedure is crucial of identifying relevant search terms.

The goal is to find the following:

• What is it used for?
• Pain points this product will fix or alleviate?
• What would the customer type when searching for the product? (i.e., figure out what the seed keywords are for the product)

Product Research

To start, I would normally begin my research on the Amazon marketplace. Unless the product is not on Amazon (seldom happens), Amazon would be where I’d start my research.

In the above Amazon listing, you will learn more about the product by reading the bullet points and the product description. Also, keep a note of what you can potentially improve on the existing listing. I would recommend reading 2-3 product listings on Amazon about a similar product. In figure 1, you can see the words that are highlighted in red in the title of the 2 listings. These are “Yoga Wheel” and “Dharma Yoga Roller.”

Identify a Seed Keyword / Search Term

By just this title alone, I got two good seed keywords I can use to:

1. Further my research off Amazon, or
2. Use these seed keywords to get better seed keywords.

As a rule of thumb, if the keyword is in the beginning of the title, in this case “Yoga Wheel,” it is a good seed keyword to use.

Upon searching for “Yoga Wheel” on Amazon, it is confirmed that a lot of listing has this term at the beginning of the title. This tells me that the “Yoga Wheel” is a good seed keyword to use. I can also search on Google or Youtube to learn more about what the “Yoga Wheel” does. This knowledge would set my job up easier once I start copywriting for the product.

2. Reverse ASIN Research

Now armed with the seed keyword, in our example, “Yoga Wheel,” we will select one top competitor Amazon Listing that is organically ranked in the top 5 for the keyword “Yoga Wheel.”

Going back to the “Yoga Wheel” search results, we will pick the listing with the badge “Amazon Choice.” Click on the listing and save the link of the listing somewhere, save only up to the ASIN only. In this case, the link is (https://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Dharma-Wheel-Petes-Choice/dp/B06W9K1W4F). You will use this for later to conduct Reverse ASIN research (Amazon reverse keyword search).

What is Reverse ASIN? It is actually a known keywords gathering process in the Amazon community. There are free tools out there that can take an ASIN and show historical keywords that customers have used to search for the product. It is a great way to gather keywords and intel on your competition.

The free tool that I have found with the best reverse ASIN result is Sonar.

Add the ASIN “B06W9K1W4F” and you’ll get the following result.

Feel free to download the result into a CSV format which will be used for further analysis in the next couple of sections.

3. Using Brand Analytics for Search Term Research

In 2019 Amazon, released a new reporting function called Brand Analytics that allows Amazon seller’s market intelligence data directly from Amazon. Much like reverse ASIN, you enter a seed ASIN and get a result of the popular Amazon search term.

Unfortunately, this reporting is only available for sellers that have registered for the brand registry. Which means you would have to trademark your brand. So this part might not be applicable for all sellers

Although the search results are not as numerous as other 3rd party tools such as Sonar, you can rely on the accuracy in terms of relevance and relative search volume.

There are two was to use the brand analytics report:

1. Enter a seed keyword and get a list of relevant keywords
2. Enter a seed ASIN and get a result of the popular Amazon search term.

Using both ways you can gather a larger list of keywords along with the 3rd party tool like Sonar.

Understanding Search Term Relevance

For anyone that has experience in search term research, they can skip this part. Before we move further into actually creating the listing, I feel I need to explain search query relevance.

After consolidating all the search terms in the previous steps, you will now refine the list down to around 50-60 target search terms, only if it is over that range. Some products will have less than the 50-60 search term range. You will probably not be using all 50-60 search terms in your product listing. You want to leverage this process so you can use the same list of keywords to launch your PPC campaign (How many keywords per Amazon ad campaign?).

The goal here is to eliminate search terms that are relatively less relevant to each other.  This step is more subjective than the others. It will come down to part common sense and the research you did in the product research section (step 1).

Determining % Relevancy

The mindset is that you want to get 50-60 search terms that are at least 60% relevant to the product. In other words, your product would be at least a 60% match to the customer searches. This is just a general relative guideline for Amazon listing optimization. The 60% relevancy might be flexible if your search term list before refining is less than 50 search term, than your 60% relevancy threshold might be a lot less.

So how do you know a search term is of a certain % relevant? The below example will serve as your start. For example, we have a “Yoga Wheel” that is 10 inches in diameter in size. The following are the keywords and the relevancy:

Now that you have the guidelines on refining the search term list, you will refine the list by removing search terms that are not closely related to the product.  You can use the MS Excel/Google Sheet filter function to remove any search terms that do not fit your relevance criteria.

Tips on Filtering Relevant Search Terms

Here are some points on filtering to help you remove none related search terms more efficiently:

• If you have a large list of search terms, remove the search terms that have more than 4 words.
• Look for terms in the search term list that are NOT related to the product. For example, if you are selling a 10 inch Yoga Wheel, any terms that are not 10 inches, such as 12 inches or 11 inches, can be used in the filter. Filter the search terms that contain these terms, and remove these search terms.
• Continue from the last point. It can be vice versa, where you are looking for search terms that must have a certain word. Our example can be “Yoga.” I am looking to remove search terms that do not contain the term “Yoga.” Since “Yoga” is the actual niche of the product, you have to make this word mandatory.

**Please note if there are doubts on any of these search terms, verify them by searching these search terms out Amazon or Google, see if the search result given is the same as the product in question.

Narrow to 6-8 Keywords

With a list of search terms from the previous step, you will define a list of to 6 to 8 keywords. These 6 to 8 keywords will be used in the listing copy. This ensures that a customer search in the Amazon A9 search algorithm can be matched/indexed to your product. Targeting the right keywords and having them in the front end (part the listing customer sees) are good fundamentals in Amazon SEO.

So how do you pick the keywords? You will pick the keywords that have the highest search volume which also have strong relevancy.

Previously, we hit on the relevancy concept and have a list of 50-60 highly relevant search terms to show for it, so how do we find the search volume? Unfortunately, Amazon does not make search volumes available. There are paid software tools out there that, in my opinion, give a good estimate of Amazon search volume such as Helium10. In this guide, I want to be budget-friendly and only suggest free methods. Hence my suggestion for getting search volume data for free is by using Google Ads (Learn how to run Google ads to Amazon).

You probably are asking why are you getting search results data from Google since we are selling on Amazon? Well other than the fact that Adwords keyword planner function is free, we don’t care about the exact search volume since it is not data that Amazon provides anyway. What is important is to know the volume of the relative keywords so you can prioritize and choose your 6-8 keywords.

Using Google Keyword Planner

You’ll need to sign up for a Google Ads account. Once inside the Ads accounts, go to the reporting tool called the Keyword Planner. This should be under Tools & Settings 🡪 Keyword Planner. However one thing to note: You will only be able to get accurate search volume data out of your Google Ads account if your account has been active and if you have already spent on Google Ads. Virgin Google ad accounts with no spend history will only provide very wide search volume ranges that are highly inaccurate and not at all useful in practice.

On the keywords planner page, click “Get Search Volume and Forecast,” enter your list of 50-KW and click “Get Started.”

Click on “Historical Metrics” and then sort “Avg. Monthly Searches” by descending order.

Although you can not see the exact monthly searches, you can still see the search ranges. The most important intelligence you can gather from this process is to see the keywords volume relative to each other.

From the list, you will pick those 6-8 keywords that are A) relevant, and B) have significant search volumes, based on the results on the keyword planner.

I will probably use the below 6-8 keywords in my listings for the combination of search volume and relevance:

• yoga wheel
• dharma yoga wheel
• yoga roller wheel
• cork yoga wheel
• yoga wheel for back pain
• massage yoga wheel

Conclusion: Search Term Research and Analysis is Complex but Worth it

Search term analysis and optimization seems like a lot of work. Well, it is! But when it is done right this one task can give you the best ROI out of all the front end work you can do when you start on Amazon. Keep grinding and best of luck!