How to Boost Your Amazon SEO Using Just Amazon PPC

Do you realize optimizing Amazon SEO can enhance your Amazon PPC? And do you know optimizing your Amazon PPC should increase your Amazon SEO?

In this article, we will be digging into the strategies you need to scale not only your Amazon PPC campaigns but your total Amazon sales. Also, do you know many businesses are leaving money on the table by using Amazon advertisements as a break-even? We meticulously explain why Amazon PPC can be a technique to boost organic ranking and, in turn, your overall profit and revenue.

Know the relationship between Paid Ads and its effect on Organic algorithm

Before we get into how Amazon PPC can boost SEO and vice-versa… As a general rule of thumb, every paid traffic marketer on any platform should be aware of how organic marketing is influenced by paid advertising platform.

For example, you can’t really run a successful Facebook Ads campaign if you don’t know what makes up a good Facebook post. On Google ads, there’s even a paid to organic report! This report actually shows you the impact of your paid ads on your organic CTR and vice versa.  

Now on Amazon… The link between paid and organic is so strong that optimizing one channel can directly influence another’s performance.

Common Amazon PPC Mistake to Avoid

Before we talk about how Amazon SEO and PPC and how they can boost each other… First, let me make one thing clear: there is a flawed Amazon SEO strategy that can actually hurt your PPC.

This flawed strategy is by going through the keyword research tools and grabbing hundreds of keywords. Then, dropping those hundreds of keywords into their PPC campaign. The thought process is that “It’s OK if I add hundreds of keywords in my ad groups…” I can just recheck it in two weeks and keep the ones that work. This is the fastest way to get frustrated and disappointed with your results.

The first reason you should not do this is that Amazon doesn’t want you to advertise on things that you are not strongly relevant and not indexed for. For example, if I’m bidding on a  “Hydration bag,” I might accidentally bid on a keyword that is so irrelevant that it might actually end up hurting my campaign’s stats.

Hence my average CTR will drop compared to my competitors. Then, Amazon will be getting signals that I’m just not a quality advertiser. The only way to prevent this is to ONLY bid on really relevant keywords

The Two Types of Category in Amazon SEO

There are two types of items to optimize when thinking about Amazon SEO. The first category is descriptive, and the second category is buyability.

Descriptive

Online shoppers are very visual. They want to get as much information as they can about the products you’re offering. The ranking factors under this category cover the things shoppers see about your product pages. There are also some ways to optimize them.

• Product titles – must contain relevant keywords to the product you’re selling.
• Product descriptions – must contain the details of your products, including basic functions, size or dimensions, and other relevant information.
• EBC or A+ Content – a feature that helps sellers present their product with enhanced content, images, and a more detailed description of their products or brand.
• Additional Information – you may also include price, quantity, and review in your listing.
• Images – must be of high-quality to easily attract shoppers.
• Click-Through Rate (CTR) – this shows how often buyers see your listing and how many people actually click it.
• Conversion Rate – refers to how many clicks your product is getting and how much of it is being converted to actual sales.

Buyability

This category refers to the factors that may help shoppers determine whether your products are worth purchasing or not.

• Star ratings – given by customers and may reflect how customers see you and your product. You may get better star ratings by focusing on the quality of the products you offer. Star rating also increases by providing good customer service.
• Reviews – the experiences of your previous customers may give other shoppers more details about the quality of your products and customer service.
• Q&A – the way you answer the questions of shoppers. Whether through comments or private messages, it may influence the customer’s decision to buy from your page or not.
• Stock levels – proper inventory management can help you stay on top of your business. Be sure to plan ahead when ordering your supplies to avoid running out of stock. Always keep in mind the factors that may affect your inventory, such as holidays, demand rate, etc.
• Good customer care strategy – taking care of your customers through properly communicating with them, whether old or new, can help you build good reviews and a loyal list of clientele.

How Exactly Amazon PPC can Boost your Amazon Ranking

Now we’ve covered those factors that boost SEO, let’s talk about its relation to Amazon PPC. Now on Google, they’ve explicitly said that running ads on a keyword does not influence organic ranking. Meanwhile on Facebook, you do get some downstream organic boost for running ads due to brand recognition. Still, there’s no direct indication it ends up boosting your organic ranking.

On Amazon, the story is different. The factors that help influence Amazon’s organic ranking also influence Amazon’s paid search ranking. Meaning the goal of Amazon’s organic ranking algorithm is to serve products that are high on relevance and buyability. Hence, Amazon paid ads end up using a very similar factor on their paid placements, using the formula:

CPC bid x relevance factor x buyability factor

Keep Optimizing Everything!

This is where things get “fun.” When you run an auto campaign, you start seeing what Amazon thinks is relevant to your product. From there, you can analyze your Amazon PPC data, then edit or modify your listing to be sure that you appear for things that are truly relevant to your product.

Also, keep in mind Amazon can sometimes be off. If you start seeing that you’re appearing for things you don’t actually want to appear for or aren’t converting for, it is suggested that you refine your listing and optimizing your Auto campaign via negative keyword matches. If you are under the mean CTR of 0.36%, you can be fairly sure that you will not optimize for your Auto campaign or the keywords that Amazon thinks are relevant for your product. So go back to the drawing board and optimize your back end.

Once you start getting traction on your paid Auto conversions, you can use it to influence your organic strategy, so when you first launch a product and optimize the listing, you’re using a keyword from real data (of which you should be optimized for). You’ll then want to begin ranking and optimizing for those most profitable paid keywords and use organic ranking as a way to boost them at least once a month.

Review your Amazon Advertising Reports

You should review your search term reports from Amazon to identify the highest converting most valuable search terms and use that to boost your organic relevancy factors.

For those strong keywords, another thing to think about is the buyability factors into Amazon’s positive feedback loop. Meaning the more sales you get from Amazon PPC, say a hundred versus seventy, that’s more opportunities to boost those buyability factors.

Here’s the thing, in the situation, I mentioned many advertisers would prefer 70 sales at 30% ACoS than a hundred sales at 35% ACoS, but this thinking is wrong. Think of it this way when you look at your campaign manager in Amazon there’s a hidden ROI that you don’t actually see listed in Amazon PPC. You see obvious metrics such as clicks, orders, and corresponding revenue. What you do not see is how many reviews and organic sales are generated from your Amazon paid ads.

What you want to really think about is how many reviews are coming in from those paid orders, and what is that organic paid review ratio? You want to start using these factors to help build an overall strategy and then use that to boost your overall rankings for both paid and organic. Once you do, you will improve your rankings and get even more sales, which boosts buyability. Hence, the positive feedback loop, aka the flywheel continues.

Conclusion

Amazon PPC and SEO are not exclusive to one another. Optimizing one greatly impacts the other one – the better you optimize your products for SEO, the easier it is to handle your PPC. Amazon designed their algorithm this way to assure that customers get what they want to buy, and sellers make the most out of their product listings. To learn more about how to rank higher on Amazon, please check out our Amazon FBA resources.

Meanwhile, if you’re having a hard time navigating Amazon SEO or Amazon PPC, we offer Amazon advertising software that can help you come up with actionable steps to lower your advertising cost of sale (ACoS), and increase your ROI instead. Our software here at SellerMetrics can also help you with bid automation, manual keyword bidding, search term harvesting and so much more.