Where to start with an effective Amazon strategy?

Amazon is bursting with competition, sellers and vendors all wanting to experience success on the platform. So, what can businesses do to ensure they make it on Amazon? The first step is to ensure you have an effective Amazon strategy in place, and there are three areas which should be a priority in every one.

Regularly review and optimise your listings

Amazon looks at content as one of the influencing factors for search result ranking, which means it should be a priority in your Amazon strategy to improve visibility and conversions of your listings.

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The first stage should be to conduct keyword research, finding high-volume keywords relevant to your product. These keywords should be used to construct your listing titles, the bullet points, a long form product description and not forgetting the backend search phrases.

This doesn’t mean you should be keyword stuffing, the listings are being read by humans so need to be written in a way that is easily understood, otherwise you will lose the conversion, no matter how high you rank. You need to find a balance between optimised copy and a customer friendly listing.

However, when it comes to keyword research and listing optimisation the job is never done!

Optimisation of listings, and in particular keyword research, should be done regularly to ensure you are constantly staying on top of consumer and competitor behaviour. Not only will you be able to spot any new, high search volume keywords consumers are using, but you can take advantage of any new questions in your Q&A section or the content in your reviews to ensure the content is answering and addressing what consumers want to know about the product.

Vendors and sellers should then carefully observe the performance of any updated listings, if they are not doing as well as you hoped, or the changes have had the opposite effect, you take a different approach.

Take advantage of Amazon’s advertising offering

It is in Amazon’s best interest for sellers and vendors to be successful on their platform, the more successful sellers it has, the less likely consumers are to go elsewhere to shop. This is why they offer a wide range of options within Amazon Marketing Services (AMS) to be utilised.

The advertising options offered include:

Sponsored products: Sponsored Products are ads for individual product listings on Amazon. They appear within shopping results pages and on product detail pages.

Sponsored brands: Sponsored Brands showcase your brand and product portfolio. Featuring your brand logo, a custom headline, and a selection of your products, these ads appear in shopping results pages.

Sponsored display: Sponsored Display is a new self-service advertising solution that helps advertisers reach relevant audiences across the shopper journey, with ad placements that appear on and off Amazon.

Although, optimisation of your listings and trying to improve your organic visibility should be at the forefront of your approach, vendors and sellers need to invest in advertising too to prepare for the volatility of Amazon’s algorithm.

Paid search on Amazon is a fantastic way to bring in actual sales and build a wider customer base too. This is something else though that should be continuously monitored in order to ensure you are remaining competitive.

Have dedicated account management in place

As there are so many elements to succeed on Amazon, it is usually a good idea to have dedicated account management in place. This can either be a person or team hired for this purpose or can take the form of an external specialist Amazon agency.

Account managers will be able to frequently monitor key metrics, stay on top of updates and new