7 Tips on Boosting Your Organic Rankings

How to Get to The Top of Page 1

Introduction

Organic rankings are the life blood of most seller businesses, and while most of my content is focused on paid advertising, developing a strong organic ranking strategy is table stakes and a critical component of a seller’s advertising strategy.

In this article, I will walk you through 7 tips on how to improve the organic rank of your product on Amazon. While this list is far from all encompassing, we will give you the building blocks and magic formula for success with organic rankings!

How to Boost Your Organic Rank?

1. Start with Keyword Research: You can’t have an effective organic ranking strategy if you do not have a strong keyword map. Sellers have a numerous keyword research tools available to them including Amazon Brand Analytics, Jungle Scout or my personal favorite, Helium 10. Keyword research is critical — you will need to find the right keywords for your listing which will be a mix of keywords that have strong search frequency and high conversion rates. You want to avoid keywords where you do not have a high probability of converting customers as all the traffic in the world will not matter if they do not end up converting into orders.

2. Put Your Most Valuable Keywords in the Title: This seems like common sense, but your product title is one of the biggest indicators of an items relevance to Amazon’s search algorithm. If you are selling a coffee creamer, you will want to get the keyword “coffee creamer” into the front of the title and avoid filler words such as '“delicious” or “flavorful”.

3. Add Secondary Keywords to Your Product Bullets: Not all keywords are created equal and you will want to try to rank for more than the keywords found in your title. Product bullets are the next best place to add keywords and should be written in a way that is relevantto both customers and algorithms. It is easy to get into the trap of writing for search rankings and forgetting that human are the ones who make the decision to buy a product. Focusing on algorithms rather than human can lead to a great ranking without any sales.

4. Don't Forget About Back End Search Terms: While most of the time you want to be writing for customers, back end keywords are the one instance where you are writing exclusively for an algorithm in 250 bytes or less. This is the area where you can add keywords related to your item, but not directly calling out the item. See the example below.

   

5. Use Coupons to Generate Demand: One of the most common methods of driving orders, especially for new items that do not have significant social proof, is to turn to promotions and discounts to help entice customer to purchase. The problem with this strategy is that Amazon places a higher weight on full price purchase compared to orders generated through sale pricing, lightning deals or 7 day deals. Coupons are the rare exception that gives the customer a discount, but is not viewed as a discount by Amazon. Why is this the case - because not all customers take advantage of the offer and does not impact the price for all customers.

6. Start Driving Traffic Against Your Target Keywords: Now that you have your target keywords you will need to start driving traffic and purchases against those keywords. Remember that Amazon is in the business of selling product so they will reward listings that generate strong sales. The easiest place to start is with a PPC campaign that only targets your desired keywords on exact match. Limiting your keyword set and selecting exact as your match type will help to keep your budget in check and avoid any non-relevant keywords and wasted clicks. Remember that conversion rate is a major driver of organic rankings so you need to drive the most qualified traffic possible.

7. Start Driving Your Review Velocity: Everyone knows the important of having strong 4 and 5 star reviews, but what sellers may not know is that review velocity is just as important as the aggregate number of reviews. Review Velocity is the number of new rating & reviews that a listing is able to generate over a given time period, generally 30 days and the reason this metric is so important is that new reviews are a signal to Amazon that customers care about the item and the new reviews text provide additional content for Amazon’s search algorithms to find!

8. BONUS: Consider a Rebate Program: this is technically against Amazon’s terms of service but there are numerous (cough, Rebaid, cough) rebate platforms which help you refund customers for full price price purchases through a ‘Search-Find-Buy’ process. Let me be clear, this is a very risky proposal, but is the most effective tactic that I have seen in materially boosting your rankings within 1-2 weeks, and is infinitely easier than building out Facebook ManyChat bots.

Conclusion

There is no magic bullet or full proof secret sauce to organic rankings, but the tips outlined above will help position you with the building blocks of success for organic rankings. Like all things Amazon, you will need to meticulously review the data and understand how your rankings change as you tweak your input variables, but remember the magic formula of Orders x Review Velocity = Strong Organic Rankings. At the end of the day, if you are driving orders and generating reviews you will start to see your rankings climb in a big way.

Like what you read? Subscribe!

Bowtied Amazon is proudly brought to you by Benitago Group