5 Common Mistakes That Can Tank Your Amazon Listing Success

When it comes to building a product detail page on Amazon, a number of elements all work in conjunction with one another to create success. I can tell you, however, when it comes to the copy and keywords, I’ve seen five mistakes in particular that often cause disastrous results.

Mistake #1 – Creating Titles With More Than 200 Characters

One thing that has been driving me crazy for years is Amazon’s completely disorganized way of communicating title character counts. (See Amazon Cleans Up Confusing Title Policies.) Stating one character count in one place and a different character count in other places is confusing and can also be misleading to the seller.

Amazon announced a title suppression rule in 2015, but didn’t really implement anything until a few months ago. So, even though many categories in Add-A-Product say you have a maximum of 250 characters, using more than 200 characters will probably cause your listing to be suppressed.

I strongly encourage you to contact Seller Central and ask them this: Why does Add-A-Product say sellers can have 250 characters in many categories when including that many characters in our titles will harm our listing’s rankings due to the title suppression rule?

Mistake #2 – Not Including Keywords in Your Feature Bullets and Description

Are they used for search? Are they not used for search? Seems Amazon can’t make up its mind. About 18 months ago, you would find this (in yellow highlight, no doubt) in Seller Central, stating that the description and bullets were NOT indexed for search.

With the update of a few Style Guides and Seller Central pages, we now see this, where Amazon has reversed its opinion.

I have always recommended that you include keywords in your copy: all your copy. One primary reason is that it would be difficult to write copy for a particular product and never mention what the product is. After all, keywords are essentially nouns that describe the thing you are selling.

Mistake #3 – Repeating Keywords Over & Over to Improve Rankings

One aspect of writing Amazon product listings has remained constant for years. Unlike Google or Bing; when optimizing Amazon content, you do not need to repeat keywords. Once is sufficient. What’s more, repeating keywords excessively won’t help your rankings, but could harm your conversions because it makes your copy sound awful. No, there isn’t a “penalty” for using a particular keyword more than once. There are times when you will need to do so (when mentioning the product you’re selling, for instance). But to repeat “stainless steel water bottle” (or whatever keyphrase) over and over and over again is unnecessary and boring to read.

I recommend switching up the keywords. Using our water bottle example, you might write “stainless steel water bottle,” then choose a different set of words (IF you have researched them and they are relevant) such as “metal” or “container.”

Mistake #4 – Trying to Fill All 5,000 Characters of Search Terms Without Regard to Relevance

Let me say this: just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD. When Amazon removed the 50-character-per-line limitation for the Search Term fields and replaced that with a 1,000-character-per-line limit, that did not mean it was a good idea to use that many keywords.

One of the biggest issues we have heard over the last several months was from sellers who were doing well, but then stuffed their Search Term fields full of keywords that were barely relevant (if at all), and then proceeded to watch their listings crash and burn over the next few months.

This blog post explains why this is such a bad idea.

Be sure to read the comments.

You wouldn’t believe the kinds of garbage keywords people fill their Search Term fields with. If you send shoppers to your product detail page on Amazon and they click away without returning to buy, Amazon notices. They see that you’re driving traffic to a page that does not make sales. Why would Amazon want to reward a page like that with high rankings? They don’t. So, eventually, they begin to reduce your visibility in the search results until you hardly show up for anything. Pages that don’t rank well don’t make sales either, because no one finds them.

Rather than following the common trend of sticking a bunch of keywords into your listing that may not be highly relevant, you should spend time evaluating each one to ensure that — if someone typed that keyphrase into Amazon — a product similar to yours would come up.

Mistake #5 – Researching Individual KeyWORDS Instead of KeyPHRASES

I think sellers get a little confused when it comes to Amazon keyword research. Here’s what happens (in a nutshell):

 

1. Shoppers type keyphrases into the word-search box on Amazon.com.
2. Keyword research tools scrape / estimate / evaluate these terms.
3. When you conduct your keyword research using Amazon and various tools, you should begin by researching keyPHRASES that shoppers are typing into Amazon.
4. After you’ve found lots of highly relevant keyPHRASES, then you use a tool such as Helium 10’s Frankenstein Keyword Processor Tool (free) to remove all duplicate words.
5. The list (minus duplicates) is what will go into your Product Name and/or Search Term fields.

At Marketing Words, we find a disturbing number of sellers are researching individual keywords instead of phrases to start out with because they’ve misunderstood the process. Researching individual words can lead to a list filled with extremely broad or irrelevant terms that drive the wrong traffic.

Correcting these 5 common mistakes in your Amazon listing can work to improve the quality and amount of traffic your product pages receive as well as the number of sales you get.

If you want to go deeper into these and many other strategies for boosting the rankings and conversion of your Amazon listings, you’ll want my Amazon Product Description Boot Camp. This 4-part VIDEO series is now on sale at a 20% discount with code BOOTBLOG (all caps, no spaces).