Introduction:
In this episode of Seller Sessions, hosts Danny and Adam have an insightful discussion about shifts they are seeing in how Amazon ranks products in search, and what this means for sellers going forward. They talk about moving beyond a primary focus on keywords to a more holistic optimisation strategy.
Key Topics Discussed:
- Evidence that Amazon search algorithms are incorporating more semantic matching (and BERT), looking at full product listings rather than just keywords
- Success with broad match and phrase match PPC campaigns, indicating changes under the hood at Amazon
- The concept of “semantic cores” – clustering single word terms that show up repeatedly across competitors’ rankings
- Titles focused on human readability combined with key conversion keywords performing better recently
- Danny’s massive research compiling over 1200 academic papers on Amazon search algorithms
- Building AI tools to help sellers optimise listings based on latest search science (Danny’s A9 Bot)
Actionable Takeaways:
- Keyword stuffing likely no longer moves the needle much; focus is shifting more towards optimising images, offers and creative
- Sellers should double down on their top 20% of SKUs driving 80% of performance
- Regularly test different angles, pricing, etc. with A/B experiments on important listings
- Ensure flat files have accurate attributes for Amazon’s catalog
- Monitor aggregate conversion rates across advertising and organic traffic
Outro:
Danny is building a free knowledge base of Amazon search insights at SellerSessions.com and access to his A9 Bot. He welcomes ideas and feedback from the community to produce more helpful content based on the science literature.
