We had a fantastic Amazon SEO session at BrightonSEO in April this year. It was well attended with brands and digital agencies from the UK and abroad. This training is running for the second year as a part of BrightonSEO.
This opportunity with Kelvin came about via a tweet intro from a good friend of mine, @steviephil It clearly demonstrates the power of peer recommendations.
Our session started with a well-known ice breaker. This helped everyone to engage with each other and created a comfortable atmosphere. It was a very simple exercise of arranging printed statements. 
Our key agenda for the day was:
- Understanding How Amazon SERP Works
- Product listing Optimisation Best Practices & Examples
- Factors influencing organic ranking
- Sponsored ads: strategies and best practices
- Winning the buy box – proven methods
- Amazon marketing services for vendors: headline search ads & product display ads
- Amazon content rich A+ page best practices
Every time I run Amazon training sessions I find it interesting to learn about the challenges faced by brands to get the product information correct, listing hijacking, getting the best out of Amazon paid ads and improving organic ranking. Most of the attendees were very keen on improving organic ranking and we discussed the following points:
Selling product via Fulfillment by Amazon helps improve your product ranking and to win the buy box.
Having product reviews and high number of product reviews helps conversion and ranking.
Amazon Paid Ads are important to improve overall sales. Some of the accounts we work with see 30% of sales from Amazon paid Ads. Paid ads allow an opportunity to place our products on the top of search results and on competing products. It is important to note there are hundreds of products like yours already and we are all trying to stay on page #1 organically so, paid ads give us that extra edge to get to page 1 quicker.
High quality and multiple product images help on conversion and ultimately ranking. Amazon guidelines say first image should be only on a white background and other images can be life style images or images showing details of the product.
Optimised Product Title helps to rank when customer search terms match. With limited space, if the brand name is not important it is good practice to use generic terms. It is also good practice to use converting search terms from paid ads.
Bullet Points act as a selling tool on Amazon product page. It is strategically placed next to the product image and buy now button. When viewed on laptop bullet points allows customers to stay within the upper fold of a page and streamline the checkout process. It is good practice to include unique selling points and product benefits. 
Product Descriptions on mobile devices are displayed before bullet points and makes it significant. We are allowed certain html including paragraph change, bullet points and bold and in some categories table. This helps us to create reader friendly product listings like this.
Getting product data correct is important as all parts of the product listings are indexed. We see incomplete product information frequently and often missing important information which does not help organic ranking.
Probably product search terms are the most under utilised Amazon listing capability. These search terms are unseen by customers but indexed in search. It allows us to include synonymous words, closely related words and brand misspellings.
Parent-Child product listings allow us to display all product variants in one place. It helps conversion of products that are not converting otherwise by giving customer choices.
This is a very short summary of what we discussed over 5 hours. It was an excellent day with lots of discussion and I personally learnt a lot. There will be another session in September, 2017 and you can register your ticket here.
