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Ultimate Guide to Creating the Perfect Amazon Product Page in 2018

By March 6, 2018 No Comments

 

Think of your product page as your product on the shelf in a retail store. In the world of ecommerce, the product page is one of the main factors in the consumer’s decision making process.

When standing in front of a saturated product shelf with tens or even hundreds of similar products (where each one claim they are the best), how do we decide which one to buy ? The truth is, the answer is not one size fits all, because we are all different and make decision based on different factors and motives.

Some people are more visual and are attracted to high quality pictures and striking colors, some make decisions based on logic and intellect and need more thorough, detailed information and some make decisions based on emotions and need demonstration on how the product will enhance their lives in a positive way.

Considering this, the foundation of a good product page is catering to the decision making needs of every one of these categories with superb, high quality images, detailed descriptions of all the features and all the wonderful benefits the customer will receive when using the product

A guy on the computer

If you’re in “I need to figure this FBA thing out ASAP” phase of your entrepreneurial journey like this guy, continue reading.

What will you learn?

In this guide you will find out the elements of a Amazon Product Page, best practices on how to create each one of these elements including bullets, product description, photos, enhanced content etc. We will also introduce you to the official Amazon Product Page Requirements and how to easily comply with them.

Lastly, we will dive into Amazon SEO, explain how Amazon’s Search Algorithm works and how you can optimize your product page to achieve a better ranking. In addition to that, we will reveal to you several tricks, tips and little insights top Amazon sellers use to make their product page more effective.

Official Amazon Product Page Style Guide

Amazon has guidelines and rules about what the product page should look like. They want their pages consistent, crisp and familiar, which is one of the reasons so many people trust Amazon. Although each category has slightly different requirements, there are general product page attributes and rules that apply to every category.

Product page policies have been established by Amazon in order to deliver a satisfying and safe user experience to the customer. Amazon are very strict about these rules and the sellers who don’t abide to them risk getting their accounts suspended.

Product Page Content Rules:

  • Comply with the general style guide. We’ll cover them later in the blog
  • Avoid using HTML, Java Script or other executables. NOTE: Many top listings contain basic HTML such as line breaks and bold. To date Amazon hasn’t be strict on penalizing these listings but it is anyone’s guess if they will enforce their rules in the future. Sellers should use basic HTML at their own risk.
  • Product title length can never exceed 200 characters in any category (be aware that different categories index different title length with some categories only indexing the first 80 characters – it’s important you test this for yourself)

Prohibited Content:

  • Obscene or offensive
  • Inclusion of phone numbers, emails, URLs
  • Availability, price, condition
  • Spoilers regarding books, music or video
  • Reviews, quotes or testimonials
  • Solicitations for positive customer reviews
  • Promotional material
  • Time sensitive information such as tour dates, seminars etc.

Product Page Creation Policies:

  • The use of false product identification information—including UPC codes or publication dates—in product detail pages is prohibited.
  • Creating a product detail page for a product already in the Amazon catalog is prohibited.
  • Using product detail pages to cross-merchandise or cross-promote a product is prohibited.
  • For Books, Music, Videos, and DVDs (BMVD) a single detail page may not be used to advertise more than one product.
  • All products listed on Amazon must meet North America product safety standards.
  • Updating existing listing for a new version of the product is not allowed. You should create a new product detail page for new versions of products.

Product variations

If your products are fundamentally the same and only vary in a few specific ways, you could list them as a variation. The products will share the same title and the customer will be able to view in a single product page. You can use double or single variations depending on your product’s differences. The advantage of using variations is that it will maintain the reviews and rankings of the parent listing.

Examples of good variation:

  • Product available in different colors
  • Product available in different sizes
  • Product available in different scents/flavors

Examples of bad variation:

  • Individual bath gel, shampoo, and scented powder (separate SKUs) that are the same scent
  • Short sleeve and long sleeve t-shirts by the same manufacturer
  • Dinner plates, salad plates, and soup bowls (separate SKUs) with the same pattern
  • Smartphone cases with screen protectors for the same cellphone model
Amazon product page variation example

Who wouldn’t want a pink Hoverboard?

Elements of the product page

These are the attributes common to all the product pages. We’ll explain every one of them in detail.

Product Title:

The product title is the first impression the customer has with the product and a big factor that Amazon’s search algorithm relies on to determine relevance.

When writing the product title make sure the title is scannable, credible and is not more than 200 characters long. Don’t include claims or Sales massaging. Capitalize the first letter of each word. Use numerals (4 instead of four).

These are the elements Amazon suggests including in the title:

  • Brand
  • Product line
  • Material or key feature
  • Product type
  • Color
  • Size
  • Packaging/Quantity

It’s important to use your most valuable keywords in the title starting your #1 keyword right next to the brand name.

Amazon product page bad title

Even with a cute looking Pikachu product, there’s just no scenario in which this listing gets a serious ranking.

 

Amazon product page good title

Appealing, easy to read and keyword rich. A good example of a title.

Bullet Points:

Bullet points, or simply bullets, are one of the most noticeable things on the product page. They are a concise, scannable depiction of the product’s main features and benefits. Their job is to offer a proper introduction to the product without overloading the customer with too much information right off the bat. The number of the bullets is usually around five, depending on the complexity of your product.

The key to high quality bullets is providing just enough information and although Amazon allows up to 256 characters per bullet, our recommendation is to use less and avoid using multiple sentences. That way the bullets will be easy to clear and easy to read.

Here is an example of a bullet template taken from Amazon guru Ryan Rigney:

○ BULLET 1 – Main Unique Selling Proposition. Use psychological triggers of curiosity, anticipation.
○ BULLET 2 – Brand story/hook. What makes your brand unique and why should the customer care? Make them feel special.
○ BULLET 3 – Talk about a free gift they will receive. (If possible, if not touch on another benefit)
○ BULLET 4 – Discuss more details that shoot down any objections they might have to your product. Cover distinguishing features of your product.
○ BULLET 5 – 30-Day Money Back Guarantee. Call to action – tell them to buy now.

Amazon uses bullets in their search algorithm so make sure, if possible, to include your best keywords at least once in your bullets.

Amazon product page good bullet point example

A perfect combination of features and benefits. A job well done.

Product Images:

When it comes to product pages, nothing screams quality more than high resolution, professional, colorful images. They are the closest thing to holding the product physically. There are multiple ways of using images to enhance your product page, depending on what your product is.

Show your photos from different angles and perspectives, showing the fine details of your product that sets it apart from the competition. Use photos to appeal to the customer’s emotions with lifestyle photos that show how the product can enrich their lives or educate them how to use the products with good product in-action images. For this part of the listing, using a professional photography service is recommended.

Here are Amazon’s DOs and DON’Ts of product images.

DO:

Take the pictures on a clean white background
Have high resolution, zoomable images with at least 1000px resolution
Have the product occupy about 80% of the image
Potentially include size ratios (ie. Amazon compares the size of their Kindle with a standard pencil)
Include a high-quality rendering of the product packaging

DON’T include:

Borders, watermarks, text, colored backgrounds, promotional messages or drawings

Below are two examples of product images of the same category:

Amazon Product page portable speaker listing bad example

No nonsense, high definition. Top Seller

Product Description:

Think of product description like virtual packaging information/data. Make sure to include things like size, style, model, what’s it used for, warranty information, assembly instructions etc. Amazon (and shoppers) dislike too sensational descriptions. Don’t include promotional messaging, details about another product or your company’s information like email or URL (Amazon will mask these anyway).

It’s advisable to use keywords in your description for the search algorithm, but make them sound natural and don’t create a sentence for the purpose of including the keyword.

Amazon product page bad description exampe

Copied, unedited and practically unreadable.

 

Amazon product page good description example

This description has a good sales copy plus information on product details.

Enhanced Brand Content:

If you’re looking to further educate or persuade your customers, than Enhanced Brand Content is for you. It presents a perfect opportunity to tell a story about your product with great visuals and appealing copy.

Enhanced brand content really does elevate the whole digital shopping experience to another level. Note that this feature is only available to professional sellers who have been approved as brand owners through the Amazon brand registry process.

When creating the enhanced brand content, Amazon doesn’t give you full creative control, instead the give you a choice between five templates.

EBC enhances your listing by making it appealing for a wide range of shoppers, decreasing the bounce rate and improving sales.

Enhanced Brand Content templates list

The templates to choose from for Enhanced Brand Content

There has been a lot of debate about the keywords in EBC being indexed or not, with more sellers denying it, so there is a good chance the keywords you include in it will be ineffective. It’s also being manually approved, so your copy may need some modification before approved. Quality EBC visuals cost money to make, so make sure you have sufficient budget for it before you start.

Overall, this fairly new Amazon feature is definitely worth the try and has been known to improve sales velocity quite efficiently.

Amazon product page enhanced brand content example

This brand tells their story, displaying the quality of their product with stunning, high detailed images, outline their unique features, showing whats inside the packages etc.

 

Amazon SEO

In this section I will dive into Amazon’s A10 algorithm, how it works and how can you optimize your product page for the algorithm.

Amazon has become more than just an ecommerce platform. It’s now one of the biggest search engines in the world and the biggest for product searches. In 2016 Bloomreach did a study that revealed the massive influence Amazon has on shopping in general. They found out that 55% of people start their product search on Amazon, as opposed to 28% on search engines and 16% in retail.

In comparison to Google, where searchers are usually looking for information, people who search on Amazon are usually in the buying mode, ready to take out their credit cards.

It is certainly worth the effort of learning how the algorithm works and optimizing your product page to best rank.

Let’s take a look at the factors that influence your ranking.

Performance Factors:

Although not officially confirmed by Amazon, by doing extensive testing, it has been determined that the algorithm includes the following performance factors into the ranking.

Sales:

The most important ranking factor. Particularly, the sales velocity comparing to your competition. Meaning if you suddenly start selling a lot more units per day consistently, your ranking will move up a lot. Of course that’s hard to do if your product is on page 3 or 10, but using Amazon PPC or driving external traffic with software like AMZPromoter will improve your sales drastically.

Your Amazon ranking strategy should be based around getting a high amount of full priced organic sales. All other performances factors are secondary to this.

Reviews:

Although always a controversial topic among sellers, there is no denying the importance of the social proof they provide. This social proof feeds into other metrics like conversion rate which ultimately leads to more sales and higher rankings. Especially when starting out, reviews are one of the most important things and a 1 star review early on can absolutely kill a listings momentum.

We recommend getting a core amount of 5 star reviews (10-20) before running any aggressive promotions such as PPC or driving other paid traffic.

Product Page/Backend Keywords:

Amazon’s search engine crawls the product page for keywords to determine if your page is relevant to the customer’s search. So it’s important to come up with a good keywords strategy for your page. We’ve already covered how to include keywords in each element and of what importance each element is for the search algorithm in the first part of the guide.

Price:

Always make sure your price is competitive, you’re not just doing it for the customer but also for the search engine.

Conversion Rate:

The percentage of the customers visit your listing actually make a purchase.

Availability of Stock:

It’s important that you don’t run out of stock because if you do your listing will drop significantly or even disappear from the ranking.

 

Keyword Research

Keywords or search queries are words and phrases that get entered into the search engine. Think of them as the link between what are users searching for and your product. Your goal as a seller is to provide as many relevant keywords to the search engine as possible to increase the visibility of your product. To do that, you’ll need to do thorough keyword research first.

A good way to start keyword research is to write the base or seed keywords. These are the first words that pops into your mind if you think about your product or think about what would people write into the search when interested about a product like yours.

After that, you can use multiple methods of keyword research, combining free and paid methods and tools. We’ll reveal some of them below.

The end result is to tell Amazon that you are relevant for a wide range of keywords so they display your product high in the rankings for many different customer search terms.

Amazon Predicted Search:

A simple method to figuring out which keywords get the most traffic is with Amazon predicted search. It’s free and you don’t need any tools to do it. Just simply write the main term you would use to describe your product and see the suggestions below. It’s a good way to find seed keywords for example.

Amazon predicted search example

Sonar by Sellics:

Free keyword research tool based on real queries of Amazon shoppers. One of its main features is the reverse ASIN lookup, which is a way to see what keywords are your competitors ranking for. To do that just enter the ASIN of the product you want to know the keywords of into the search. Other features include extended search to find synonymous keywords and information about the search volume of the keyword for which they use their own algorithm based on calculations of probability. Sonar covers US and German marketplaces, its completely free and has unlimited use.

They also made the tool very handy by creating the extension for the browser so you can make the keyword research without leaving Amazon!

Sonar by Sellics

Helium 10:

Helium 10 is a high-end service that caters to Amazon sellers. It consists of multiple tools and a few of them are for keyword research.

Helium 10 Cerebro is a reverse ASIN lookup tool. When you enter a product ASIN, you’ll receive hundreds or sometimes thousands of of keywords suggestions, broad and exact match search volume, the number of competing products, who’s doing PPC, and their proprietary IQ score, which is smart keyword quality estimate developed by Helium 10. A lot of experienced sellers believe Cerebro gives you the most accurate search results in the market. Their data is derived from the actual search queries done by Amazon shoppers.

5K Checker is a Amazon keyword index checker. It allows sellers to figure out which of their frontend keyword search terms are being indexed by Amazon and which ones are not. It cuts down a process which would usually take hours to 30 seconds. You can see which bad keywords may be causing good ones to not index and check competitors ASINs to see which keywords they index for.

Magnet is an Amazon Keyword Aggregator. It shows you the optimal keywords for you product listing. Simply enter your seed keyword and get the best keywords available. Tools like Magnet are the pillars of keyword research because they give you a relevant list for your Amazon SEO, both frontend and backend. Evaluate and sort your keywords by using keyword rating and search volume data and get found by the algorithm more often by optimizing your listing accordingly.

After you put together a keyword list with Magnet, use Helium 10’s keyword processor called Frankenstein, which process keywords, sorts them into manageable groups and tells you the best ones to target. It includes de-duplication filters, removing unwanted characters and words, and sorting the keywords by popularity.

Misspellings are often neglected and are a great way to generate additional sales. Rather than guessing and figuring them out on your own, you can use the Misspellinator that finds the top misspellings for your keyword instantly.

Although not used for keyword research, Scribbles is a tool worth mentioning when talking about Amazon SEO. It helps you optimize your listing by making sure you’ve included your most valuable keywords to your titles, bullets, descriptions and backend terms and have a fully optimized product page.

The pricing is 99$/month and includes the use of all the tools above and plenty more. If you can afford it, we recommend it.

Frankenstein by Helium 10

With these tool, you can make a comprehensive list of all keywords you can rank for. Note that your listing will probably have just around 5-10 keywords that driving the majority of your sales.

When you have your list ready, there are two factors on deciding which keywords are most important to you.

  1. The amount of traffic a keywords receives per month. Of course you want to rank for the keywords with the most traffic but remember that keywords with the highest traffic are also the hardest to rank for, so consider, especially in a highly competitive niche, ranking for the keywords with a little less traffic
  2. Relevance to your product. For examples, if you sell a Dog Rain Jacket, the keyword Dog Clothes, although related, it’s not very specific to your product. It means that people searching for that keyword are not looking for your exact product. You can still include these keywords in your backend, which we’ll go into later.

Applying factors from above, you can pick your keywords. Use the absolute most important ones in your title and the rest in your bullets, description and enhanced content.

Seller Central backend keywords

Here you can enter all the keywords from your list that weren’t included in your product page. One good trick to getting some “secret” traffic is to include common misspellings of keywords here.

The Seller Central backend keyword consist of 5 rows each allowing 1000 characters. However, at the time of this post only the first 250 characters will be indexed in search. Amazon has changed this several times in the past and will likely change it again in the future.

It’s sufficient to include a unique word only once, entering a word more than once won’t have any effect, you should also avoid plural versions of word unless it is significantly different. The words must be separated by spaces and capitalization is unnecessary.

Conclusion:

Congratulations! You are now one step closer to becoming a FBA ninja. With the knowledge and information shared in this article, a beginner seller should be able to create his first product page, intermediate seller will hopefully notice the biggest mistakes of his product page and fix them and experience seller will use some details of this guide to optimize their listings.

Happy Selling!

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