Help CenterAn Amazon listing is the sum total of the entire no- or low-content book you’re offering to your customers. The listing includes several elements - the title, description, cover image, reviews and ratings, price, etc.
Each of these elements needs to be presented in the best way possible, so that you get in front of more customers and convince them to choose your products over those of your competitors.
Sending customers to Amazon’s Buy Box is the aim of every seller on the marketplace. But before you get to this point, your listing needs to be practically perfect. And there are several ways you can do this.
Here’s how Book Bolt’s Book Scout can help you with that.
What is listing optimization and why is it important?
Listing optimization is the process and efforts involved in ensuring that your listing gets higher rankings on the Amazon search engine results page. However, this is done through the use of effective keywords. Essentially, you want to be picking the keywords that are getting the highest search volume for the product you’re selling. You then want to use them in your own listing to get more views and sales.
The importance of keywords cannot be overstated. Keywords are the only way customers can search for a product with ease without scrolling through millions of products one by one. Just like Google, the Amazon algorithm helps customers find what they are looking for through keywords. These keywords signal customer intent. And it is this intent that a seller needs to pay attention to.
For example, if a customer is looking for an “organizer”, they will type in this keyword in the Amazon search bar to see all the results that pop up. However, if it’s someone who is looking for the words “floral organizer”, fewer results will be brought back simply because the search term has been narrowed down. A search query for “floral organizer 2022” will be even more specific and yield even fewer results and so on. The more detailed a search query, the more specific results Amazon can bring back to the user. This is the customer-facing side of things.
And on the other side of the coin, an Amazon seller of no- and low-content books needs to figure out which keywords customers are using. They’d also want to know where the highest search volume is. In addition, it’s important to know how competitors are using these keywords in their listings through their titles and descriptions in order to rank higher in the search results.
This is where Book Bolt’s Book Scout comes in.
Using Book Bolt’s Book Scout
Book Bolt’s Book Scout does a reverse ASIN search to help a seller determine what keywords their competitors are using for a given title. This is especially important if a seller wishes to emulate their competitor’s strategy and try to get ahead of them by offering a better quality product. There are several places where a low-content book’s ASIN can be found. These include through Amazon itself, as well as via Book Bolt’s Cloud or Product search tools.
The ASIN is a 10-digit number that helps to pinpoint and accurately identify a product. It stands for Amazon Standard Identification Number. Once a seller has this number of a competitor’s low-content book, they can enter this in the Book Scout module and hit “Search”. The results will show the product image, the title, and the description. Underneath this information, however, is where much of the value lies.
For example, all the keywords associated with the competitor’s title and description will be brought back. These results can be sorted by rank. Crucially and most importantly, the seller will be able to see the total items count and the monthly Amazon search volume for each of the keywords.
Leading with the example from the previous article, the keyword “organizer” found in the results of a listing, will yield tens of thousands of items associated with it and a monthly Amazon search volume in the millions. This means that despite the high competition for organizers, there is an exceptionally high search volume for this keyword on Amazon. In essence, this makes the keyword (and possibly the category it represents) a potential avenue for exploration.
How to utilize Book Scout to optimize your listings
Looking at what your competitors are doing on Amazon is probably one of the most important things you can do to optimize your listings. And adding to this, looking at their keyword usage will help you figure out how to not only optimize your listings, but beat the competition while you’re at it.
Remember to always hone in on a particular well-performing book when using Book Scout. Do that by using the Products or Cloud tool. Once you’ve spotted a book to investigate via Book Scout, there are a few scenarios worth considering.
Keywords emulation
Say that you’d like to offer customers an organizer for helping them remember their passwords and login details. The marketplace on Amazon is full of organizers and notebooks. Yet a notebook that contains the keywords “memory”, “remembering”, “organizing”, “passwords”, and more in the title and description is likely to make more sales. An effective keyword strategy for your product would involve looking at all the keywords used by the competitor in their top-performing book listing in tandem with the associated items count (look for lows) and the search volume (look for highs).
However, keep in mind that keyword stuffing is not going to help your cause. Keyword stuffing can end up sounding like a nonsensical clustering of words to create a title and description. But this will add no value to your customer and might even alienate them.
Therefore, using keywords in a natural way that mimics natural speech and rules of grammar will aid with this.
Total items count vs. search volume
Next up is the total items count. This refers to how many items on Amazon contain these keywords. This does not necessarily equate to a total number of physical products with that keyword, but rather, the total number of times that particular keyword appears in various listings.
This count is essential for helping you see what kind of competition you’re up against for a particular keyword. For example, going back to the password organizer mentioned above. It’s clear that there are literally thousands of products that contain the words “password”, “organizer”, “memory”, “remembering”, “remember book” and more. Adding these up can get us to over the 200,000 mark. Yet looking at each keyword’s total items count in conjunction with search volume will help a seller see which keywords have a high search volume and a comparatively low total items count. This is the “golden mean” that sellers should be aiming for.
Search volume as a means of competition analysis
Finally, there’s search volume. Search volume can be looked at separately in its own right, but it does help to follow a more holistic approach. Such an approach would look at the total items count and search volume for a given keyword together.
Once this is evaluated and the “golden mean” (as mentioned above) is found, these would be the keyword(s) you’d be advised to use for your listing to optimize it. For instance, a top-selling organizer that is used for remembering passwords is specifically aimed at women and has a floral pattern. Yet the word “floral” does not appear anywhere in the keyword listing that the particular seller has used. The seller has instead opted to go for keywords that have a very high search volume to target this level of demand.
Closing remarks
No matter how good your no- or low-content book design is, listing optimization should be your number one priority if you’d like to make the most out of your Amazon KDP sales. With that being said, it’s crucial to look at what keywords your competitors are using and the best way to do this is to use Book Bolt’s Book Scout module. By doing a reverse ASIN search on a given title, you’ll be able to see exactly which keywords your competition is using, alongside the total monthly search volume and total listings count. Each of these aspects together can help you choose the best keywords for your specific niche. And when implemented in your title and description, can help you rank better on Amazon, thereby getting more people to see your product.