Do you know?Amazon sellers in the US sold an average of 11,500 products per minute during the holidays. That’s quite an impressive number that many Shopify stores are looking up to. One of the secrets of selling big on Amazon from these high-volume sophisticated sellers is their holiday SEO tips.
In this article, I'm going to share with you the best Amazon SEO tactics that work wonders for Amazon sellers. You can apply these SEO tips to your Shopify store and get ready for the holiday season!
Not really.
Amazon sellers have the advantage of a bespoke robust product search system. Plus, Amazon is also indexed by Google so sellers can easily get their products found on Google SERPs. Shopify sellers will be on your own from A to Z to build a strong Shopify SEO for your stores.
Furthermore, Amazon has its own algorithm for product ranking, which is called A9. And, Amazon sellers mostly get SEO support from A+ content - a content form provided by Amazon containing rich and detailed text information, images, and pre-built layouts.
Meanwhile, although Shopify sellers don’t have a built-in SEO system in Shopify to rely on, you have tons of SEO apps to help you get the job done.
Although it’s true that Amazon sellers have their advantage as Amazon is already a high-traffic website. However, the competition is just as hard when compared with Shopify sellers. Amazon sellers also have to put hard work into optimizing their product listings for SEO so they are found by the right shoppers.
And because Amazon sellers are the best when it comes to applying SEO tactics for holiday selling, we’re here to learn their secrets.
Psst! It's all about the right keywords!
It's not because your current keywords or Shopify SEO tips do not work during the holiday season. You need to update your keyword lists and prep your stores for holidays because every holiday has its own unique keyword combinations.
Your potential customers actually include holiday-related keywords in their search commands. For example, for Christmas, online shoppers will add phrases like “Christmas gift” with a specific product-related keyword - such as “ugly sweater Christmas gift for husband”.
Secondly, holiday eCommerce sales will grow 15.5% to $235.86 billionin this year's forecast. Despite the effect of inflation, consumers still have a high demand for online shopping during the holidays. That's for sure an opportunity for eCommerce stores like Shopify to increase their revenue.
Besides the holiday-cheer decoration and preparing your stock, refining your product listing keywords for SEO should be one of the crucial steps in your holiday planning. Think of holiday keyword optimization as your festive digital signage hanging on the doorstep of your Shopify store.
What is a seasonal keyword?
It looks like this: the name of the occasion + a specific seasonally related topic + a target end user group. For example, “Christmas” + “book gifts” + “for moms”. There are many combinations you can think of.
📣 Important note: in this article, we’ll mainly refer to “commercial keywords” which are keywords that can convert into sales, not “informational keywords”. Informational keywords are what customers search for to learn about a specific product or topic while commercial keywords are used when customers have a purchase intent in mind.
Keyword research is the backbone of your holiday selling optimization. Extensive research helps shop owners know what customers will search for. Below are 2 effective ways to help you find the best holiday SEO keywords:
Amazon sellers can easily extract the keyword report from their Seller Central Account dashboard. From this report, they can review which keywords customers actually used to land on their product listing and save this insight for their next holiday campaign.
For Shopify sellers, you can go to My Shopify > Analytics > Reports and look for the Behavior section where all store search data is located. You can easily choose a Time range to collect real-life holiday SEO keywords.
Behavior section in Shopify Analytics
The best time range to select is from October to December when the idea of buying holiday gifts, decorations, and other household gear starts kicking in the customer's head.
Besides the built-in Analytics report, you can also use different tools to find which keywords have the best performance during last year’s holiday selling season:
If you are usingProduct Filter and Search by Boost, you’ll have a 12-month range of quality reports for your whole site’s product filter search. With our Analytics feature, you’ll have an insight into your customer’s site search behavior.
One thing you can do with the report is to examine which product filters have the most clicks or generate the most sales, and which of your product’s information presented in filter options are viewed more by real-life customers.
→ Get the most out of Analytics feature for your holiday planning here:
4 Tips To Prep For Year-end Sales With Boost's Analytics
With the collected keywords list from the above tools, make sure to check out the search queries that have resulted in a conversion, queries with high Click-through-rate and queries that have high impressions. They might be the most effective keywords to use again this year.
Competitor analysis helps you get an idea of how you can make specific changes to your keyword optimization with some high-volume searched keywords.
When it comes to Amazon SEO tactics, one of the most often used activities of Amazon sellers is to “stalk” what other sellers in the same niche are optimizing their keywords. This can also be a good Shopify SEO tip too. You can also use the stalked data for ads, applying the assistance of an Amazon SEM marketing services and landing the page in front of potential customers.
What to look for when doing a competitor analysis?
You should do both a back-in-time competitor’s SEO research and their current SEO activities to know which keywords worked for them last holiday and what they are currently optimizing for. Make a spreadsheet of results you found from the below sources:
💡 Need extra help with SEO and keywords? Check out these SEO tools and Shopify SEO tips for your store:A Review of the Top Shopify SEO Apps That You Should Try
SEO Checklist For Shopify: Get Your Store In Top Shape With These Vital Tasks
What is a long-tail keyword? Long-tail keywords are basically composed of a generic keyword and a modifier. For example, with “gaming mouse” as a generic keyword, you can add more details to make it a long-tail keyword such as “best gaming mouse under 1000”.
Long-tail keywords surely don’t have as much high search volume as short-tail keywords do, but they have the specificity that brings you a higher conversion rate.
Image Source: Semrush
One of the keys for Amazon sellers to climb the rankings and sell big is to find less competitive but still highly relevant long-tail keywords to drive traffic to their listings.
Fly to Amazon and enter their search bar, you’ll immediately get what a conversion-optimized suggestion is.
Keyword auto-suggestion on Amazon
You can also use Google search autosuggestion as well as the Related Searches section to get a grasp of in which direction your holiday-related long-tail keywords should be.
There’s a simple tool calledSoolve which helps generate related long-term keywords on different platforms with the short-tail keywords provided.
One of the traditional ways to identify long-tail keywords is to add modifiers to the main short-tail keywords. Most-used modifiers are “how”, “what”, “where”, and “why”.
However, remember that we want to target commercial keywords for conversion and sales. So, you’ll need to filter out informational keywords. Hence, go deeper in adding modifiers to your keywords.
Pay attention to holiday-related or buzz-phrase, deal-sensitive words like “Black Friday”, “gift”, “presents”, “sale”, “discount”, “coupon” etc.
You’ll actually need to guess - or do fact-check based on your collected data - what problems or needs customers might want to resolve when shopping for their holiday. Remember, always be specific.
For example, the holiday is the gifting season. So, there will be a high possibility that customers will look for gifts. Now ask, who they will buy gifts for? What that person would like to have? Or what the recipient’s hobbies might be? And do they have a fixed budget in mind? Do you want to target such customers near your store?
Match the possibilities then the best modifiers to add will look somewhat like this: Christmas gift for gardening mom near Texas.
This way, you’ll target more problem-solution-based keyword combinations to improve your conversion rate.
There are 3 important areas where you need to incorporate your researched keywords.
For Amazon sellers, optimizing keywords in these areas is the killer SEO tactic because the relevance of your product information to a customer’s search query is scored right there.
Is it the same for Shopify? Yes! Shopify sellers are trying to rank high on Google, and Google also reads what Amazon reads first when matching a store’s relevance to a user’s query: it’s the page’s title, headings, and description.
When updating your page titles, don’t forget to include the most relevant keywords at the beginning of the title. This will help you rank higher with the holiday keywords.
In the product page’s title, learn from the mighty Amazon sellers: they make it sweet and clear about their product with relevant keywords right from the beginning. Their best-performing titles always include:
Amazon’s product titles are good examples of how you should write your own product titles
💡 You can test if holiday-related keywords perform well on the product’s title or not. Always test to see what converts best for your store.
For the headings, add some holiday-related buzzwords - but remember to make it flow naturally and don’t sound too obvious that you’re trying to get the keyword ranking!
Here are a few tips you can copy from Amazon sellers to optimize your listing for better conversion rate and keyword ranking:
For product images, Amazon sellers know the rule "a picture says a thousand words" to their hearts. There are certain rules in optimizing product images for higher product ranking (yes, Google loves them too).
Do you have free shipping available? Make that the very first option visible on your product information ANDShopify filter. During the holiday season, the convenience of shipping is the second most important factor that decides a customer’s purchase.
Purchase decision makers according to Amazon buyers (Source:ecomcrew)
Esports Geardisplays Free Shipping Filter first thing in their Product filter
▶ Learn how to optimize Shopify SEO for the Collection page with Boost
When shoppers use your product filters, it means that they are having a purchase intent in mind. So, it’s best to optimize your Shopify filters for their purchase intent. That means using keywords that specify your product’s features or stats and listing them strategically on your filter trees.
For holiday selling optimization, you should make holiday-themed product information the most prominent on the filter tree. For example, a filter option of “Christmas ugly sweaters” product type, “Santa Clause” product tag, or “50% off” product metafield.
Or, alternatively, you can create a separate Holiday Collection like what The Present Finder did:
Source: The Present Finder
Besides optimizing your filter tree with holiday-curated filter options, you should do some optimization for the Instant Search Bar too.
In this on-site search section, remember to:
Take an example from Amazon. With a robustfuzzy search algorithm, Amazon always returns the most relevant products even when shoppers use different words or words with typos to search.
Amazon displays results with correct keywords despite the searcher's typo
→ Read more:Best Practices for Instant Search Box - What to Do With ‘No Search Results’
You don’t need to be a Shopify expert to optimize your store product and instant search. You can easily prep your store for holiday selling with these robust (plus, SEO-armored) product filter options ready to serve on your table:
No more missing on potential customers - even when their search returns no result - our app handles it for you, with many useful options and redirecting suggestions besides “Search tips”
Let’s make it short and quick - beware and do not commit these “SEO crimes”:
Site speed is a part of user experience which is a factor Google uses to determine the ranking of your store. During the holiday season, the traffics will be peaked and might cause slow site loading. You’ll need to prepare your website for all different scenarios to ensure 24/7 fast page loading even during peaked times.
First, estimate the number of traffic your site can handle. In most cases, you can get advice from your hosting provider. Then, if your estimated traffic might be much bigger than your site’s capacity, just upgrade your hosting plan.
If the traffic might be too big, consider using a VPS or CN hosting for more power.
→ Read on: 11 Tips to optimize page speed for Shopify stores
Wow, you’ve made it this far til this point! Thank you for reading this humble sharing on Amazon SEO tactics for your Shopify stores.
Holiday SEO is essential for any online business. It may sound like “Christmas in July” but these preparations are what it takes to stay ahead in the game (remember, SEO strategy takes time).
Even after this detailed post, if you are still finding it difficult, no worries, we’re here to help! We have the #1 Shopify Filter and Search to help you nail your Shopify product filter and search! Here’s a 14-day free trial for you to enjoy all of the premium features. Try our app today - it takes only a minute to install and see new horizons for yourself!
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