This guide will cover the basics of building an optimized ecommerce product page, with a focus on the Amazon FBA page style.
We will discuss how Amazon builds their pages, what type of product pictures you should use and how to include relevant keywords in your page. You will also learn about creating headlines and bullet points that attract customers and how to use the description section to build trust and tell your story.
Finally, we will cover some technical aspects you can leverage to improve your position in the Amazon Seller algorithms.
Chapter Quick Links:
- Amazon product page optimization
- The best pictures for your Amazon product page
- Choose relevant amazon product keywords
- Write a headline and bullet points that convert searches into customers
- Create a compelling Amazon product page description
- Complete and optimize your product page backend in Amazon Seller Central
- Learn about Amazon search index and check your keyword index
- Actionable steps: ecommerce product page design for Amazon FBA
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Amazon product page optimization
There’s a reason Amazon’s product pages all have the same style: they are specifically engineered to convert visitors into buyers!
In this post we’ll explore how to create your Amazon product page and why this style should be used for all your seller platforms, including your future Shopify store.
An Amazon product page needs to respect a few guidelines before it gets approved on your listing:
- Product pictures should be of high quality. The main picture, the one you see in a search and the first picture displayed on the listing, always needs to have a white background and high resolution. It’s also recommended to include “lifestyle” and “action” images of your product in use.
- Bullet points need to highlight benefits. Try to avoid listing features and instead get people realize how good they will feel by using your product.
- Have a compelling product description. This is a chance to go into detail about the product and list features. If you have a registered brand you have extra options to customize this section.
- Use relevant keywords related to your offer and what people are most likely to search for. Make sure to include words that are misspelled, abbreviations, synonyms and long tail keywords.
One way to ensure you have an optimized Amazon product page is to use a specialized business that offers these services.A great example is the team at The Listing Factory. I haven’t had a chance to try them out yet, but they have various bundles with services such as copy writing and keyword research, Pay Per Click campaign setups and even product photography and video creation.
Reviews are going to be a huge part of your private label product page. They are a somewhat controversial topic, but it’s universally acknowledged that the more positive reviews you have, the more sales you’re going to get.
The reality is that review buying is alive and well, and yes, your competitors will have plenty of them. The irony is that a lot of them can be easily spotted. However, the hard truth nobody talks about is that if you’re a big seller, you might just get away with it.
At the end of the day, the big sellers also bring in a lot of revenue, so it doesn’t make much sense to close them down, even if they might not be 100% legitimate. This doesn’t apply to small brands however. Sales are much smaller and the impact of closing down the listing of a small seller is basically non-existent.
The harsh reality is that if you’re a small brand, you need to play by the rules as much as possible. The slightest irregularity on your listing can cause you months of lost sales, which at this point is the same as going bust more or less.
Getting reviews can be tough, but my suggestion is to not buy them, even if the temptation is high. Amazon came down hard multiple times on fake reviews, and plenty of listings lost a lot of or all reviews, even legitimate ones.
No need to despair though, since there are a few legitimate ways of getting reviews. They only downside is that the process is slower and needs more effort on your part.
The first method to get reviews is to reach out to your buyers via email or a card inside the package to encourage them to leave an honest review. Never ask for positive reviews, just encourage people to give their honest feedback about the product.
Always respond to reviews and questions you receive on your product listing in a personal way. It’s a good idea to include your product keywords in the answer to get more notice from Amazon’s indexing algorithm.
Another good idea is to try to reach out to people who left negative reviews to find out why. If they have complaints about the product, see if there’s anything to do to help them and improve their experience with your brand. If you can make them happy you can suggest to them to change their review if they want, based on your help.
Sometimes negative reviews, especially unverified ones, can be left by your competition. You can reach out to Amazon support to remove these, especially if the complaints are unfounded. Negative reviews can have a bigger impact on your listing than positive reviews.
If you have a registered brand you can get access to the Early Reviewer Program. Products that qualify for this program need to have a sell price of at least 15$ and less than 5 reviews. For 60$ per parent ASIN, Amazon will send people your way to leave reviews until your reach 5 of them. These are not guaranteed to be good, so you might end up with negative reviews you can’t remove.
Finally, a tried and tested method is to reach out to friends and family to help you out and buy the product so they can leave a review. It’s a gray area for sure, but it can help give you a small boost at the start. It helps if the country of the buyer is the same as the marketplace you sell on (e.g. US buyer on the US marketplace).
The best pictures for your Amazon product page
You are allowed to show 7-9 pictures on your Amazon product page. Take advantage of the limited number and show as many angles as possible, especially with people using the product in real life.
Pictures should be clear, easy to understand, rich in information and make the product attractive.
Your main picture is shown in search pages and it’s always the first one customers will see. This needs to be your best image, and always on a pure white background. If you have variations in color or size, make sure to include these somewhere in the 9 pictures.
Try to include additional pictures that show the product being used in real life and try to show-off it’s various features. You can use text and graphics on these to explain features, sizes or even show the packaging.
Things to consider regarding your Amazon listing pictures:
- Images need to show only the product that’s being sold
- All of the product features and characteristics need to be visible from all angles
- Main picture needs to have a pure white background (RGB 255, 255, 255)
- The main picture has to be a professional picture of the real product. Do not include graphics, illustrations, models or substitutes on this image
- Don’t include accessories not sold with the product, text that isn’t part of a logo, watermarks or embedded images
- Pictures need to be correlated with the product name in your listing
- Images need a minimum of 1000 pixels or larger (but no bigger than 10.000 pixels on the longest side) to allow zooming in
- Accepted formats are JPEG (.jpg), TIFF (.tif) or GIF (.gif). Prefered are JPEGs. Don’t use animated GIFs.
- Don’t show the product in multiple angles or positions in the main picture
- The product needs to take up at least 85% of the picture
- Don’t include people in the main image, unless it’s a clothing item
- Don’t use unclear or blurred pictures
- No nudity or sexually suggestive images are permitted
- Lingerie, Underwear, Swimsuits, Children Outfits being worn by a model are not allowed
- When you upload your product pictures on the Amazon listing, make sure their names contain your keywords
Choose relevant amazon product keywords
Amazon keywords are going to be critical to your brand’s success. These are the words and phrases that your potential customers are typing in the search boxes with the intent of finding and buying the product they need.
Keywords also make your product relevant to Amazon’s search engines, signaling that your product matches a customer buying intent. They are a decisive factor in your listing’s ranking and visibility on search pages.
Finally, since they are specific words and phrases people search for with the intent to buy, they bring in targeted, valid, traffic to your product page, increasing the likelihood of making a sale.
The most important aspect of finding relevant keywords for your private label brand is to make sure you understand your own product.
Start by thinking of your product instruction sheet you sent to manufacturers. What did you focus on as the main features, benefits and functions of the product? How did you initially find the product and can you elaborate from those keywords?
Keep in mind that most Amazon product search tools also offer some sort of keyword search functionality, so try to take advantage of these and search for main keywords and related keywords that show up as having a sizeable volume of sales. You’ll want to target as many of these as possible in your listing to capture maximum traffic from searches.
Next step is to study the main competitors with the highest sales volumes, at least 3 to 5 of them, that show up when you search for your keyword. Get their ASINs so you can later find keywords in the backend of their listing.
Finally think of related keywords to your main one, also known as seed keywords. You can find synonyms, long tail keywords or related searches.
However, just as with regular Search Engine Optimization, there are some things you should avoid when building your Amazon listing:
- Don’t overstuff your bullets and description with keywords. Make the text sound natural, as if written by a human for a human
- Don’t use keywords that aren’t related to your product. People won’t find what they want to buy and will just bounce off your page. This will hurt your ranking more than anything else
- Don’t use competitor Brand names anywhere on your listing. You will be opening yourself up to potential Amazon bans or even worse, legal action from your competitors
- Don’t repeat keywords from your frontend, the part that customers get to see, in your listing’s backend, which is what only you get to see in Seller Central. This won’t improve your ranking. Just take advantage of this space to input other relevant keywords that maybe don’t make sense to be used in the frontend
The process of finding relevant keywords for your private label listing is not set in stone, as there are many tools you can work with and things you can research.
However, you can use the steps below to give you a rough idea of how you can treat this process:
- Use Keyword Density Analyzer to check your competitor’s Amazon product page links for the keywords they use
- Focus on 2-word and 3-word phrases with a density of over 0.33% in the listing
- Download the files into an Excel spreadsheet where you will have all your competitor keywords in a database
- Use Keyword Inspector to analyze competitor ASINs for backend keywords and download these reports to your excel database
- Use Keyword Tool Dominator to find seed keywords. This tool returns Amazon search bar autocomplete keywords. Adds these results to your excel database.
- Find additional keywords using Merchant Words. Using this tool you can see estimate keyword searches and related keyword searches from Amazon customers. You can correlate these with estimates you may have gotten from product search tools as well.
- Use Helium10 – Frankenstein to process your keyword database to: remove duplicates, add only spaces, protect numbers, convert to lowercase, remove special characters. This will make the database easier to interpret and analyse.
- Some Amazon research tools also have these functionalities integrated. Check out the services offered by: Jungle Scout, AMZ Scout, Viral Launch
Write a headline and bullet points that convert searches into customers
Your product name and main picture are the most important factors in convincing potential customers to visit your listing. However, as great as your product pictures might be, they’ll mean nothing if people don’t find them through relevant searches.
That’s why your product title needs to be optimized with your most relevant and important keywords, the ones that bring in the most sales for your competitors.
However, don’t just stuff every possible keyword in the title, hoping that you will end up first in ranking. You still need to create a compelling, logical title, that can be easily read and clearly understood by your customers.
Once people are convinced by your product headline and pictures that your product matches their search intent, they’ll visit your listing. The next piece of information they’ll find once there are the bullet points.
The Amazon bullet points are a block of text placed under the product name, next to the main picture and it should highlight the product benefits.
The bullet points should be concise, easy to scan and should quickly summarise the product for the customer, all while improving your keyword indexing.
Ideally they can answer the most important questions in the customer’s mind before they get a chance to ask them and should push them towards a buy, by making a call to action.
Bullet points are the most read section on a product page so keep these action items in mind:
- Bullet points offer your potential customers all the relevant information about the product
- Each bullet needs to start with a capital letter
- Numbers in bullets need to be spelled out in letters
- Use semicolons ( ; ) to separate bullet points
- Don’t use other punctuation in bullet points, keep the text simple
- Don’t be vague or generic in your phrases. Use concrete benefits and examples to express why the customer should buy from you
- Don’t include info about your company or brand in the bullet points
- Don’t talk about promotions or pricing. This is against Amazon’s policy and even if it wasn’t, you would still have to modify your bullets each time you make a price change.
- Don’t talk about delivery details. This is not something you can control, since you’re using Amazon FBA
- Try to tailor you bullets based on your target audience.
Details you should include in your bullet points:
- What problems your product solves
- Customers questions or doubts are answered without them asking
- The content is high quality, easy to follow, with correct grammar
- Don’t lie in your bullets and don’t exaggerate your benefits
- Don’t copy text from your competition or from other sources
- You can actually have 6 bullet points in total. You can enable the additional one in Seller Central – Manage Inventory – Edit – More Details. It will have less characters available than normal though
- Don’t use icons or images in the text. They take up too many characters and can negatively impact your indexing
- You can insert a call to action (CTA) on the 3rd bullet point as this is the last one visible by default in the mobile app and can increase your conversions
Create a compelling Amazon product page description
Your product description shows up after the bullets, in the middle of the listing page.
It gives you a chance to talk more about the product and brand and should be used as a supplement to your bullet points, containing less important information.
If you have brand registry on Amazon you benefit from Enhanced Brand Content. This gives you more options to customize the description section, including the ability to add images, infographics or videos.
Use the product description section to:
- Give more details about the product and your brand
- Answer additional questions that you didn’t have room for in the bullets
- Offer extra calls to action (CTAs).
- Increase your indexing in the Amazon algorithm with even more relevant keywords
- The product description doesn’t usually get as much attention as other parts of the page, but it can still be useful in telling your product and brand story and creating a connection with your customers.
A good product description for the Amazon listing should follow these guidelines:
- Describes the product features in detail. Covers sizes, shapes, colors, how to correctly use the product.
- Emphasizes the product benefits listed in the bullet points
- Instructions related warranty or proper care for the product
- Contains clear, concise ideas and correct grammar
- It can include your brand name, but not the seller or company name
- Does NOT include: email, website, company details, details about other products you sell, promotional language (only until, discount, while stocks last etc.)
- It tells your brand’s story, mission and goals
- Contains as any extra information about the product that you couldn’t add in your bullets
- Targets specific audiences and describes potential uses. You can explain how your product can be used as a gift, used by young people, by moms etc. This can further help with nicheing and keyword targeting
- Can contain basic HTML tags to organize and make the text look better ( Bold , Underline etc.)
- Make sure you add plenty of calls to action in your description: make it yours, get it today, improve your life etc.
- The product description should contain words that stir feelings and emotions in your customers
- It’s a great place to add more keywords related to your product, especially long tail keywords
For even more information on how to build your Amazon product page listing, check out the Amazon Services Quick Start Style Guide.
Complete and optimize your product page backend in Amazon Seller Central
You can access the listing backend from Seller Central – Manage Inventory – Edit – View Amazon detail page.
Here you will find all the details about your listing, and you have the option to modify or add a few things:
- Vital info: product name, ID, brand name
- Variations: details about size , color, if applicable
- Offer: here you can set details about the standard price or promotional price
- Compliance: this shouldn’t be applicable if you don’t have Hazmat or FDA products
- Images: you can use this section to upload product images
- Description: your product description area along with the bullet points section
- Keywords: use this section to add any relevant keywords to your product and listing that you haven’t been able to add in the bullets or description. This is a good place to add misspelled keyword variations, since the section is not publicly visible.
- More details: this is where you can enable an extra bullet point for the listing
Learn about Amazon search index and check your keyword index
Amazon has a proprietary search algorithm called A9. Indexing in the Amazon ecosystem represents the total keywords in the frontend and backend of a product listing that signal a product to be relevant to a user’s buying intent.
The frontend is what customers see on the listing page and the backend is what you get to see in Seller Central.
Overall, Amazon search is extremely important for product discovery and sales, as people have more buying intent on Amazon. By contrast, a search on Google tends to be more informational rather than with the intention of buying a product.
On the Amazon platform products are ranked and displayed in search pages for users based on multiple metrics:
- Relevance: does your product match the other top products in the search category and how well does it match to the customer’s search intent
- Conversion Rate: this is determined based on the click through rate (CTR ). This metric measures how many people actually click on your product page. The conversion rate (CR) represents how many people actually buy the product once they reach your listing. You can influence these metrics with product pictures, product title, customer reviews and answers to customer questions
- Customer satisfaction: a huge role in this metric is played by customer reviews. Products that have a customer review of 4 stars or better have a much greater chance to rank higher on the page. Make sure you reply to all your reviews and questions with a professional but personalized answer. Always add keywords in your replies to increase your indexing
- Other factors that can impact your ranking in a negative way: late replies to buyer messages; a high product return rate; running out of stock – that’s why as soon as you are out of stock you need to close your listing; various errors in your listing like not having a completely white background on your main image
Keep in mind that Amazon wants to increase revenue / customer as much as possible, so the better a product sells, the more likely it is to be in the top of the page, as it also favors Amazon. You want to make Amazon and it’s algorithms want to push you to the top of pages because you bring value to customers and, by extension, to Amazon itself.
Take note that you won’t help your indexing by using your keywords in the frontend and backend. Try to spread these evenly, with the most relevant keywords in the frontend of the listing, going from the top down. Your most important keywords need to be in the listing title, followed by bullets and so on.
Using keywords in answers to questions and reviews will reinforce the relevance of the keywords used in your listing, both frontend and backend.
There’s no need to use your brand name in the listing when you’re starting out. It’s unlikely for people to search specifically for your brand. You might as well use the characters for another relevant keyword.
You can use the Chrome extension AMALyze to check indexing on your listing.
Some Amazon product search tools also have this functionality. Check out the services offered by: Jungle Scout, AMZ Scout, Viral Launch
Another useful extension is Keyword Index Checker which can check the indexing of various search keywords based on the ASIN.
Once you’ve checked your listing’s indexing, if some keywords still haven’t indexed, you can try the following:
- Add the keywords in the title, bullets or description, depending on their relevance and importance
- Add them in the names of your uploaded product pictures
- Add the keywords in backend fields Subject Matter or Intended Use
Changes in indexing typically take one day to update, so recheck after a while to see if everything is in order.
Actionable steps: ecommerce product page design for Amazon FBA
- Find product keywords with keyword research tools
- Optimize your Amazon page with keywords
- Target your page optimization towards your customer profile
- The most important keywords should be found in your product title, followed by the bullet points and product description
- Use professional product photos
- Create bullet points that can be easily scanned product benefits
- Make a product description that gives additional information and erases any potential doubt your customers might have about your brand or product
- Ensure your Amazon page and listing are indexed in Amazon