Amazon Merch SEO Tutorial 2022+ (Title, Brand, Bullets, Description)
hey what's up guys today we are going to talk about amazon merch seo we're talking search engine optimization how to optimize our listings to gain visibility with the ultimate goal of increasing sales of course we know that sales don't take place if people the potential customers don't know your product exists and the best way to get a sale in my book is through organic rank we want somebody to see us in search results typically near the top because that gets the most impressions and we want to get clicked without having to pay amazon for that placement meaning we're not going to talk about advertising in this video we're going to talk about doing what we can to gain a good organic placement in search results on amazon so let's get started [Music] quick reminder take advantage of the free weekly print on demand giveaway the links at the top of the description takes like 10 seconds to enter and you'll have a chance of winning a subscription to merch titans upload automation merch ninja print on demand research tools all sunsets premium pre-made graphics and bubble scout the best redbubble niche research tool you can find a link again in the description and while you're down there take advantage of my seven-day merch by amazon free mini course and join my awesome amazon merch facebook community i'd love to have you there all right so we are talking seo search engine optimization we are going to look at it through the lens of selling t-shirts on amazon because seo applies to more than just amazon but on this youtube channel a lot of us are amazon sellers and we do sell a lot of print-on-demand products on the platform so let's refine the scope a bit but i also just want to share you know customer journeys don't just start on amazon they may start on somewhere like google right i don't know about you guys but when i open up my default web browser i have google a tab open to google as one of the tabs okay so you go to google you start searching what do you see you see autocomplete well this can have some important valuable information to us looking to rank our products on relevant keywords right because when it does autocomplete just note this for you know the future it shows us related um queries that other people search for to what we seeded it with when i say seeded it with i just mean like whatever you type in initially okay so that can be good for finding things like long tail keywords we type funny christmas shirt and what do we see for family okay so boom there's a demand for family funny christmas shirts for couples perfect for 2021 okay people want a 20 21 spin on it you know what i mean like there's a lot of opportunity here and when i actually do the search what do we see well at the top we see a lot first of all it's pretty busy um at the top there we see ads okay so people paying for placement and google rewards them as such with the highest placement on the page which is going to get the most visibility and as a result you'd probably expect them to get the most clicks of course we understand the customer journey click or search find buy right search click whether it's an ad or not a lot of them don't even know it's an ad even though it says it and um you know hopefully purchase right so you see ads at the top there then my eyes kind of go to the right and i see the sidebar and it's kind of interesting that they put a sidebar there because it to me just looks like another way of jamming in more related products except i don't see it tagged with ad anywhere on the sidebar so those could be organic placements although i don't really know specifically how to rank there in google but again we're talking more about amazon i just want to kind of you know zoom out just a little bit i always think it's good to take like a full picture view uh next you see images for funny christmas shirt those are not ads so that's just actually pulling from google images so guys if you do um actually like run a website or anything like that where you can control things like the file name and the image alt text you know those aren't like surefire ways of ranking high but they certainly do help the algorithm understand what your image is about ai is getting good at reading images in general now too so uh and then underneath there we see a link to tipsyelves.com which if you asked me uh if you're gonna pay me a thousand bucks to guess correctly what was going to be the number one organic result i would not have guessed tipsyelves.com however they are ranking quite well and underneath there we see a link to amazon okay so as far as us as t-shirt sellers on amazon google is not necessarily doing us much favors um not that amazon doesn't rank well it's the second organic rank per like normal links but as you can see there's about four things ranking above it so we are probably capturing a lot of sales from people who actually go directly to amazon and then do their search uh that being said when we clicked the amazon link and i actually wanted to see what listings google was pointing to when they put the little image preview for the funny christmas t-shirts on amazon it wouldn't take me directly to the listings it would just keep taking me directly to this page okay uh but basically what it's done is it searched amazon for funny christmas t-shirts which actually they added the word tea that's kind of interesting so i searched google for funny christmas shirt and it takes me to amazon funny christmas tea shirts so interesting to note that here on amazon guys what do we see sponsored ads at the very top uh i believe that's a sponsored brand ad or headline search ad i still think of them as that but in order to show up at the very very very top of search results you need to be brand registered with amazon you used i used to be able to run those ads without being brand registered but they uh took my rights away to do that unfortunately with an older amazon advertising account then underneath there we have some sponsored listings actually in this case only one from the ann arbor t-shirt co and they sell a ton of shirts on amazon uh beyond that though what do we have we have three organic placement shirts and i'll hide myself really quickly so you can see the third one uh that are all ranked really well on the keywords funny christmas shirt well what are they doing that we can learn from or like what are they doing that we're not doing right because we all want to rank really high on these extremely valuable keywords don't we we can see the bsrs there 1400 uh 1229 and the one in the middle says my christmas spirit is whiskey and it looks like it's fulfilled by merch by amazon which probably explains why it's got a bsr of about 26 000 and is getting kind of destroyed by the shirts on the left and right side which i'm willing to guess probably are doing some sort of like fba fulfillment or very quick turnaround and still arriving potentially before christmas whereas we know the merch by amazon shirts right now are not so here i'll turn myself back on in the video um here we go so i wanted to just really quickly touch on again the difference between google and amazon uh so what i wanted to highlight here we know we searched for funny christmas shirt right and the highlighter actually kind of broke here i'll hide myself one more time but you see in the red lines i was trying as soon as i went full screen it stopped the alignment got all messed up but i was just trying to highlight in the title where we said where the title says funny christmas shirt okay and it turns out that two of the three actually say like funny christmas funny christmas and christmas shirts and when you go into the back end of amazon only one of these is a merch by amazon shirt but basically like you can set attributes to where even if you don't say the word shirt in the title amazon still understands what the product is okay so it's not like you have to put the word shirt in necessarily if you set the right flags in the back end too for them to understand it's a shirt when you sell through merch by amazon they do this for us on the back end we're not even able to see it so they do understand it's a shirt now does that mean we should or shouldn't put the word shirt in well i'll answer that in a second okay but what i really wanted to illustrate though is that generally speaking the number one best practice tip that you can take away from watching this video is and i'm gonna give you some actionable advice in a second but it is that you want to try to include phrase matches or you can go for just an exact match but i think you can do a little bit better than that on amazon but at least phrase matches with what customers are searching that you really want to rank on so in this case we're looking at it through the lens of i want to rank on funny christmas shirt okay well if i want to rank on funny christmas shirt the best thing i can do especially with the new listing that has no sales is to include funny christmas shirt in the title now on amazon on etsy pretty much anywhere i would highly recommend front loading your title with that most valuable phrase okay and i'm not saying put t-shirt christmas funny right because t-shirt christmas funny isn't what they're searching they're searching for funny christmas t-shirt i know that's obvious but the point of me saying that is that you don't want to just stuff random keywords in a random order you want to assist the algorithm in saying okay they searched for this and that listing has that right there front loaded in the title i know etsy outright states that if you front load the title with your most valuable keywords that's going to carry the most significance uh on amazon i don't know that they outright state that anywhere um they're probably a little bit more secretive about their their algorithm and whatnot but i mean pretty much everybody would agree i think so the number one thing is kind of unrelated to well it's i mean it is a part of seo and that is sales sales are the biggest deciding factor of what is going to rank in the top organic spot on amazon on etsy pretty much anywhere um red but red bubbles might be the one platform where that's not the case because i think that if you just tag spam enough they'll give you a good placement which i'm really not a fan of i don't know how they haven't fixed that yet if you know anybody at redbubble call them and tell them to fix that uh but definitely on amazon guys sales is going to get you the best placement why is that because sales are customers voting with their dollars of what should rank at the top right uh the the most the best uh indicator of relevance is somebody spending their hard-earned cash on a transaction on a product from amazon's catalog every time they search something and they click that listing and they buy it that's signifying to amazon's algorithm that hey this product was relevant not only relevant because they clicked it which increased the click-through rate but that they purchased it which increased the conversion rate guys keep in mind it's the internet i guess this is where being a web developer helps guys but like you can track using javascript impressions okay and amazon's doing it all the websites are doing it for sure the big ecommerce websites so they know when somebody searches for a funny christmas shirt and they see you know five six seven eight shirts and they click one of them while the other seven of them just had their click-through rate negatively impacted because they know that there was an impression there where they were seen but they weren't clicked and the one that did get clicked just had a positive impact on their click-through rate now from there whether or not they convert is gonna which means did they actually um add to cart which is another you know measurable action and then did they go from the cart to check out and actually pay another measurable action amazon's going to weight all of these into their decision making process for organic seo and this stuff changes over time guys i've known in the past that like there were times where they tweaked the amazon search algorithm and people that it added to cart and didn't check out were ranking really well so you know people abused that obviously um fba sellers were like hey just have people add to cart and don't even have to buy it and then all of a sudden my item's shooting up the organic rank uh so merch by amazon we're all here to talk specifically about what to do with your merch by amazon uh product listing seo well here is the actionable advice that you came for and i'm gonna use this shirt as an example santa claus it says i do it for the hose he's got his thumbs up i think it's pretty funny i like the design by the way the distressed i like that it's like the red against the the heather gray i don't know why i just like the heather gray shirts i think they look good anyways as a title for this shirt i may do one of two things i may say funny christmas shirt comma i do it for the hose that way i'm saying hey amazon algorithm you know i can't stuff my title with a million things because you limit how many characters i can put in so i'm gonna go for two high-value phrases funny christmas shirt which is super competitive by the way and it's you know gonna be tough to rank on page one on those keywords given how competitive they are but let's go for it funny christmas shirt comma i do it for the hose so it's like highest level highest value keywords and then sub niche within that right so the highest value is funny christmas shirt like if i had my wish list that would be i want to rank number one there or even just christmas shirt right doesn't even have you can knock the word funny off i want to rank number one on christmas shirt and then funny christmas shirt and then i do it for the hose if i can just rank on all three of those that would be great right and then there could even be more longer tail sets of keywords that you rank on from there but in terms of like value the value pyramid at the top funny christmas pyramid or funny christmas shirt not pyramid funny christmas shirt all right so i put that first front loaded now of course amazon merch did that change where they say don't put the product type in the title so you know they're not going to reject you unless something changed today they're not going to reject you for putting shirt in your title so it's up to you whether or not you want to do that you could also flip it and just say i do it for the hose comma funny christmas and then understand that after funny christmas they're going to automatically append the product type so it'll say shirt sweatshirt hoodie etc all right for the bullets these also get indexed they don't carry as much weight as the title but for your bullets you can include keywords that you would like to get indexed on generally speaking what i say is that unless you're selling in a super fringe niche that doesn't even exist on amazon any like yet uh unless you're doing that and you basically have zero competition i to me i don't think it's that likely that you're gonna rank near the top of page one because you included some additional keywords in your bullets you know what i mean like the saturation the competitiveness it's it's making it tough right like if somebody else puts something that you have in your bullets in their title and you both have zero sales i'm guessing that they'll outrank you while it's not a sure thing because the algorithm is unpredictable and it can kind of shuffle things around and it's constantly changing um you can typically bet on that okay that being said some bullets that i might use for this example is this funny christmas shirt says quote i do it for the hose that way it's like i'm reinforcing in the title and in the bullets the i do it for the hose part which represents the sub-niche of christmas shirt that we're in the next bullet i might say something like it makes a great xmas gift for friends family brothers and sisters sisters now i put xmas because we already put christmas multiple times do i need to put christmas again it's not going to help so why not get indexed on the word xmas because some customers search for xmas instead of typing out the full word right you see i'm saying like we don't need to spend forever on bullets because ultimately it's it's just one thing right it's just one thing of many that we can do um that being said also one thing to note is you don't want to get rejections because you went crazy with your bullet points every additional word you put on your listing in the bullets in the description etc is increasing the likelihood of you getting rejected for some crazy fringe word that we all thought was fine and then you realize it wasn't fine right because amazon merch like they don't have a perfectly defined uh content policy and sometimes there's like false positives on a rejected word so just throwing that out there too i don't like to get too crazy with my bullets i like to keep it safe because i don't want to get a rejection for nothing all right for slightly more than nothing it's not nothing but i you know typically in one of my bullets i'll say like oh it makes a great gift for whoever okay and by the way meets me saying that does that mean that when someone goes to amazon and types in xmas gift for friends that my shirt's gonna rank number one because i put it in my bullets you know of course not of course not unless they hit the reset button on amazon's database and you know nobody has any sales on record anymore well then maybe because the algorithm says oh well this listing contains that phrase except it's in the bullets so if someone has it in the title they'd probably outrank me just my guess description guys to my knowledge still does not get indexed for amazon merch products i just ran a test over the last week to try to confirm this before putting this video out because i don't want to say something that's not true so i just ran a test i just rechecked it before i recorded this by putting something that was unique only in the description of one of my amazon merch product listings okay and no results when i searched for it on amazon's front end therefore i think that pretty much confirms to me at least to the best of my knowledge that the description's not getting indexed therefore um do you really need to put anything there i mean you don't have to leave it blank right generally speaking what i'll do is i'll grab my title i'll grab my bullet one bullet two i just kind of paste them one after the next after the next it may not make a lot of sense but guys who reads the description anyways uh you know what i mean maybe on an fba product where you can like actually format it with html and make it look nice yeah definitely i would write a description then or you know even better go with enhanced brand content that is what you should do in amazon fba um that comes with being brand registered which you pretty much have to do these days but that being said for merch you know keep it simple do not generate any words that will get a rejection just for a description for sure do not do that that would be crazy to me so keep it safe that's my one takeaway for the description guys um also before i leave i just wanted to mention if you don't know like what keywords to target check out amz suggestion expander or just go to google and use the autocomplete when you're searching uh amazon has an autocomplete by default too amz suggestion expander though free chrome extension it will expand i mean it does what it sounds like it expands the suggestions when you're looking at amazon's search autocomplete and it takes like two seconds to add to chrome so i will put a link to it in the description so that you guys can how does it only have 58 reviews and 100 000 users that is incredibly low 58 reviews 100 000 plus users man nobody reviews chrome extensions anyways i love this extension i i don't know if i've ever reviewed it maybe i own one at this point uh and it does basically um this for you and i just realized that it didn't no i guess that is amz suggestion expander yeah normally amazon's autocomplete is just one column and this expanded it to four different columns sometimes they do keywords before keywords after they have an other column etc all right guys thank you for watching this video as i sign off just wanted to remind you if you find information like this useful uh i am more than happy to be your coach for your merch by amazon journey i am very accessible on a day in and day out basis my average response time to any questions probably like if i'm not asleep it's probably under an hour so if you want to check that out i have a full program walking you through how i went from tier 10 to tier 200 000 you can find a link in the description guys thank you for watching this video though please like and subscribe appreciate you appreciate your time have a great rest of your day you
