Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and even Alibaba all have one huge thing in common: They’re all run by optimized search engines trying to find the best result for the consumer. Taking advantage of these by implementing SEO strategies isn’t just efficient, but absolutely necessary to survive in these massive platforms. Perfecting the search engine optimization in posts is essential in getting products seen and getting organic sales through the platform.
Keyword Real Estate: It’s Already Taken
Generating keywords for products used to be as simple as naming the product, synonyms, and adjectives describing the product. This is not the case anymore. In oversaturated markets such as Amazon and eBay, these common, short keywords have been used by hundreds or even thousands of merchants for their products before. These older products are going to maintain the space at the top of search results while new products with the same keywords will sink into the dozens to hundreds of pages behind these initial products.
Creating new keywords for possible searches is the only way to get products to the top of pages on the consumer’s search. The most common practice for this is to create long strings of keywords to decrease the chances of your keywords overlapping with other products and therefore increase the chances of someone searching the string of keywords and seeing your product first. It is important to ensure that these strings of keywords are something that consumers would possibly search. Luckily, there are tools that can help.
SEO Tools to Utilize
There are actually keyword investigation tools and add-ons that can estimate the number of searches for the keyword(s) as well as giving a good idea of the amount of competition for the keywords, or the number of product pages already using them. Simply searching for “keyword research add-on” or “SEO research add-on” will give a number of options to choose from.
Researching using these tools takes away most of the work involved in deciding on keywords. All that’s left is to generate potential keywords. Thesauruses are helpful to come up with synonyms for potential searches you may have not even thought of. You never know what people are actually searching for until you test it, and you may be surprised.
Consider Sponsored Promotion
Sponsored Promotions are ads placed at the top of similar searches by default in marketplace platforms. For a fee depending on the keywords being searched, a marketplace will promote your product to the top of the page. This will practically guarantee clicks and leads to a lot of purchases, but it will take a huge chunk out of profits. An estimation of the cost of a sponsored promotion can also be generated by the keyword research tools mentioned above, but generally more popular, commercialized keywords are going to be much more expensive than less popular keywords.
The point of doing this is to generate traffic. An increase in traffic almost definitely means an increase in sales, and hopefully reviews. This is a good thing not only directly for sales, but also for climbing spots in search results. The working of algorithms in online marketplaces is not clear, but have many high rated reviews as well as a lot of sales will make the product climb in search results naturally. If the product is good and the keywords are not too commercially invested, there is a lot of potential for the product to be placed on the front page for search results. Paying for some views can help a struggling product become a best seller in the category.
Regardless of the platform, these marketplaces want quality goods consumers enjoy buying at the top of results. More satisfied customers lead to more profits for these dominating platforms. While it’s near impossible to game the system anymore due to advancements in the algorithm, creating unique keywords people are likely to search for helps ensure traffic to the product. This traffic translates into purchases, reviews, and more purchases, moving the product up in search results and organically earning you more money.
