SPARKLYPETS CASE STUDY
Ranking on Amazon: The Newest SEO
Strategy for Ecommerce
Summary
Everyone understands the importance of SEO as it pertains to search engines, but what about SEO that directly leads to click-through, conversions and sales? This is exactly what Amazon SEO is about, but hardly anyone understands it to the extent that…
Stats
Clients
Zoltan
from Sparklypets
Industry:
Pet Accessories
Service(s) Requested
Amazon SEO
Problem Solved
No sales on Amazon
KPIs:
Organic Traffic
+33,4%
Click-through rate
+26,3%
Sales
+11.5 %
Conversion rate
+41,32%
About Company
Sparklypets is a new pet accessory and safety brand that aims to help dog owners and their pets make friends.
As a product-based service, which has its own Shopify-powered e-commerce platform, it was important for Sparklypets to also have a presence on the biggest e-commerce platform in the world, Amazon.com.
This was a no-brainer for Zoltan, from Sparklypets, as they understood the need to be on Amazon, while simultaneously maintaining their website.
Unfortunately, simply being on Amazon will not automatically result in sales, especially considering the fast-paced nature of ecommerce.
“Ecommerce can be chaotic!” admits Zoltan; “There’s always something important to do, so I jump from extinguishing one fire to another”…
SEO: Amazon’s Ranking Algorithm (A10) Kala Agency
Amazon’s A10 algorithm has been designed to specifically rank products according to how quickly customers will make a purchase after it filters the results based on the customer’s search query — a search query that relies on keywords.
This means that Sparklypet’s highest-ranking Amazon search result will be a product that matches the customer’s keywords, and has either been most purchased or has the best reviews.
If the product does not have any reviews or has not been previously purchased, then the algorithm will still rely on the listing’s keywords and images to determine if it will be appropriate.
How the Amazon Algorithm Decides Purchase Likelihood
Amazon shoppers do not simply enter in one search query, many of them utilize several search combinations to land on their ideal product, so the A10 algorithm has to take this into account when it ranks Sparklypet’s products.
Amazon’s A10 Algorithm mainly does this in two ways;
- 1) Through filters
- 2) Through purchase likelihood based on click-through-rate and conversion rate.
What is Amazon’s Search Filter
When an Amazon customer searches for a product, they have the ability to narrow the search pool further by utilizing various filters such as “product category”, “shipping method”, “color”, “brand”, “seller rating”, etc.
These filters assist Sparklypets’ customers to know whether a dog collar is, black or orange, for instance — as long as this information is also in the product’s copy, the Amazon algorithm will know that it has to display the collar as a search result.
That’s the reason why Kala encourages all its clients to create “optimized” listings.
Another example is if a customer is searching for orange dog collars, but they only want to look at options from Sparklypets. Then, this customer would filter the category so that they only see “dog collars” as well as “Sparklypets” in the brand filter.
Inside the seller’s central console, the Amazon algorithm considers Sparklypets’ product listing URLs according to parameters such as:
- Node: Every filter category has a unique ID number. This is the ID that the “node” parameter will be looking at. For instance, if a Sparklypets customer is searching for the category “dog vests“, the ID would be number, “1562360967”.
- Keywords: This represents the search term that the customer will be entering. Every seller needs to, at the very least, have a generic name. For example, this could be “purple dog vest”.
- Brandtextebin: This might sound like an unusual parameter, but inside the Amazon algorithm, the Brandtextebin parameter helps the seller compare the performance of different products. For example, “blue dog vest from Sparklypets” vs. “orange dog vest from Sparklypets’ competitor”.
The Kala team helped Sparklypets control as much of these variables as possible during their execution of an Amazon SEO strategy.
Where Amazon SEO Comes In | Kala
When filtering products on the back-end, Amazon will observe all of the search results and omit products that are not relevant to the query.
That means that if your Amazon product listing is not optimized with keywords in the search query, it will not be a ranked search result.
What is Amazon’s Search Filter
- Their click-through rate: The rate at which people click on their pet product listings,
- Their conversion rate: the rate at which people add Sparklypets’ products to their Amazon carts, and their overall sales
This means that they invested heavily into paid solutions such as Amazon SEM (Amazon’s Pay Per Click [PPC] services). Solutions such as this became quite pricey, over the longterm, because Sparklypets was essentially paying for every single sale.
Amazon SEO offers a better alternative to SEM, because Sparklypets was able to gain traffic without paying for it, by allowing Kala to execute their recommendations based on the diagnostic audit.
The team at Kala simplifies Amazon SEO through a combination of;
- Copywriting,
- Buyer psychology
- Kala’s own complex proprietary knowledge,
- The issues identified in Sparklypet’s Amazon SEO audit, as well as
- Industry standards and best practices.
“The high ad costs are what made me immediately want to work with Kala!”
Zoltan says.
Sparklypets’ Amazon SEO Audit | Kala
To succeed at their Amazon marketing efforts, Sparklypets would have had to understand the similarities (and differences) between Amazon SEO and Google SEO. While both types of SEO rely on keyword optimization, when a Sparklypets customer is looking for high-end pet products, the first place that they’ll search for them is Google.
When they are ready to proceed with a purchase process, the first place they tend to search for products is on Amazon — so, Google search results happen at the beginning of the search process, when the customer wants to be informed, whereas, Amazon listings are seen at the end of the search process when the Amazon customer is ready to buy.
A Kala Amazon SEO audit is designed to specifically help Sparklypets, and anyone else, understand how their Adwords campaigns could improve their return on advertising spending as well as optimize their Amazon listings for organic traffic.
“It’s literally free traffic! I [Sparklypets] was sick of paying a lot for SEM and social media ads”
Zoltan
Once the Kala team had sensitized Zoltan to the “basics” of Amazon SEO, they came in and immediately started with keyword research for all of Sparklypets’ most troubling listings. Keyword research was able to tell Sparklypets important information about their Amazon product listings.
For instance “how they were ranking for certain pet product keywords”, “which keywords would be the easiest for them to rank for”, “the keywords that their competitors were ranking for”, and finally, “what their potential customers were searching for”.
Why Amazon SEO Keyword Research
is Essential | Kala
The Kala team agreed that Sparklypets copy and keywords needed, to be improved as soon as possible pronto because the listings were based on translation. A translator and a native English speaker (the customer) will not always use the same words. From the audit, Kala was able to see that the text was not done well and was not optimized for the keywords that the seller had chosen.
“Taking into account the volume and the competition on Amazon, once we had all the keywords, we were able to optimize the content for them on Amazon.” -Kala
This is included but was not limited to optimizing descriptions for each listing, changing the images to make them more “filter friendly”, etc.
The Results of Proper Amazon SEO | Kala
Sparklypets’ original click-through-rate was a low 2.5%. During the time that Kala began optimizing each of their Amazon listings, they noticed that the click-through-rate was gradually improving, and at the most recent time of observation, the click-through-rate had increased by 26.3%.
The metric that Kala used to monitor improvement in their data, both before, and after working togethe,r, was conversions. If the click-through-rate goes up, but none of their ideal customers are proceeding to purchase, they would need to re-optimize the listings.
Fortunately, because of the work that the team had put into each and every listing, from research to customer psychology, this was not the case. They were able to receive NEW and repeat customers.
The Kala team helped Sparklypets get more hits from people searching for their pet products as well as improving their overall optimization strategy, including search-optimized keywords in the product titles, and descriptions so that their listings would appear organically without spending any money.
Organic Ecommerce Leads | Kala
As mentioned, Sparklypets has its own Shopify hosted ecommerce platform, on top of their Amazon store. Being able to own the search traffic and data that comes to their website is something that Zoltan expressed a desire to be able to accomplish. During Kala’s audit of the Sparklypets’ Shopify website, the team notices that organic traffic was 560. Five Hundred and Sixty.
According to industry standards, their original organic traffic rate was extremely low, however, this is understandable considering the fact that Sparklypets’ website was brand new and they had never invested in any iteration of SEO.
Organic traffic, after Kala had worked on their site, increased by 33.4% within the first two (2) months.
Before working with the Kala team, it was difficult for Sparklypets to learn SEO on the go, and they preferred to throw money at the problem instead. The first thing that Kala did was highlight the importance of creating branded and optimized content — placing more emphasis on the Sparklypets blog.
The Kala team has been consistently creating content on behalf of Sparklypets over the long-term and helped the brand decrease its reliance on paid ads, and embrace a more optimized organic approach.
If organic is good for dogs, it’s good for Sparklypets!
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