The E-commerce Leader

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[00:00:30] Intro: Hey folks. Welcome back to the e-commerce leader. And today we are in the middle of a discussion about the sort of strategy level of Amazon S E O. Now Amazon SEO or keyword, ranking, or listing ranking ranking for keywords, whichever way you want to look at it, is a critical. Part of the picture. In fact, I would argue an Amazon SEO is more critical to a business focused on selling on Amazon than Google SEO is for Shopify based business because of the economics of advertising and SEO and, and the general business model without getting into that.
[00:01:01] We we’ve covered that in the podcast. Anyway, today we’re going to come across a few. In important topics. The first one is the three essential digital marketing metrics for SEO. And they’re true across all platforms where there’s particular issues on Amazon. We’ll talk about that and how to get around that.
[00:01:17] How your budget ties into Amazon SEO and your market choices and how to evaluate if a keyword is worth even trying to rank for in the first place. And then finally the long tail keywords strategy. How does that work? And, and how can we use that? But without going down sort of rabbit holes with it as well.
[00:01:34] So that’s, what’s on the agenda for today. In the following couple of episodes, we’re going to be really digging into some more tactical how to stuff. So you can always skip ahead to that if you want to. But I would urge you if you’ve got the patience to take a bit of time to understand the overall situation, because the more you understand the baby.
[00:01:53] Strategic drivers of SEO. I think the more you’re going to be able to implement tactics that have some kind of shelf life, rather than doing the latest hack you heard on a podcast this week, and then in a month’s time it’s over, right. That’s kind of a depressing, we don’t want to lead you that way as ever on the e-commerce leader, we are more strategic, big picture to small picture.
[00:02:11] And we totally believe from our work with our clients as well. SEO work that this pays off. So share our opinion on that. Then stay tuned and enjoy the show.
[00:02:22] Jason: you mentioned kind of a little cascading funnel there a moment ago on, you know, first there, you first you get the impression and you get the add to cart, then you get the actual sale to occur. Now, you know, Amazon has one click. Purchase. So all that can be first impression and then purchase can be instantaneous.
[00:02:40] Yeah. But sometimes people do go to their cart, to update their mailing address or credit card info or that kind of thing. So, that’s key, key to your thinking here is that funnel effect. And that’s similar to Shopify actually in many ways, any commentary on that kind of a cascading set of steps,
[00:02:57] Michael: the new ones I think you need to, because all this stuff can get very complex.
[00:03:02] You need to come back to extremely clear-minded sort of mental model of what’s happening. Which is quite simple in terms of the customer journey through Amazon, the psychological drivers may be complex, but it’s impressions. Do they see your product listing or not? Right. And that is the keyword ranking.
[00:03:19] That’s the SEO piece we’re talking about, but because Amazon links it all together, one of the ranking signals for should they show your product listing under the keyword, say, you know, blue iPhone holder is the click-through rates. So if they show your products, listing a a hundred times and at a thousand times in any one person clicks, that’s a nought point, 1% click through rate.
[00:03:40] That’s too low that doesn’t show very good relevance. Remember relevance being a golden rule. The second thing is if people click onto your listing, otherwise known as a session and only out of a hundred people who visit your page, a one person buys. That’s a conversion rate of 1%. That shows also very bad relevancy.
[00:03:55] Now. Relevancy. Is it an instinct question because it’s not just about relevancy on Google it’s relevancy, plus a kind of quality of a, a, you know, a post, a blog post or whatever it is, or a Google or an Amazon, sorry, a YouTube video when on Amazon is about value for money as well, and that’s quite subtle blend.
[00:04:13] So it’s really hard to know whether somebody clicks on your listing because as a beautiful image or it’s very relevant or it’s the average rating price, and it’s actually a blend of all four. So the only way to tell which one’s driving it is to play with those factors. And that’s a conversion optimization question, but it leads straight back into SEO.
[00:04:32] So you really can’t separate the two in the Amazon space. So the how to think about those metrics click-through rates being, I would say about 1% or above and conversion rates. You know, how long is a piece of string, but you want it to be in the 10, 20% range, 30%, maybe not a few percent
[00:04:48] Jason: for our Shopify consulting clients.
[00:04:51] One of the things we look at a lot is. This in Shopify backend, this, products that are viewed and then added to cart and then actually sold and that little funnel and Shopify we can look at. And, if your numbers are very disparate, you know, like you’re, you’re, I guess the equivalent here is on Amazon, was what I want to ask you about.
[00:05:14] But, you know, if your impressions numbers really high and you’re, you know, you’re, added to cart number is much, much, much lower or in anywhere in that funnel, if there’s a huge deviant, you know, deviation, I’ve always talked to our Shopify consulting clients about ways that. You know, close those, shrink those numbers in essence, you know, you don’t want to lower the impressions, but what you want to do is raise the, the close rate in essence.
[00:05:41] And when Shopify, we have a few tricks of the trade, we can bring to that party. You can do things like retargeting with email marketing, for abandoned checkout, or text messaging for abandoned checkout, and different things like that, on Amazon. Can you do it? Are there things to be done there? How w how would you, consult with somebody who’s getting the good impressions, but they’re there, you know, sales rate maybe is lower.
[00:06:06] Is there any equivalent there on the Amazon side?
[00:06:08] Michael: It’s really instant questions. So here’s what I would say. Amazon as a platform is a bit like you with a direct to consumer side. They know this stuff, and Amazon probably has an incredibly sophisticated way of retargeting, abandoned checkout, stuff like that.
[00:06:22] And I was an Amazon consumer myself quite well. Busy one. I should know better when I can’t remember whether Amazon starts emailing me, say, Hey, you’ve abandoned your cart. I don’t think they particularly do actually, but I imagine they would, they would certainly take that into account. Yeah. Obviously things like retargeting for abandoned checkouts for us as Amazon sellers are not possible.
[00:06:41] Unfortunately it gets worse than that because the actual data to start with, we are not privy to the organic impressions data. This is one of the massive problems. I mean, Amazon knows exactly what’s going on, but they do not share it with a third party seller. So we impressions clicks, conversions that the golden Trinity of these stats marketing stats.
[00:06:57] Internet marketing, digital marketing, right? Unfortunately, one of those we’re driving blind on because we do not get organic impressions. So the best way you can deal with that is to run Amazon ads. In this instance, not as a way to drive sales as a solution to the problem you, you mentioned, but for informational purposes, because if you are advertising on the keyword blue iPhone holder, for example, and you get a thousand impressions, but you get a 9.16 view percentage, then you can clearly see from the advertising data that that is happening.
[00:07:24] And you can extrapolate to some degree with some major degree of uncertainty still to a degree. Yeah. That is happening on the organic side as well. So that’s the best you can do in sense of stats. Yeah. In terms of solutions. Unfortunately, it really comes down to the same things, which is optimizing for conversion, but for a particular keyword.
[00:07:42] So if you are selling a blue iPhone holder, my, the, the search intent behind this is my first question. What are they trying to achieve? Well, hold on iPhone, duh. Well, yes. Okay. But in what context, I’ve got an iPhone right here on my desk. It’s a bit too low because I use it as a kind of third screen. Okay.
[00:07:59] Well, in that case you needed quite a different fiscal solution. Does your product fit that situation? If not, don’t try and sell it to those people. Cause it will backfire. You’ll get rid of views and Amazon will notice and punish you. But is it for example, in a bedroom, is it for work? Is it for pleasure?
[00:08:15] Those are some of the questions you’ve got to get into before you can really deep dive into the answer, which is to target. A really clear answer to a clear search intent. Often people make generically pretty images, but they don’t actually communicate anything. I think it’s more important to clarify what is it you’re trying to communicate and then make sure your images are beautiful, but make sure they’re clear.
[00:08:37] And once you clarify that stuff, it tends to really drive conversion rates up and that should help ranking for the keywords that are relevant to that kind of answer is the best I could say. So you’ve got to work around the houses with this stuff. It’s, it’s a really kind of fiddly tricky stuff sometimes.
[00:08:52] Jason: So we’ve talked about relevance to the consumer and answering their question or query what comes out.
[00:09:00] Michael: Well, really, once you think about relevancy, consumer, that’s all very well, but you do not exist in a vacuum, as you said, 50 other people claiming the same thing. Like we can help you with your iPhone holding needs, for example.
[00:09:11] So then you’ve got to think about, the competition and can you actually win a search engine result page kind of competition, and, really speaking, that’s a question of sort of, a mixture of what overall market you’re going for. For example, would I go into the iPhone holder market? I wouldn’t, because I think it’s just saturated.
[00:09:30] But even if you decide you are going to do that, then you really need to think about, a shortlist of reasonably short tail keywords that are relevant to your competition and really thinking about, I’m going to go for like titanium iPhone holders or something, very specialist. And because I could win it and abandon the sort of market.
[00:09:45] So those kinds of questions ready.
[00:09:47] Jason: Okay. But let me just ask you this real quick is winning it. Just a function of getting more reviews than the next guy, or is it more than that?
[00:09:57] Michael: Not really. No. So here’s my take on reviews and its relationship to S E O and Amazon. And, I’m not an incredibly technical Amazon consultant.
[00:10:05] I’m an, I don’t run a PPC agency. I know people who do, and I discuss things with them quite often, but my take on it is there’s not a direct correlation, however, indirectly, having a five star average rating. And I think the average rating, not number of reviews by the way, it’s really, really, if you drop from five service to 4.5, so I’ve seen a drop in conversion rate as much as half.
[00:10:25] So it goes and say 40% to 20% or something like that, which means obviously if your conversion rate drops, that sends a very powerful signal to Amazon, that you are not pleasing the people who have clicked onto your search result, as opposed as a result of searching for, I know iPhone holder blue or whatever it is.
[00:10:42] So that’s kind of indirect. Because review rates so powerful for conversion rate, the conversion rates are powerful for SEO. It does indirectly affect it, but not directly is my understanding. Okay.
[00:10:56] Jason: So then let’s say the next thing is really winning the search engine results page. Hmm, rank question. How, how do you do that then?
[00:11:05] If it’s not just about reviews, if it’s more nuance than that, what, what goes into it now?
[00:11:10] Michael: Really? It’s we’ve talked about relevance, so picking a keyword fight that you can win. So if I want to go for an iPhone, Charger or something, then that’s going to be unwinnable because there will be Chinese companies out there who will sell them for a quarter of the price that I would sell them for probably at a loss, but they don’t care because the communist party is bankrolling them and so forth.
[00:11:28] So, that’s the first thing. And there is really a, a budgetary side to this because, if you want to kick off your ranking, and launch a product slightly different question from how they rank overall, but there all links because you can’t get ranked in the first place. When you launch, then it tends to become a self fulfilling thing and you stay not ranked for the right keywords.
[00:11:45] So in order to do that, you’re going to have to pay money in. Rather, sideways really one is by reducing the cost of the product because a lower price means it looks like better value. So you get better click through rates and you get many conversions, which gives you better organic, organic ranking.
[00:11:59] You also kick off incidentally getting reviews earlier, which will help with the conversion rate, which helps with ranking. And then the other side, that’s the conversion side and the other side is traffic. And when you start with, as we’ve discussed, many times you start the cold start as Amazon puts it.
[00:12:13] Yeah. So you need to pay money for advertising. And so you’re going to need to budget for ads and really that’s a, that’s part of your decision of which markets to enter into and which keywords specifically to target, because some would cost a fortune to rank for in some will be more affordable.
[00:12:28] Jason: Yeah.
[00:12:29] Okay. So, I’ve yeah, we we’ve talked about this before this Amazon cold start, challenge. Right.
[00:12:35] Is it possible to resurrect a product from the dead on him? Not to get too religious, but yeah,
[00:12:43] Michael: it is. But I think it’s got a bad history behind it. It’s just going to it’s a little bit like, if you’ve, you know, a bad student, at school or, an employee, that’s got a question mark over their head in work and you’re going to have to be a bit exceptional and you’re going to have to be consistent.
[00:12:58] So if you sort of show the odd spike of good behavior and convert, customers, and then they start buying it and giving you rude reviews after awhile, then that’s going to show up quite simply, that’s going to shovel the conversion rates and that will then show up in the, in the rank. Right? I’m not saying by the way that Amazon doesn’t take any notice of, of reviews in their actual ranking mouth as well.
[00:13:16] But it kind of comes to the same thing. So, I guess to answer your question, if you, are consistent in changing things, then you can probably resurrect dead products. It’s not something I kind of specialize in. But normally that the reason it doesn’t come. Naturally that often for me is because if a product has a problem and it shows up in their reviews, unless you completely redesigned it.
[00:13:37] And some people do, but most people just abandoned it. Therefore they never bothered to timely rank it. And if it didn’t get ranked in the first place, because they couldn’t afford it, then that normally doesn’t change. And again, unless they’ve got some investment, but then why would investors want to put good money after what looks like bad money?
[00:13:53] So there’s a natural few things that mitigate against it and normally happening in real life possible.
[00:13:59] Jason: It’s almost like the snowball rolling downhill towards success seems easy, but trying to get it to roll uphill is really, really tough battle. Okay. That’s interesting. Let me ask you one other question.
[00:14:11] Before we move on from this reviews related topic, I’ve heard at conferences, people who are private labeled people who basically say any review, that’s like four stars or three stars. They’ll just go to Amazon and ask the review to be removed. And really just, honestly, I think unethically have low rank reviews that are honest reviews removed.
[00:14:38] Hopefully you think that’s scummy behavior like I do. But Amazon seems to tolerate it. And from what I’ve heard from these people, Amazon tint seems to let you do that as a seller, it seems so wrong. Somebody leaves a heartfelt three-star review on a product. I mean, as an author, I’ve got a lot of books on Amazon.
[00:14:59] If it’s a three-star right. And they just didn’t like my book. And I can’t ask that that be removed. That seems so unethical, but I don’t know if you have an opinion. Like I obviously I’ve expressed my very strong opinion.
[00:15:12] Michael: What I’d say is good for you. And I, I, you know, I guess the majority of sellers I know, or at least the ones who are willing to talk to me about it are frankly more willing to manipulate things in their favor.
[00:15:23] And I guess if you’ve got, you know, $50,000 worth of product on its way from China and you were about to, you know, have the economics, if it goes south because of some rude reviews which does happen, you can see that people have a powerful incentive, possibly, not losing their house or something ultimately to, to go the other way.
[00:15:38] Now I’m not, I’m not gonna, comment so much on the ethics of it, but the, couple of points really sort of, if you like take an amoral rather than immoral stance, a morally speaking objectively speaking, That Amazon is unlikely to remove a review, unless there’s a really good reason anyway, because not so much for ethical reasons I suspect, or they may have ethical dilemmas at Amazon.
[00:15:58] They don’t come across that way. But for practical reason that they want to retain the trust of consumers. There is a lot of bad publicity, but Amazon and the reviews manipulation probably rightfully so, but anyway, that irrespectively, there’s a PR problem there for them and they need to be acting on it and seem to be acting on it.
[00:16:15] So for that reason, it’s pretty hard to persuade them as in, to remove your review anyway. So it’s kind of a moot point, whether you choose on ethical brands, not to do it, or whether you try to manipulate everything, it comes to the same thing, which is Amazon will just say no seconds. We’re not going to tell it.
[00:16:28] I hope
[00:16:29] Jason: that’s. I hope that’s true. The presenter I remember hearing said, they just keep putting out a customer service ticket until somebody does it. And I thought, you know what? I’m, this is I’m sorry, I I’ll express them. Opinion. That’s just wrong. This is so wrong. So anyway, let’s move on, but I’m just saying, please, in my view, you should not do that as a seller, you know, and if your product is a marginal or, you know, average, then, let the market speak.
[00:17:02] Michael: Absolutely. Here’s what I would say. I remember talking funny, the ethical side don’t end up discussing it very much, but probably because I don’t speak to many people who have strong faith like you do, but I guess, but here’s what I would say.
[00:17:14] I remember back in sort of Sunday school, years ago, this lady who was not kind of a conventionally Christian, 80, should we say? But. Pete thought about this stuff a lot. She was very, very bright lady. She was a poet. So he think a lot, but aren’t necessarily conventionally kind of ethical, I suppose. But anyway, she said to me, something which has struck me as very true over the last while, which is if something’s morally wrong, it’s probably going to show up in results at the end.
[00:17:36] Anyway, it just may take a bit of time. So to your point, I don’t think there’s a real ethical dilemma in the sense that if your product’s bad, basically, it’s going to end up failing anyway. And short term manipulation is kind of irrelevant. Maybe it’s unethical behavior. Maybe you shouldn’t do it. Maybe you think you’re going to lose your house.
[00:17:52] So you should either which way the outcome’s going to be the same. So to your point, I think it kind of averages out to the same thing, which is kind of. Unethical behavior tends to mean that people don’t trust you, lack of trust or don’t do business with you. Lack of business means that your business dies.
[00:18:06] So it comes to the same thing. Yes. Yeah. This lady had to be a Quaker. And one of the things that the Quakers were very successful business people in 19th century Britain, they made things like ambitions, flaps, and quite a lot of, you know, Quaker oats. And one of the reasons for that is because people trusted them.
[00:18:20] They said they were going to do something and they did it. And so to your point, I guess in the end, you could see ethics as a, you know, as a business advantage, you’d be like slight sideshow, but we have got ethics is one of our sort of pillars of content. So I take your point.
[00:18:33] Jason: Okay, great. Okay. Well, let’s see.
[00:18:34] This is good. So, let’s keep going. So let me ask you this question. Do you think it’s important to focus on one key frame? Or do you think a cluster of key phrases or kind of what you want to go after? I mean, you know, like we’ve talked for our listeners about us being maniacally focused on the e-commerce with only one deviation either has the dash or does not have the dash in our Spotify and, and, that kind of focus for the podcast, but on Amazon, how do you consult, your private label product sellers?
[00:19:04] Are they, should they go off for one singular phrase or should they kind of, you know, have an umbrella approach?
[00:19:11] Michael: Well, here’s what I would say that the more sophisticated the algorithm gets, it’s there for a purpose, which is again, relevance for the consumer, right. Quality in, in Amazon. Well, that means quality products at the right price, as opposed to merely just relevance of the document to the query.
[00:19:26] I can the Google world. Right. But, They’re not getting sophisticated for random reasons. They’re trying to get better at that job whilst balancing out these tensions of Amazon keeping its market share and making revenue from, from advertisers, right? So the better the algorithms get, the more common sense or human like they are, which is to say the artificial intelligence is getting more like human intelligence.
[00:19:46] So people don’t search just for one keyword. They have a variety of keywords that are associated with each other. I guess they’re not even necessarily short or long tail variations of the same keywords in Google. They call it the LSI latent semantic index. And maybe Amazon hasn’t quite gone as far as that, but you have to trust the algorithm and common sense.
[00:20:04] And I would answer very clearly a cluster of keywords, rather than one keyword, which means the good news is it’s common sense. And it’s how consumers behave. The bad news is. As soon as we put our marketer, Hatton’s hats on, we totally forget what it feels like to be consumers and empathy problem.
[00:20:18] Really. You’ve got to think about what, what would a consumer. Well, you’ve got two ways. You’ve either got to imagine what a consumer would put in to sexual products and then really get a sense of the competitive landscape for each individual keyword. But the other way of doing it is if you’re not very imaginative, then don’t bother thinking or imagining, go and talk to consumers, go and talk to people and ask them to search.
[00:20:39] Don’t ask them what they would search for. Just ask them to search and to video it, anything like that, then you get your mum to do it. If your mom is an obsessive shopper for iPhone holders, whatever it is. So get a human input and then filter it through the algorithm that start with the algorithm, because that’s the wrong starting point.
[00:20:55] That’s not, Amazon’s starting point. That’s not Google starting point. They start with the human intent or the engineering algorithm to end up with, with two outcomes, which is number one, a sale for Google or Amazon. And number two, I’m getting relevant results for the consumers, which means that they keep coming back.
[00:21:11] Jason: So you mentioned the phrase long tail, keyword, obviously. I I’m familiar with that phrase for those of our listeners who I think most people would be, but I got Chris Anderson’s classic book that everyone should read, is, is fantastic for that. Yeah.
[00:21:26] Michael: Long tail, what’s it. Long, long, long tail.
[00:21:29] Yeah. Very, very good. 2007 original. Wasn’t it. And it’s really dated incredibly well for anything to do with digital marketing. Absolutely agree.
[00:21:37] Jason: It has. So do you focus on long tail keywords with your clients mostly? Or do you go for the big, hard, you know, category killer, you know, key phrase or keyword? What’s the best strategy?
[00:21:48] Michael: Instant question. I would say it’s actually not really an either or question because, it used to be that you could just focus on longer tail keywords.
[00:21:56] So instead of iPhone holder, iPhone holder to Tanium blue or something really obscure like that, I would say most competent competitors will already be doing this anyway. So in an established market, you probably won’t find that’s enough. So really I think you need to just think of it in two phases.
[00:22:09] Ultimately, you need to decide what sort of shorter or medium tail keyword, I don’t know, iPhone holder, iPhone X, or something that you’re going to go for. And that is really your aim in the medium term or even longer term. But then in order to get there, you may want to target a long tail keywords that contain your short term keywords.
[00:22:27] For example, iPhone holder, iPhone X, blue, iPhone holder, iPhone X, plastic, et cetera, et cetera. And they’ll probably be a hundred such keywords or whatever it is, maybe hundreds. And if you like, every time you rank as Kevin King, the great Amazon, sales expert, put it to me. By the way, a guru who I think also really, really knows his stuff, Kevin King, it gets my vote.
[00:22:46] He’s a very competent guy, but anyway, he said, for example, if you go for widget blue widget, red widget, small widget big, then you’ll start, you know, again, if you like every time you get a sale on one of those, or even a click, you’ll get about a 10th of the ranking juice for the word widgets that you would have had if you just put the word widget in.
[00:23:03] So that’s really the long tail ranking theory, I guess it’s similar in the Google world, right? That you would know more than me. But you’ve got to bear in mind that in the end, you are trying to rank for whatever your target keywords are directly. And, and you’re still going to have a cost commensurate with that.
[00:23:18] So again, don’t kid yourself that you are going to end up ranking for iPhone X, anything, because that’s just not a set. And go and don’t kid yourself that you’re going to just take a little piece out of the market that is blue iPhone X cases, because somebody else will have had that already. You have to think a bit more in the middle ground, really?
[00:23:37] I think.
[00:23:38] Jason: Okay. Let me ask you about that before we move on to the next part of our conversation, because I phone is an obvious, you know, unwinnable, but they’re meaning many minutes. Products on Amazon. Where it’s is it winnable? I don’t know. How do you coach people who are in that middle of the world, kind of quasi popular, some people looking, but it doesn’t have huge, you know, cultural relevance like iPhone.
[00:24:07] How do you tell if it’s winnable or not? What, how do you judge, what are the criteria you use to figure this stuff
[00:24:13] Michael: out? Well, so I guess there’s two sides to it. It’s a very, very good question. It’s really great question. I’m glad you asked me that. I hadn’t really thought of our saying that two things.
[00:24:23] First of all, I think you’ve got to look at the upside potential and then you’ve got to look at the competition. So the upside potential, the opportunity. How valuable would it be if you won? You know, good market share. Like you got ranked in position four, which is an Amazon way of looking at impressions data, which is Amazon way of looking at market share.
[00:24:40] So with Google as digital marketers, way of looking at market share, but if you zoom out a bit and think like a business person, irrespective of medium market share, okay. So if I can get 10% of the market share for iPhone X plastic phone holders, a year, how much would that be worth? Not just in revenue.
[00:24:56] Which is traditionally how you measure market share, but how much profit would it make you? Okay. There’s one side. The other one is affordability and cashflow. Okay. To get to that position, how much money is it going to cost us? It assume it, by the way, the opportunity is poor then bother. And the second one is assuming the opportunity is good.
[00:25:11] And with having, how much would it cost us to get there? So you have to think about, there’s lots of parts of the economics when you’re a private label, product developer, if you’re a wholesaler similar, but a bit simpler, which is to say, how much is the cost of goods sold at the cost of the product landed cost or, you know, whatever it is.
[00:25:26] And that whatever’s left between that. And the revenue is what you’ve got left to do things like advertising or do price reductions, which are two sides of the same coin. They’re going to increase conversion rate and get your ranking. Right. So you’ve really got to try and cost out not only how much budget is going to cost you, that’s the next thing.
[00:25:42] But then the third thing is cashflow. Okay. So it’s going to cost you $40,000 to, to rank, you know, and. Have 40,000 flow out of your account, how quick this is going to happen in three months. Okay. Do you have $50,000 in the bank allocated just to product launch, not product cost, but product launch for a single product column.
[00:26:00] Cause it could be that you could, you could rank for something crazy. Like, spatular literally had a client a while ago or kind of a collaborator. He was ranking for something like vegetable spiralizer is a few years ago, but it was still insane. And they literally, after the product patent and production costs and shipping costs, they spent $40,000 for three months to then make, you know, 50,000 profit the next month.
[00:26:21] And then on from that, it made a huge amount of profit. The opportunity was high, but the cashflow required was so vast that most people wouldn’t do that. So opportunity size, budget cashflow, a lot of it comes down to money. Now in terms of how do you make that decision based on what you’re looking at?
[00:26:36] I would say a few rules of thumb, first of all. If you take one, month’s worth of revenue on Amazon. If you multiply that by three, that’s going to be, if you, if you divide it by say four, that’s your total landed cost and importing from China in normal times, by the way, in 2021 right now is not the case because shipping times all up in the air, but even in normal times, you’re going to have to have three months worth of inventory, at least.
[00:27:01] So you can multiply that number by three. That’s the amount you need for your product. And then you need to look at the amount that it needs to spend on, on price reductions. You’ll probably going to need to take it down a substantial, maybe 25% below and standards and market price. Then you’ve got to look at the cost per click and do some maths on it.
[00:27:18] And normally speaking, if you’re even asking the question, should I go into this market? It looks a bit competitive, but do you see, in, in most cases, the answer is no, don’t do it. And that means that a lot of things that look like opportunities aren’t and that means you’ve got to look at hundreds of opportunities and that’s frustrating, but that is, I think the reality for a lot of people I’m afraid what’s not a sexy answer, but there aren’t that many opportunities always.
[00:27:40] Jason: What are the software tools you like to use to do that? I’ve heard viral launch as a tool that you can use for that kind of thing. Are there
[00:27:45] Michael: others? Three standard ones that are really good for keyword research, viral laws created by Casey Goss. Who’s gone off to do other things now. Very good jungle Scouts.
[00:27:53] Greg’s a very smart guy. Hadn’t spoken to him for ages, but he knows his stuff and, and helium 10, which tends to be the one I use. And the one that works, my Amazon seller Francis would be the main tool.
[00:28:03] Jason: Okay. And now we come to the part of our show where Michael is going to share a simple three-step process for improving your Amazon SEO without advertising.
[00:28:13] Michael, what are the three steps involved?
[00:28:15] Michael: Good. I should have probably put these right up front, but I just want to give a grownup sort of more strategic thinker, because I think these tactical things all over the internet, but the three things are measuring, defining the target keyword list and building those into, your best thing really
[00:28:30] Jason: is that sounds too simple.
[00:28:31] Is it? Yeah.
[00:28:33] Michael: Kind of is, and it isn’t, if you’ve got the market choice wrong and you don’t have an advertising budget, then you look at it, go wrong. So the first thing is measuring before you do anything, you need to remember to set up a baseline measurement, to see if the things you’re doing to achieve your outcome are actually doing any good because they often don’t.
[00:28:51] And you need to know that. So in terms of keyword, ranking is really our objective here. Then measure up front before you start doing anything, keyword ranking, using a tool like helium, 10, many things out there that will do it. And then check your metrics weekly, have a weekly review, preferably with a coach or somebody who knows her staff or mastermind vendor.
[00:29:09] Somebody who sought on Amazon is willing to go out for coffee with you, whatever, but check that, especially when you’re launching new products and make sure you keep an eye on the, the metrics, above all, how much have you spent, how much keyword ranking have you gain? Because if we’re going no keyword ranking need to change what you’re doing.
[00:29:25] Really basic, simple idea, but a lot of people skip up. They just do staff based on the fact they’ve heard that it works and you’ve always got to have your own data to verify or disprove your theories no matter how great the provenance is because everything’s different. Each business is different. Each product devise differently, things shift over time, very quickly in this space as well.
[00:29:45] Jason: Wow. Michael, we’re an hour into this conversation and we’re like halfway through our outline. I’m just saying, should we make a part two of this whole entire recording so we can have maybe four whole sessions on this stuff? Yeah. I think
[00:30:03] Michael: everyone should be obsessed in this. So the practical ways you can improve your SEO with advertising, we, we can dive into that next time.
[00:30:09] So that those by all means do that.
[00:30:11] Jason: Why don’t we do that? So why don’t we, why don’t we break it here? You want to summarize for us. Where we’re at so far in the conversation. And then we’ll turn this into a legit two-parter next week. We’ll, take on second part of that
[00:30:25] Michael: conversation. Absolutely. So first thing is SEO really is about relevance to the consumer query.
[00:30:31] So just make sure that you bear that in mind, front and center. If you’re trying to sell a blue widget to people who are searching for a red widget, it sounds really obvious, but I see a lot of that and that’s going to get penalized by an intelligent consumers and therefore by any well-run platform, including Amazon, Google, or anybody else, Just think about the fact that even if you’re not a private label seller, you may be able to optimize listings if you can.
[00:30:55] That is the key to driving Amazon SEO, unlike other SEO platforms. So if you’re a wholesaler, try your best to get some permission from the brand owner to modify the listing. And if you’re a retail, I would try to at least consider using Amazon ads. We haven’t really talked about that. We’ve talked about that practical thing the next time.
[00:31:12] But don’t just kind of assume that you’re, kind of helpless in the face of existing listing. If you’re a wholesaler, if you’re a private labeler, you definitely need to make the effort there. It’s really critical to get this right, because advertising to buy sales just doesn’t work economically will not make you profit.
[00:31:26] And you need to really think about this tension that each platform is negotiating between the shareholders, consumers and advertisers and how they are balancing it out. And you need to align yourself with that in terms of SEO on Amazon. You need to optimize for conversion first. Yeah. Need to understand the consumers articulate how your product solves the problems and preferably how it solves and better than everybody else.
[00:31:48] And really the pivot point between the listing and SEO is key words and then clicks and conversions. Yeah. And the other thing I guess we were saying is really, keywords strategy needs to be a bit common sensical by all means target long tail keywords, but understanding the end, you probably want the sort of medium tail keyword in most cases.
[00:32:04] And the final thing to say is if you’ve chosen a really hyper-competitive market, it, you know, no matter of tactical stuff is going to actually rescue you. So it comes down to that boring, old truth, which is you have to pick right market and you have to serve them with relevant goods. And if you pick an over competitive market where you don’t send them.
[00:32:22] Sadly.
[00:32:22] Jason: I love it. Well, what a conversation, man, this is a deep dive in all things SEO on Amazon. So we’re going to pick it up next time and continue the conversation. So if you’re following along with us live, feel free to add questions, and we’ll pick them up next time. If you are, listening to the replay on any of the platforms that we’re broadcasting this into, of course, ask questions as well.
[00:32:44] We’ll weave them into part two of the conversation. So, Michael, thank you as always, and just one final call to action. If you are loving this podcast, then feel free to leave us a like or subscription or whatever you can do on whatever player of choice you use. But it’s just an honor to have people, give us that kind of feedback heard from somebody yesterday who said they really loved the podcast, and it’s always great to hear that.
[00:33:08] And so thank you everybody for hanging in there with us and, really, really appreciate it, Michael, as always. It’s an honor, sir. Have a great evening there in London.
[00:33:18] Michael: Thanks man. Have a great day over in Seattle, Washington.
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