Amazon SEO: Guide to Optimize Your Product Listing for Amazon Marketplace

You have the freedom to create your listing on Amazon in any way you see fit, but neglect to optimize it properly and you’ll struggle to rank highly or reach high conversion rates. Amazon’s A9 algorithm takes a look at a number of factors when determining what product listing should be towards the top of the search results.

It’s important to rank on page 1 of the search results as the majority of people don’t bother navigating to page 2 and beyond. Focus on optimizing your product listing to give it a boost in rankings and consequently increase the number of sales generated.

Furthermore, you must consider the product listing from the perspective of the potential buyer. It must be informative, comprehensive and have plenty of pictures to provide an accurate representation. After all, it’s humans that will be buying and not the algorithm.

Start with the title

The first thing potential buyers look at is the title, which means it needs to be informative. Ensure that the brand name, model number and name of the product is included. These most important elements should be at the start of the title, then you can include descriptive words that outline the main features. For example, if you were selling headphones, then you could use keywords such as noise cancelling, wireless and over-ear.

The title has a 250 character limit for the majority of categories and your aim should be to use the entire length. It’s important to include as many keywords as possible because it will elevate your search rankings for a wider range of queries. However, remember that you’re writing for humans too, which means the title must make sense.

Product Images

After the title the next thing buyers look at are the product images. Therefore, they must do a good job of clearly depicting the product. A maximum of 9 images is allowed and you need to use every slot possible. Get various angles of the product and where applicable provide zoomed in options that highlight certain key features.

Here are a few tips for creating your own photos:

• The main image must have a plain white background without a watermark.
• An image with the product packaging is a good idea.
• Ideally the height should be 500px and the width 1,000px. This level of resolution ensures the image quality is maintained when zoomed in on.
• A lifestyle image showing the product being used allows the buyer to visualize how they can use it. Also photos that can depict the scale helps the users get an accurate physical representation.
• Invest in good quality photography equipment.

Product Features

Once a potential buyer is interested in your product they will inspect the specifics using the product features bullet points. The character limit for this section is 1,000 so you have to be mindful of only entering the most important aspects of the product in a concise manner.

The key to creating a good quality product features list is to place yourself in the shoes of your customer – consider what they would like to know. Highlight the most important features and place them towards the top. Ideally your product description will attract the buyer over the competition – even if the competition is offering exactly the same product.

Guarantee and warranty information should also be provided, typically it will be the last bullet point of the list. Finally, ensure the material the product is made of is included and the problem it actually solves. No need to go into much detail as you can use the product description section for that.

Product description

Below the fold once the user scrolls down they will see the product description area. Some Amazon sellers leave this pretty much blank and that is the worst thing you can do. Here you can expand on the various benefits of the products and really sell the buyer on why they should buy it.

The character limit for this section is 2,000 and you need to use all if it to fully optimize your Amazon listing. Start by expanding on all of the features you have mentioned in the product features section. Customers that make it to this section are interested in finding out more, but they don’t want to read a long article. Therefore, ensure the sentences are short (10-25 words) and plenty of keywords are used which are bolded – this creates skimable text.

Consider the target audience and use language they can relate to. Also storytelling is a great way of highlighting the main uses of a product in an engaging way. This is a technique that successful Amazon sellers use to increase conversion rates to beat the competition.

Customer reviews and product score

Obtaining high quality reviews and plenty of them is the best way to win on Amazon. However, you cannot game the system and due to recent policy changes you cannot incentivize buyers to leave reviews. However, there are still a few things you can do to nudge buyers to take the time to leave a review.

An automated email campaign can be used to improve the customer experience by sending notifications of when the product will arrive. This same method of communication can be used to send follow up emails to ask for a review. However, in the end you need a good quality product and people will leave reviews organically because they are pleased with their purchase.

Ideally your product score will be 4.5 or above. You cannot manipulate this score but you can improve the quality of the product and the score will rise naturally. Look for patterns in the negative reviews to figure out the shortcomings. Once you address these you’ll have a much better chance of increasing the product score.

Conclusion

From the advice above you can see that there is a formula for optimizing any Amazon product listing. Amazon is a competitive marketplace and you need every edge that you can get. Therefore, it’s a no brainer to spend resources to fully flesh out the product listing to make use of all the screen real estate you’re given.

To get a better idea of how to optimize take a look at some of the bestselling products on Amazon. They will likely have excellent product listings that can be used for inspiration to create your own competitive Amazon product listing.

The post Amazon SEO: Guide to Optimize Your Product Listing for Amazon Marketplace appeared first on EDKENT® MEDIA.

from EDKENT® MEDIA https://ift.tt/2sU8Vsi
via

Questions To Ask For Hiring The Best SEO Agency For Your Business

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a constantly evolving technique. With each single day passing by, search engines keep updating their algorithms to offer a better user experience. On one hand where traditional SEO involves keyword density and cheaply bought links, modern SEO is a proven and integrated digital marketing strategy.

Businesses that earlier kept their SEO in-house are finding it complicated to come up with measurable success. These days, a modern keyword strategy calls for experience into content marketing, knowledge of Google’s ranking priorities and so on. This is only possible if you have 1-2 SEO experts in a marketing team. This is the reason why some of the brand are willing to join hands with a professional SEO Agency.

Hiring an SEO firm can be troublesome. There can be two ways. Either, your partner will help you generate leads by growing organic traffic or they will engage in black hat techniques and leave you with less traffic than ever. However, when it comes to hiring, you just need to know about the important questions to hire an expert who matches your business level in positive ways.

Consider These Questions To Hire The Perfect Personnel For Your Business

1. What is your approach of SEO to offer great results

There are 3 major phases of SEO and the most effective one comprises all 3 as components of comprehensive SEO strategy.

Technical SEO that considers code, website structure, speed and other metrics that could impact traffic. In a technical SEO interview, SEO professional makes sure that search engines crawl your website and its content, reviews 404 errors and analyzes redirects among other tasks.

User Experience is the optimization of content of digital properties. In an On page SEO review, SEO experts will analyze user-facing aspects including the content, navigation and keyword optimization.

Off page SEO that improves SEO presence by earning links and improving the property of online content.

Modern SEO requires a holistic view so make sure that the SEO firm you hire can do all the three, i.e, technical, UX and off page.

2. How will you adopt the SEO strategy to our brand

SEO does not come with a one-size-fits-all solution. Your SEO partner must have some ideas as to how your business needs a unique approach. SEO for local business is helpful in attracting a large volume of customers. An SEO expert must understand the general approach to serve specifically to your niche.

How long will it take to see the results?

A planned, structured and effective SEO takes time. However, this should not prevent any agency or a SEO professional from quoting the time frame for results. In general, you can expect to view results within 6 months of getting started.

The possibility of displaying up results also depends on the health of your website. For example correcting technical issues can lead towards SEO gains in a shorter period of time. But, if your website is structured well and free from any snag, you will have to wait longer to see a computable change.

Don’t forget taking a smart move. If your agency says that they will be delivering quick results, you need to ask them how. If they point towards the technical factors, it is a good sign but if not then you need to be a little cautious. They might be using spammy techniques that eventually get your website penalized.

What is their approach for mobile?

A mobile-first index is the priority of Google. This makes mobile optimization important as ever. Always opt for firms that have a process for conducting a mobile audit of your website. You also need to be pretty sure that your firm understands why mobile is important for SEO.

What is your idea of conducting a keyword research?

Earlier, keyword insertion was about writing a term in a Keyword research tool and framing a list of relevant keywords. Further, it involves developing content with keywords inserted at multiple places. However, with modern keyword research, extra time and effort are required. It involves understanding the user intent. It also helps in understanding what information a user is searching for in the web.

While interviewing any SEO professional, you must know whether they take the user intent into account or not. For a good SEO, they should also involve the latest methodologies that determine keyword intent. If the whole conversation is centered around the number of searches for a keyword and keyword density, it is assured that they are operating outdated practices.

Wrapping it Up!

SEO is a complicated domain. To offer quality results to searchers, it is important that an effective SEO is concerned more about the quality than with ranking aspects and quality of links.

By answering these questions to an SEO expert, you will be able to achieve long-term success. If you have any other questions to ask to a SEO personnel, please let us know by commenting below.

Author bio:

Author’s name works as an Digital Marketer at Webby Central, a renowned digital marketing firm. His skills and knowledge in business consulting and branding are trusted by many leading businesses. In the above post, he has made a note of some quick questions you need to ask before hiring an SEO expert for your business.

The post Questions To Ask For Hiring The Best SEO Agency For Your Business appeared first on EDKENT® MEDIA.

from EDKENT® MEDIA https://ift.tt/2JGDOGU
via

Questions To Ask For Hiring The Best SEO Agency For Your Business

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a constantly evolving technique. With each single day passing by, search engines keep updating their algorithms to offer a better user experience. On one hand where traditional SEO involves keyword density and cheaply bought links, modern SEO is a proven and integrated digital marketing strategy.

Businesses that earlier kept their SEO in-house are finding it complicated to come up with measurable success. These days, a modern keyword strategy calls for experience into content marketing, knowledge of Google’s ranking priorities and so on. This is only possible if you have 1-2 SEO experts in a marketing team. This is the reason why some of the brand are willing to join hands with a professional SEO Agency.

Hiring an SEO firm can be troublesome. There can be two ways. Either, your partner will help you generate leads by growing organic traffic or they will engage in black hat techniques and leave you with less traffic than ever. However, when it comes to hiring, you just need to know about the important questions to hire an expert who matches your business level in positive ways.

Consider These Questions To Hire The Perfect Personnel For Your Business

1. What is your approach of SEO to offer great results

There are 3 major phases of SEO and the most effective one comprises all 3 as components of comprehensive SEO strategy.

Technical SEO that considers code, website structure, speed and other metrics that could impact traffic. In a technical SEO interview, SEO professional makes sure that search engines crawl your website and its content, reviews 404 errors and analyzes redirects among other tasks.

User Experience is the optimization of content of digital properties. In an On page SEO review, SEO experts will analyze user-facing aspects including the content, navigation and keyword optimization.

Off page SEO that improves SEO presence by earning links and improving the property of online content.

Modern SEO requires a holistic view so make sure that the SEO firm you hire can do all the three, i.e, technical, UX and off page.

2. How will you adopt the SEO strategy to our brand

SEO does not come with a one-size-fits-all solution. Your SEO partner must have some ideas as to how your business needs a unique approach. SEO for local business is helpful in attracting a large volume of customers. An SEO expert must understand the general approach to serve specifically to your niche.

How long will it take to see the results?

A planned, structured and effective SEO takes time. However, this should not prevent any agency or a SEO professional from quoting the time frame for results. In general, you can expect to view results within 6 months of getting started.

The possibility of displaying up results also depends on the health of your website. For example correcting technical issues can lead towards SEO gains in a shorter period of time. But, if your website is structured well and free from any snag, you will have to wait longer to see a computable change.

Don’t forget taking a smart move. If your agency says that they will be delivering quick results, you need to ask them how. If they point towards the technical factors, it is a good sign but if not then you need to be a little cautious. They might be using spammy techniques that eventually get your website penalized.

What is their approach for mobile?

A mobile-first index is the priority of Google. This makes mobile optimization important as ever. Always opt for firms that have a process for conducting a mobile audit of your website. You also need to be pretty sure that your firm understands why mobile is important for SEO.

What is your idea of conducting a keyword research?

Earlier, keyword insertion was about writing a term in a Keyword research tool and framing a list of relevant keywords. Further, it involves developing content with keywords inserted at multiple places. However, with modern keyword research, extra time and effort are required. It involves understanding the user intent. It also helps in understanding what information a user is searching for in the web.

While interviewing any SEO professional, you must know whether they take the user intent into account or not. For a good SEO, they should also involve the latest methodologies that determine keyword intent. If the whole conversation is centered around the number of searches for a keyword and keyword density, it is assured that they are operating outdated practices.

Wrapping it Up!

SEO is a complicated domain. To offer quality results to searchers, it is important that an effective SEO is concerned more about the quality than with ranking aspects and quality of links.

By answering these questions to an SEO expert, you will be able to achieve long-term success. If you have any other questions to ask to a SEO personnel, please let us know by commenting below.

Author bio:

Author’s name works as an Digital Marketer at Webby Central, a renowned digital marketing firm. His skills and knowledge in business consulting and branding are trusted by many leading businesses. In the above post, he has made a note of some quick questions you need to ask before hiring an SEO expert for your business.

The post Questions To Ask For Hiring The Best SEO Agency For Your Business appeared first on EDKENT® MEDIA.

SEO Audit Checklist [Updated for 2018]

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an extremely important matter for digital marketers. Today, marketing-savvy business owners can also be found tinkering with SEO concepts, all in an effort to get more visitors on their web pages. SEO basics have largely remained the same as we edge towards the end of the first quarter of 2018. There is still link building, keyword research, fixing broken links and the other usual suspects. But some of these aspects have undergone nuanced changes that have an impact on your SEO rankings. Your competition might also have picked up thing or two about SEO in 2018, which could be giving you a harder time. Hence, it is wise to revisit your SEO strategies in 2018 now. We have prepared a checklist that helps you quickly evaluate how you are doing with your SEO and which areas need work.

The SEO Audit Checklist

1. Find out your strategic objectives – Before delving into activity towards SEO, it is vital to know what you plan to achieve with SEO. This thing that you have set out to achieve through SEO, must have a timeline and be measurable and be challenging enough to push your team and yet be realistic. For example, ‘We want to increase our visitors by 15% by the second quarter of 2018’ is one such objective. A clear objective helps you stay focused on the target and helps you evaluate any SEO initiative objectively, without being biased.

2. Do a keyword analysis – This is SEO 101 but ever so important today. You must identify a set of keywords (the number of keywords targeted should be something you can work with) that you want to capture. You need to challenge yourself (like in point 1) but you should be realistic in your goals. Shorter keywords would have been under the hold of possibly bigger players in your domain who have spent years building their backlinks. Everyone wants to see a David beat Goliath. But it is better to go gradual in SEO than end up with strategies that don’t work. Hence, take up keywords (longer keywords are also fine) that you want to target.

3. Identify poorly performing blogs and pages – Based on your identified keywords, find out which one of you blogs are doing poorly. You can use the good old Google Analytics to get an idea about the number of visitors, the bounce rate and the amount of time spent on the pages. These are the pages and blogs that you already have that can be made better, without needing to reinvest in new content.

4. Promote the poorly performing content – Inject the poorly doing content with a new dose of promotions. You can start by sharing those articles on social media with the relevant hash-tags. You can build backlinks as well from some of the relevant blogs of your competitors. A good way to pull in leads through this content is to offer solutions to problems posed on forums on LinkedIn and Facebook and suggest your pages that is like a soft sell.

5. Perform a technical analysis – The poor content uplifting gives you good initial results to help get a buy-in from your stakeholders. The next thing to do is to do a technical analysis on the website. Find out how much time does it take for your pages to load. If you find that it is not satisfactory, you can use some CMS plugins or Compressor.io to change things there. You should also examine if two of your pages are competing for the same keyword (this leads you to be ranked lower). There is also the redirect chain that needs to be prevented and elimination of duplicate content. You also need to check the mobile friendliness of your website (a very important aspect for 2018 indeed) through the Google mobile friendly checker. All this clears the ground at the basics and helps you progress the next thing on your plate.

6. Perform an experience analysis – The next thing is to know if the user experience offered is at par with the standard today. Effective metrics here include the bounce rate and exit rates on pages. It also helps to ask around in the community for tips on what they think needs work. You will be surprised at the simplicity and yet, the efficacy of some of the suggestions. Minor user experience changes can usually be done inexpensively. At this stage, you should also consider the content experience apart from the user experience. A good idea here is to have authoritative content written out by experts in the field. Trustworthy content has always a way of finding the right visitors.

7. Identify competition and their strategies – There is no SEO checklist that is complete without looking at what the competition does. A thorough competition analysis includes finding out the competition’s pages that come up for your targeted keywords. You should also find out the metrics for them, that you unearthed for your own web pages, like the loading time or the technology stack employed. You may even want to pick up information like what plugins they are using or how they are building their backlinks.

8. Analyze your links – This is once again SEO 101. Link analysis is a part of almost any staple SEO checklist. The very first thing to check is the relevancy of your backlinks. While it is not possible to be a cent percent relevant, but the majority of backlinks posted should be relevant. It is also important to check for the presence of different kinds of backlinks (diversity) which is useful for SEO. If your backlinks are of different types like contextual links, links posted on forums, blog comments, footer links etc. then that helps. It is also important that these backlinks go to deep pages within your site, so that the entire website gets covered and not just the main pages. This helps you in ranking better with the help of backlinks.

9. Apply everything, use tools if necessary – The last step here is to take all the information you have gathered about your site’s poorly performing pages, your competition, your backlinks, your broken links, your redirect chains and put it to use. You should also consider SEO tools like Ahrefs or Majestic for link analysis. You can employ SEMRush to find out your organic traffic score. There is obviously Google Analytics to do the basic analysis of your web page metrics. The idea here is to give the SEO tools out there a try and decide upon which one to use, based on your experience.

Conclusion

With these nine comprehensive steps, your SEO ranking should start climbing up the way it should. These steps would give you a great head-start and a good leverage over your competition. The rest of course, is the power and quality of your content that will truly decide who gets the visitor’s attention, once the SEO playing field is largely leveled.

Author Bio

Abhishek Mohanty is a marketing specialist at ReportGarden, a marketing agency software for management and reporting. Follow him on Twitter: @abhishek_mohnty.

The post SEO Audit Checklist [Updated for 2018] appeared first on EDKENT® MEDIA.

from EDKENT® MEDIA https://ift.tt/2JEdZKB
via

SEO Audit Checklist [Updated for 2018]

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is an extremely important matter for digital marketers. Today, marketing-savvy business owners can also be found tinkering with SEO concepts, all in an effort to get more visitors on their web pages. SEO basics have largely remained the same as we edge towards the end of the first quarter of 2018. There is still link building, keyword research, fixing broken links and the other usual suspects. But some of these aspects have undergone nuanced changes that have an impact on your SEO rankings. Your competition might also have picked up thing or two about SEO in 2018, which could be giving you a harder time. Hence, it is wise to revisit your SEO strategies in 2018 now. We have prepared a checklist that helps you quickly evaluate how you are doing with your SEO and which areas need work.

The SEO Audit Checklist

1. Find out your strategic objectives – Before delving into activity towards SEO, it is vital to know what you plan to achieve with SEO. This thing that you have set out to achieve through SEO, must have a timeline and be measurable and be challenging enough to push your team and yet be realistic. For example, ‘We want to increase our visitors by 15% by the second quarter of 2018’ is one such objective. A clear objective helps you stay focused on the target and helps you evaluate any SEO initiative objectively, without being biased.

2. Do a keyword analysis – This is SEO 101 but ever so important today. You must identify a set of keywords (the number of keywords targeted should be something you can work with) that you want to capture. You need to challenge yourself (like in point 1) but you should be realistic in your goals. Shorter keywords would have been under the hold of possibly bigger players in your domain who have spent years building their backlinks. Everyone wants to see a David beat Goliath. But it is better to go gradual in SEO than end up with strategies that don’t work. Hence, take up keywords (longer keywords are also fine) that you want to target.

3. Identify poorly performing blogs and pages – Based on your identified keywords, find out which one of you blogs are doing poorly. You can use the good old Google Analytics to get an idea about the number of visitors, the bounce rate and the amount of time spent on the pages. These are the pages and blogs that you already have that can be made better, without needing to reinvest in new content.

4. Promote the poorly performing content – Inject the poorly doing content with a new dose of promotions. You can start by sharing those articles on social media with the relevant hash-tags. You can build backlinks as well from some of the relevant blogs of your competitors. A good way to pull in leads through this content is to offer solutions to problems posed on forums on LinkedIn and Facebook and suggest your pages that is like a soft sell.

5. Perform a technical analysis – The poor content uplifting gives you good initial results to help get a buy-in from your stakeholders. The next thing to do is to do a technical analysis on the website. Find out how much time does it take for your pages to load. If you find that it is not satisfactory, you can use some CMS plugins or Compressor.io to change things there. You should also examine if two of your pages are competing for the same keyword (this leads you to be ranked lower). There is also the redirect chain that needs to be prevented and elimination of duplicate content. You also need to check the mobile friendliness of your website (a very important aspect for 2018 indeed) through the Google mobile friendly checker. All this clears the ground at the basics and helps you progress the next thing on your plate.

6. Perform an experience analysis – The next thing is to know if the user experience offered is at par with the standard today. Effective metrics here include the bounce rate and exit rates on pages. It also helps to ask around in the community for tips on what they think needs work. You will be surprised at the simplicity and yet, the efficacy of some of the suggestions. Minor user experience changes can usually be done inexpensively. At this stage, you should also consider the content experience apart from the user experience. A good idea here is to have authoritative content written out by experts in the field. Trustworthy content has always a way of finding the right visitors.

7. Identify competition and their strategies – There is no SEO checklist that is complete without looking at what the competition does. A thorough competition analysis includes finding out the competition’s pages that come up for your targeted keywords. You should also find out the metrics for them, that you unearthed for your own web pages, like the loading time or the technology stack employed. You may even want to pick up information like what plugins they are using or how they are building their backlinks.

8. Analyze your links – This is once again SEO 101. Link analysis is a part of almost any staple SEO checklist. The very first thing to check is the relevancy of your backlinks. While it is not possible to be a cent percent relevant, but the majority of backlinks posted should be relevant. It is also important to check for the presence of different kinds of backlinks (diversity) which is useful for SEO. If your backlinks are of different types like contextual links, links posted on forums, blog comments, footer links etc. then that helps. It is also important that these backlinks go to deep pages within your site, so that the entire website gets covered and not just the main pages. This helps you in ranking better with the help of backlinks.

9. Apply everything, use tools if necessary – The last step here is to take all the information you have gathered about your site’s poorly performing pages, your competition, your backlinks, your broken links, your redirect chains and put it to use. You should also consider SEO tools like Ahrefs or Majestic for link analysis. You can employ SEMRush to find out your organic traffic score. There is obviously Google Analytics to do the basic analysis of your web page metrics. The idea here is to give the SEO tools out there a try and decide upon which one to use, based on your experience.

Conclusion

With these nine comprehensive steps, your SEO ranking should start climbing up the way it should. These steps would give you a great head-start and a good leverage over your competition. The rest of course, is the power and quality of your content that will truly decide who gets the visitor’s attention, once the SEO playing field is largely leveled.

Author Bio

Abhishek Mohanty is a marketing specialist at ReportGarden, a marketing agency software for management and reporting. Follow him on Twitter: @abhishek_mohnty.

The post SEO Audit Checklist [Updated for 2018] appeared first on EDKENT® MEDIA.

Unleash Your Business's Potential with Edkent Media

Watch on YouTube here: Unleash Your Business's Potential with Edkent Media

Content Marketing Tips for Your Business 5

Watch on YouTube here: Content Marketing Tips for Your Business 5