If you want success on Amazon, you need to understand how Amazon’s Search Algorithm
works – right? Sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised…
Most sellers have no idea how Amazon ranks and delivers search results; let alone how (easily)
exploitable it can be!
Are you ready for a shocking fact?
THREE TIMES as many buyers search for products to buy on Amazon, rather than Google.
Think about it…
Where do you go when you need to know if a product is worth buying?
What about when you want the best deal on anything from a book to a refrigerator?
Amazon…
Yet, you probably don’t pay attention to it’s search engine – much less consider it as a
marketing channel worth optimizing for. Even most ‘Amazon Marketers’ are still spending their
days trying to optimize their Amazon Listings for Google…
But, what if you knew how to rank in Amazon instead?
You’d have THREE TIMES more ready-to-buy customers than you’d EVER get in Google – and
you’d do it in a fraction of the time!
You’re about to read The Ultimate Guide to Ranking Your Products on Amazon…
But before we get into the meat of the matter, here are some basics you should know…
Introducing A9: Amazon’s Product Search Algorithm
A9 is the name of Amazon’s product search algorithm. Since this is a guide about ranking
products in Amazon, it makes sense to start at the source. So, this is A9’s official statement for
how they calculate search results.
[quote name=”Amazon”]Our work starts long before a customer types a query. We’ve been
analyzing data, observing past traffic patterns, and indexing the text describing every product in
our catalog before the customer has even decided to search.[/quote]
As we can see here, much of the work is done before the customer even touches the keyboard.
Once the customer actually hits “Enter” to perform a search, the A9 algorithm delivers results
through a two-step process:
[quote name=”Amazon”]Once we determine which items are good matches to the customer’s
query, our ranking algorithms score them to present the most relevant results to the
user.[/quote]
It’s a pretty simple process at its core:
● First, they pull the relevant results from their massive “catalog” of product listings.
● Then, they sort those results into an order that is “most relevant” to the user.
Now, some of you SEOs out there might be thinking, “Wait a second… Isn’t relevancy Google’s
turf? I thought Amazon only cared about conversions! What’s all this focus on relevance doing
here?”
The answer is simple: Relevance doesn’t mean the same thing to Amazon that it does to
Google. Read this statement from A9 carefully to see if you can catch the difference:
[quote name=”Amazon”]One of A9’s tenets is that relevance is in the eye of the customer and
we strive to get the best results for our users. […] We continuously evaluate [our algorithms]
using human judgments, programmatic analysis, key business metrics and performance
metrics.[/quote]
See that?
● Google says, “What results most accurately answer the searcher’s query?”
● Amazon says, “What products is the searcher most likely to buy?”
The difference between those two questions is the difference between how Amazon measures
relevancy compared to Google.
On the whole, ranking in Amazon is more straightforward than Google because you’re
essentially cutting the work in half. This is because there’s no such thing as off-page SEO for
Amazon; they only use internal factors to determine how a product ranks. Backlinks, social
media, domain authority… These are all things you don’t need to worry about on Amazon.
That being said, there are a few simple rules you must always remember about Amazon.
These 3 rules are critically important to making the most of this guide, so make sure you read
them twice:
● Amazon’s top goal in everything they do is always maximize Revenue Per Customer
(RPC)
● Amazon tracks every action that a customer takes on Amazon, right down to where their
mouse hovers on the page
● The A9 algorithm exists to connect the data tracked in #2 to the goal stated in #1
So far, so good?
You want to read more about How To Rank Your Products On Amazon Download This The Ultimate Guide