Ho-ho, hold onto your Amazon margins with holiday Amazon listing optimization. The year’s final quarter brings about the most impactful sales opportunity for Amazon sellers alike. Your Amazon marketing efforts should focus on making an impact throughout the year, but knowing how to capitalize on this surge in online traffic is to your advantage during the holiday season. Your Amazon product listing is the best place to start to boost visibility and sales on Amazon. This blog article will help you unlock the most irresistible holiday Amazon listing optimization tips experts leverage to grow e-commerce brands. Grab your pen, paper, or iPad and jot down these tips and tricks to level up your Amazon listing. Let’s get started.

Why Do You Need To Optimize your Amazon Product Listing?

As an Amazon seller, it’s crucial that your product listing ranks high on page one to have the best chance at the most sales on the world’s largest online marketplace. Your product ranking usually falls and rises depending on how you optimize your listing. Conversions and page views determine where your product ranks on search results and plays a crucial role in how the algorithm pushes your product detail page against your competition. Amazon scores factors such as listing relevancy, keyword search volume, conversion, images, and more to determine how and where customers will have a chance to view your product and listing.

11 Tips For Optimizing Your Product Listing for the 2022 Holiday Season

Amazon listing optimization requires focused keyword research and recognizing consistent brand patterns to be most effective and heed the best results. That means ensuring your brand targets a specific buyer avatar and maintains a higher standard on online marketplaces such as Amazon. Showcasing your brand consistently on and off Amazon will serve you during the holiday selling season as traffic is at an all-time high. Here are ways to optimize your listing for the 2022 holiday season:

#1 Behavioural Trends & Data are Your Best Friend

 

Long gone are the days of slapstick content on Amazon. Understanding behavioral patterns are your best friend to harnessing the best results on Amazon. While SEO is a defining factor, behavioral purchase trends are king on online marketplaces. Leveraging copy that addresses the buyer’s journey helps shoppers navigate their purchase decision with ease. So how do you start? Knowing your audience as if they are a real person and part of your immediate circle is the best way to understand who your audience is, their lifestyle, and what problems they seek to solve. Defining Age, Career, Lifestyle, Hobbies, Martial Status, and more are ways to clearly define your audience.

During all times of the year, you’ll want to ensure that you’re doing better than your competitors, but especially during the holiday season. Determine who your top competitors are and benchmark your performance against theirs. If they are ranking higher than you, find out what in their listing is effective and revamp yours. What conversational style are they speaking in, and who specifically are they targeting? Track this behavioral data during the holiday season and note what works for them so you can reference this information in subsequent years.

It’s best to perform competitor analysis before the holiday season begins, as it gives you more time to test your marketing strategies and optimize for the best performance. Pay attention to shopping trends and online behavior across channels and strive to optimize your lisitng with this information.

#2 Optimize Your Images to Reflect the Holiday Season

 

It’s always interesting when sellers, big and small, employ Christina Ink to analyze their listings for effectiveness. One of our team’s most consistent notes is that poor imagery is a widespread issue for sellers across the board. Whether it’s a cost-related problem or selling fatigue, the truth remains that sellers don’t always invest in the best images, and their conversion suffers.  Your images have everything to do with your conversion and need to stand out. Perform an unbias review of your product packaging, imagery, and A+ content on Amazon. Are your Amazon images captivating attention, highlighting product benefits, and solving your ideal customer’s problems? Keep reading to find out how to optimize your Amazon images for the holidays and beyond.

The holiday season means more traffic as people spend money on gifts and holiday trinkets. Whatever percentage of that traffic comes to your listing will largely depend on your product images.  Every image on your listing is essential. However, your main image, also known as the Hero image or Thumb image, is the glue that holds everything together. The quality of your main image determines whether buyers will click on your listing to review its details. Your main image should be a crystal-clear image of your product on a white background. It should be a high-resolution image that shoppers can zoom in on.  First, ensure your product is up to par and stands out against your competition. Use ultra-bright lighting to captivate your product’s best angles, and ensure you leverage high-quality photography essentials such as photography boxes, tripods, and more.

Try different positioning and ensure your product photography captivates your product in its most true-to-size format. When it comes to the 2022 holiday selling season, consider adding holiday-themed content to the remaining images in a tasteful manner. Appeal to your target market and be mindful of religious holidays to not cause offense to any one particular group. Inspiring tradition throughout your Amazon images can help buyers feel more aligned with your community and inspired to purchase. Not following these simple tips can leave buyers confused and unsure as opposed to being compelled to click add to cart as traffic increases during the holidays.

#3 Optimize Your Amazon Title for the Amazon Search Algorithm

The amazon search algorithm known as Amazon A9 is built on two core elements – relevance and performance. Relevancy is vital when optimizing your listings. Amazon leverages the product title to determine the relevance of a detail page. It holds an internal scorecard combining all factors to determine where it will rank your listing in search results. That’s why product titles created for a specific category tend to perform better on searches. Like your main image, your title is crucial in increasing conversions. 

The Amazon title needs to entice buyers enough that they click through your listing page. But it also needs to include relevant keywords that relate to the product. When your product appears in search results, shoppers will read the title to see if it matches what they are looking for. You want to be as accurate in your description as possible to ensure a high conversion rate. To optimize your title:

• Strategically include relevant keywords, keeping the highest-performing keywords at the start of the title so the algorithm can correlate your product to match customer needs.
• Avoid using all caps, but capitalize the first letter of every word.
• Avoid using commas as commas make it challenging for the algorithm to understand and separate keywords. Use a space and a dash to separate keywords and make it easier for buyers to understand your title.
• If you are brand registered, you can leave the brand name out of the title. If you aren’t brand registered, you may want to consider including it, as Amazon may add it, forcing the original title to be truncated.
• Review your category-specific guidelines to ensure you stick to the specified length. 
• Optimize your title for mobile view. Add pack quantity and important size formation closer to the start of the title, so this vital information can be viewed on mobile. 
• Don’t use symbols or triggering language in the title. Amazon bots scan your content, looking for anything that violates TOS. Trigger words can have your listing suppressed and your account closed. Avoid words such as microbial, organic, toxins, and FDA and pesticide claims unless you meet specific requirements and approvals.

#4 Leverage Sales Copywriting in Your Bullet Points 

Amazon gurus are lying to you when they say the bullet points aren’t critical, and here’s why: The SEO in your bullet points impacts your internal Amazon score, but copywriting helps shoppers relate to pain points and see themselves using your product. Copywriting on Amazon is extremely undervalued, and during the 2022 holiday season, leveling up your copy alone can have a massive impact on who scrolls and who stops on your listing.

Bullet points provide an excellent opportunity to convey information quickly and digestibly to a specific audience using a specific language. Picture yourself as a puppet master, and you are conducting shoppers to do what you want them to, just by honing in on good copy. When optimizing your bullet points consider addressing the following with conversion-worthy copy:

• Grab attention with open loop hooks. Everyone talks about the first few words in a bullet point, but few explain their importance. A hook grabs attention and keeps people reading. Check out this e-commerce copywriting article if you’re unsure what a good bullet point hook is for your product. 
• Leverage the copywriting formal Problem Agitate Solution in all five of your bullet points. This copywriting formula can help you target your ideal shopper and speak to them in a way that drives a response. Be sure to include comparison statements, and copy that talks about a specific customer–meaning ‘you’ and ‘your.’ You want your customers to feel like you are speaking directly to them and solving their problems or hitting their biggest impulse pain point.
• How is your product different and unique? When writing copy, consider the defining factors that set you apart from your competition. Review competitor bullet points and strive to make your copy better. Tell customers how you are different without pointing out competitor brand names. Statements like “competitor products don’t last,’ etc., may be within TOS if leveraged correctly.
• Highlight real pain points. Pain points trigger an emotional response from shoppers and need to be evident in your bullet point copywriting. Always try to position solving pain points so customers can easily see the results of purchasing your transformational product. 
• Position your product as an ideal gift. Never force your product as a giftable item if it isn’t. But the 2022 holiday season is the best time to leverage your product as the best gift for the most relevant audience. 
• Add a guarantee without using the word guarantee. You can trial statements that leverage ‘risk-free purchase’ in the copy. Don’t include specific return policies or extended warranties, however.

Bullet points are one of the content marketing elements the Amazon algorithm indexes when ranking products. Ensure that you include your most relevant and highest-searched keywords. Avoid using keywords that don’t work with grammar or sentence structure, as these keywords, while relevant, can confuse readers. Shopper confusion is a conversion killer. Write that down! We can’t stress this enough during the 2022 holiday season– copywriting sells products. Review your listing in an unbias approach and determine if you are leveraging the best copy to target your ideal avatar.

#4 Ensure your Product Description Tells Your Brand Story

 

Your product description shouldn’t be identical to your Amazon bullet points. The description is where you have an opportunity o showcase who you are as a brand and what you stand for. Your customers can better relate to authenticity in 2022; the description is a great place to start.  During the holidays, you can mention things like family and tradition and their importance to your brand story and journey. Go into greater detail about your brand’s history and explain the benefits and features of the product. Leverage lower search volume keywords that maintain relevance in your product description. Don’t forget to use manual line breaks to add spacing to the text. 

#6 Leverage Relevant Back End Keywords to Improve Search Visibility

Back-end keywords influence your product ranking. During the holiday season, keywords that you can’t fit into the forward-facing listing may be highly relevant to your product. Add these to the backend of your listing to boost visibility. It’s okay to add different languages in this area, like Spanish and French, and don’t worry so much if these keywords are a little lower in search volume.

#7 Optimize Your PPC Strategy for the Holiday Season

If you are running PPC ads, which is very common with most Amazon sellers during the holiday shopping season, you need to optimize your ads for SEO. Running PPC ads alone is not enough to guarantee increased sales during the holiday season.  Create various ad types and target the best keywords, including branded terms. The holiday season is a great time to leverage a video ad to boost visibility and traffic to your listing. Your video ad can include holiday elements to draw further attention during this time of year.

#8 Scour Customer Reviews With a Fine Tooth Comb 

 

 

Reviews are your lifeline on Amazon for many reasons. But before you analyze reviews, first, you must encourage your customers to leave reviews in compliance with Amazon TOS. You may not know that customer reviews are vital to your product ranking. The more positive reviews, the higher your product will rank on search results. Analyze your product reviews and see how you can improve your product listing using the feedback left by your customers. Here’s the thing, though, we aren’t only analyzing reviews for negative feedback; we’re looking to understand reviews in a specific language set by shoppers. How are they speaking about your product and brand? Mimic the same conversation style in your listing and copywriting to attract your ideal audience who’s ready to buy or who you can captivate in an impulse purchase.

If there’s an aspect of your product that customers aren’t happy about, find a way to manage expectations positively on your product detail page. Create a clear ‘how to use’ image and solve common review pain points in the first three bullet points to address common feedback. If you don’t have reviews to work with, look to your competitors. Use your competitor’s customer reviews to optimize your product listing. Analyze your competitor’s reviews for conversational tone and adapt it to your brand and product in a way that’s on brand and that resonates with your target market. Include features and benefits of the product so long as relevant to optimize your listing. If there are seasonal holiday shipping issues, ensure you well pack your products and enroll in Amazon prime to ensure a more positive customer experience during the holidays and throughout the year.  

#9 Set Competitive Prices to Boost Traffic to Your Listing 

 

Let’s face it, price matters on Amazon, no matter the season. Since the holiday season means more traffic, you may be tempted to increase your product’s price. While you shouldn’t set product prices too low, you want to keep pricing competitive. This means evaluating the market and your margins to determine if a lower price may suit this time of year to boost sales. The holiday season is all about deals, so offering a great deal can make all the difference in your click-through rate and conversion.

#10 Incorporate Holiday-Specific Copy in Your Listing 

Most Amazon sellers have already switched to holiday mode. Your Amazon store should be no different. One of the most critical aspects you should pay attention to during the holiday season is how you can bring relevance to your listing content.  Create content around important upcoming holiday shopping events like Thanksgiving, Black Friday, Amazon Cyber Monday, Christmas, and New Year. This will help you attract quality traffic and stand out from the competition, which may not have optimized for this high-traffic time of year.  Add holiday keywords to your bullet points and description, and focus on tradition and family statements if relevant to your product and brand.

Customers will be more likely to envision themselves using your product if you paint a picture and unfold a story with great holiday copywriting.

#11 Optimize Your A+ Content for The Holidays 

If your brand is registered with Brand Registry, you can take your product descriptions to another level, thanks to Amazon A+ and Premium content. Standard product descriptions usually contain long text passages. With A+ content, you can optimize your product descriptions to include high-resolution images, stunning video content, and compelling copy. You can add comparison charts of your entire product line and competitors.  A+ content is an attention grabber during the holiday season since it makes it easier for shoppers to skim through product features, benefits, and stunning imagery. Amazon states conversion can increases anywhere from 3-5% simply by leveraging A+ content. Why not leverage that increase during the holidays with holiday theme copy and storefront design?

Summary

Optimizing your product listing in a comprehensive approach ahead of the 2022 holiday season is no easy feat, but it can have a profound, if not long-term, impact on your sales and brand view.  Take advantage of the expected traffic spikes during the holiday season by ensuring that all aspects of your listing are compelling. Optimize your images, product title, description, bullet points, and A+ content if you are brand registered. Don’t forget to use customer reviews and set competitive pricing to drive traffic to your listing and show shoppers who’s boss. 

Creating product listings that are more discoverable in search results will go a long way in turning shoppers into buyers during the upcoming 2022 holiday season. And remember, Amazon listing optimization is never a set, and forget it aspect of selling on the world’s largest online marketplace. You’ll optimize your listing for various seasons and periods and test specific keyword targets for the best possible outcomes no matter the time of year. Is your Amazon listing optimized for the 2022 holiday season? Its’ never too late!

Contact Christina Ink today for a free Amazon listing evaluation, and prepare to spike sales.