What Is Indexing on Amazon? 1.1

With Amazon, all of the data is structured exactly how Amazon wants it to be.  This means that indexing on Amazon is not about crawlability, but about making getting the data into the indexing sections of the product detail page. The length of many of these fields is limited to a specific number of characters. This means the challenge of indexing on Amazon is to make sure that you are maximizing the most important words for potential customers to find your products. Want to get found on Amazon, reduce your reliance on paid advertising, or take market share away from your competition?

Being indexed for relevant keywords is key to your success.

It is important to know that the algorithms for organic and advertising are different on Amazon.  This also means that the algorithms for relevancy are different for paid versus organic.

If your listing is indexed for a keyword, it will show when a customer uses that search term in the Amazon search bar. In other words, checking your keyword indexing allows you to verify which words your product will be shown as a result for a specific keyword.

As we start to learn about indexing, we first must clarify some common terms:

• Keyword: A word or phrase of words used to target potential traffic.
• Search Term: The exact word or phrase of words a customer enters into the Amazon search bar.

In general, the way customers find products on Amazon is through search.

Think of each search term a customer might use as a door to find your product. The more keywords you are indexed for, the more “doors” a customer has to find you.

When you are indexed for highly relevant keywords, it will positively impact the amount of traffic and market share you will get on Amazon.

When working on relevancy, you want to prioritize the most relevant words, not simply look at estimated search volume for that keyword or search term.  Relevant customers bring in customers more likely to buy.

There is a direct correlation between being indexed for highly relevant purchase intent keywords and your revenue.

If your product is not indexed with the right words, buyers will find a competitor’s products or will not find any products related to their search. Building up the number of keywords you are indexed for increases the ways your customers find your products.

Opportunities for Indexing on Amazon

On Amazon, you have a limited number of characters or opportunities for keyword indexing.

Amazon limits the length of your titles, bullets, and back-end search terms. You need to focus on keywords that are highly relevant to your product and have search volume.

Amazon rewards conversions and sales, so indexing keywords that drive traffic and do not result in conversions will actually hurt your organic ranking.

Keyword indexing on Amazon is not a process that you can set and then forget. You want to go back to your keywords and check them regularly for relevancy and conversions.

Some common reasons we might need to add additional keywords into a listing after it was originally optimized are:

• We became aware of new alternate uses for a product.
• We unexpectedly found a keyword performing better than expected in ads.

Amazon may change its algorithm or make changes to the sub-category structure data. Your data may be deleted when changes in categories or sub-categories occur on the website.