Are your conversion rates and sales low? Are you struggling to keep your Amazon PPC costs within your defined budget?

If that seems to be the case, then it’s time for you to take a step back and re-evaluate your listing.

Creating an Amazon listing looks like an easy job to most. This is why many sellers don't pay much attention to the task. Nevertheless, running a successful product holds great significance.

How so, you may ask?

It is simple. With over 12 million products spread out in 36 different categories, it’s safe to say that customers on Amazon have a lot of options to choose from. Additionally, they can’t see, touch, or smell your product, so your listing is what helps them make an informed decision.

With the help of a well-optimized product page, you can increase your product relevancy and visibility from an SEO standpoint and give your product the edge it needs to fight for the top spots, allowing it to capture more conversions, sales, and PPC clicks.

In case you are new to all this and wondering what product page optimization even is, here is a primer:

Product page optimization is the act of improving basic yet essential details in your listing to increase its discoverability and overall conversions and click-through rates (CTR). You go through your listing title, bullet points, images, description, indexing, and more, fixing any mistakes and optimizing them for better performance.

But, how do I spot mistakes in my Amazon listing and make sure they aren’t repeated?

Don't worry. This guide will walk you through some common mistakes that sellers make when creating a listing for their store.

We all know that the title is the best place to put your keywords as Amazon gives it the highest indexing priority. So if you want a high-ranking listing, you should probably place as many high-search volume keywords as possible in your title, right?

Wrong!

One of the biggest and most common rookie mistakes sellers make is overstuffing their title with every keyword they can find out there, hoping to get in the good books of Amazon’s search algorithm. Unfortunately, that is not how Amazon SEO works.

When you add too many keywords, you’re also repeating multiple words, which, in fact, negatively impacts the readability of your listing, making it look spammy. Customers are more likely to skip your product page because no one wants to read a title that doesn’t flow and makes no sense.

Also, Amazon is all about relevancy. When you stuff keywords, there is a chance that the search terms you use are too broad or irrelevant to your item. This can bring in the wrong type of traffic and harm your rankings.

When writing a listing on Amazon, you need to find a balance between adding keywords for Amazon’s A9 algorithm relevancy and keeping it user-friendly to read and understand.

What to do: The best way to avoid stuffing is to have the top relevant keywords in hand. Perform solid keyword research and pick out three to four most viable search terms. Play around with them and place them in a way that they read naturally.

This one is pretty obvious, but it is surprising how many sellers don’t put enough effort into their listing images. They simply use plain or stock photos, while some don’t even care to fill all the slots available to them.

Images are crucial to your product detail page as they are your only chance to show your customers how your product looks in real life. Therefore, they need to be thoroughly optimized.

Average-quality product pictures and packaging images won’t make the cut; you need something that stands out. You need to make sure your visuals pull in your customers and show them all the benefits your item offers.

What To Do: First things first, you need to have high-quality images, shot in high resolution. Hire a photographer if you feel the need. Utilize all the available image slots with infographics, lifestyle images, product close ups, etc. The images should communicate the benefits of your product.

Less is more is the mantra for a high-performing listing on Amazon, especially when it comes to using keywords. Now this doesn’t mean you should use fewer keywords, but instead, you should avoid repeating the same keywords in your bullet points and description.

Using the same keywords again and again not only takes up valuable real estate–space that you can use to put in other search terms but also doesn’t sit well with Amazon. It may even penalize you for doing so.

Furthermore, repeating keywords unnecessarily affects the readability of your listing, increasing customer bounce-back rates and decreasing your chance of making a sale.

What To Do: Use your keyword research to plan out search terms for each bullet point and description. Prioritize no more than two keywords per bullet point. If possible, combine two search terms into one.

Another product detail page optimization mistake that sellers often make.

Bullet points are vital to your listing. They help move your customer down the sales funnel, convincing them to read further about your product. This is why they need to be benefit-focused rather than feature-focused.

Allow us to explain with the help of an example:

When buying a supplement, would you want to know how it benefits you, or would you want to know how many essential nutrients and minerals it has?

The benefits, right?

This is the case with your customers too. They want to know how your product will benefit them, improve their lifestyle, or solve their problem. Of course, the features are also important, and they should be mentioned, but the benefits should lead.

What To Do: Create a value proposition for your product. List down all the possible features and then define the benefits that your customers will get from those features. Highlight the primary ones in the starting bullet points and convince the reader why your product is the best choice. Expand on the features when writing the description.

When shopping, most customers have an exact idea of what they want, while some others just casually look around, hoping to find something at random. Whatever the case is, they will have questions, and to convince them to buy from you, you’ll have to answer their queries.

Many sellers give a lot of information about their products but fail to address the questions their potential customers may have. This is one mistake you should avoid.

Customers love probing before pulling the trigger. They want to know the function, material, specifications–everything about a product. When you answer their queries, you help them understand your product better, which increases the likelihood of them buying from you. It also ensures that you land the right type of customer.

What To Do: Do thorough research. Read your competitor’s reviews. Sift through the Question and Answer section in your listing. Find all possible questions your customer may have and incorporate the answers in your content.

The biggest mistake you can make on Amazon is using trademarked names and prohibited words in your listing.

Incorporating already trademarked names can create a sense of distrust among your customers as well as cause potential copyright infringement issues, which can lead to account suspension.

The use of restricted words doesn’t bode well either. Amazon is quite strict about these and even a single mention can cause you inconvenience and trouble down the road.

What To Do: Before uploading your listing, always weed out the words that might be brand specific or trademarked. Avoid using words like “sale” or “limited-time offer”. Here is a full list of Amazon-prohibited words. You can bookmark the link and use it for future reference.

Skipping out on backend keywords is another common mistake that sellers make.

Backend fields provide additional real estate to fit in extra keywords into your listing. And while they don’t play a direct role in conversions, they do improve the discoverability of your product for different sets of keywords.

Here you can add common misspellings, associations, synonyms, leftover search terms, and keywords in a foreign language that are viable but may not be the best fit for the front end.

What To Do: Fill in all the backend fields. However, make sure to keep the character limit in check. Also, use spaces to separate different search terms. Do not repeat keywords already used in the front end of your listing.

More than 50% of the web traffic on Amazon comes from mobile. Also, click-through rates on mobile devices are higher than desktops. This means that if you are not optimizing your listing for mobile, you could be losing out on some big potential revenue.

When your product page is mobile-friendly, you improve your customers’ shopping experience and capture more conversions and sales in the process.

What To Do: The mobile layout on Amazon differs from the one on the desktop. Typically, customers see the title first, followed by the images, A+ content/description, and then the bullet points. This isn’t fixed though and can change. However, the important points you need to remember are:

As discussed earlier, your listing’s backend is a gold mine that’s just waiting to be explored. Many sellers are so focused on crafting the perfect front-end copy that they completely disregard the optional (yet crucial) backend fields.

These fields need to be filled with relevant keywords and accurate information about your product. This information can be found in your product’s Browse Tree Guide (BTG), available for download in Seller Central. Failure to fill in the information accurately can lead to categorization errors, which can make your product difficult to find on Amazon.

What To Do: Download the Browse Tree Guide (BTG) for your product category and fill the valid values to avoid any confusion for Amazon algorithms.

To summarize, we discussed nine Amazon listing optimization mistakes and looked at how you can avoid them. We hope after reading this guide, you’ll be able to craft a better listing for your product. It would take time but the effort is worth putting in.

Now go and create!

ZonGuru is an all-in-one Amazon toolkit that helps private label sellers with product research, niche evaluation, competition analysis, listing optimization, inventory tracking, customer review acquisition, and running day-to-day operations of their Amazon business. Our tools bring you the most accurate data from across ten Amazon marketplaces, including the US, Canada, Mexico, UK, Italy, France, Spain, Australia, Germany, and India. We make selling on Amazon easier.

A marketer by trade, a writer at heart, and an Amazon evangelist around-the-clock, Hammad lives and breathes the world of the smiling A. He can often be found discussing the ins and outs of the marketplace across the web. In the very rare instances when he is not busy educating the audiences, he likes to sit down and have a good me-time watching the latest football action on his large-sized TV screen.