A Quick Hack to Drive External Traffic to Your Amazon Store

Are you running an effective PPC and getting a good number of sales? Or maybe giveaways are getting you ranked in a good spot, but that’s just the amazon traffic you are selling your product to, and you might be skipping a good chance of boosting your sales by merely sticking to the amazon traffic.

This blog is intended to illuminate a new sales path and provide you with some tips to grab more amazon traffic that you most probably have been missing out on.

Why External Traffic Matters for Amazon

Amazon is sheltering more than 12 million products. Doing everything to increase the visibility of your product within the organic search constraints is Amazon’s rock bottom table stakes. That includes optimizing your listing, description, Title, bullet points, backend search words, and A+ content.

The same goes for paid traffic – that you are utilizing your paid mediums amazon launched for you. However, by doing this you will face two challenges.

First, you will be stuck in high competition as you are only working on something that every other seller is doing.
Second, if you are a new seller then there will be many sellers ahead of you unless you came up with a unicorn product that has no competition.

External traffic is the solution for these predicaments. The biggest mistake some people make is when they try to drive off their customers outside Amazon to their website. The main issue with that, your performance and future place on amazon are forecasted by your Ranking. By driving off customers outside amazon, you are robbing your own SEO juice that is the deciding factor of your Amazon ranking.

Note: SEO is more rewarding than the referral fee, which is hardly 15%, what you are saving by making people purchase directly from your website.

Why do I need external traffic?

Gaining visibility and traction in such a huge space is very difficult. By combining the right strategies and utilizing the optimum tools, you can achieve that. But why achieving that external traffic is so important that everyone is looking up to it?

Almost 65% of the customers start searching directly on Amazon for the products they want. This is huge and we cannot cast aside the fact that Amazon itself is a huge market to give you good output. But, keeping in view the potential and competition if we stretch a little more then, there are still 35% of the people who want your product but are not searching for it on Amazon.

Let us understand it in a way that, suppose you have 100 customers, and 65 of them buy on Amazon. Still, 35 people want a product but your product is not reaching out to them. Wouldn’t it be more beneficial for you if you convert these 35 people to buy their desired product from your online Amazon store rather than buying from an online website?

Let’s suppose you do not focus on driving external traffic and put all your efforts, energy, and resources into optimizing and ranking your product. You may get enough sales to sitting above a breakeven point but then what will happen is; that you will see a Sales Plateau. That means your sales will be limited to a certain level and cannot exceed that limit until and unless you break through it by driving external traffic.

A good traffic-driving strategy can improve your ranking, boost your sales, and enables you to glorify your brand by making it long-lasting.

Where to begin?

That’s the real question, where to begin with? Should I make a personal website, or should I start sharing my product on pages for better visibility? The answer is no, not right now. Your first step should be to optimize your SEO content.

SEO Optimization

You may be wondering how will SEO optimization help you to drive external traffic. We need to clear the misconception that an optimized listing is only for Amazon. SEO optimization of your product does not only help boost your product on the front pages of amazon but also on other search engines. According to Sales lion, 34% of people use search engines like google, bing, yahoo, etc. to search for a product.

Optimizing your product’s content will have a direct impact on your product’s organic search ranking. More organic search ranking means more sales.

For SEO Optimization of your content, you can follow these tips

Study your competitors
Write a catchy Title
Fix your bullets with relevant keywords
Add pictures
Update your description

In this way, Google will show in the search results whenever a customer types a keyword that relates to your product. Moreover, Amazon always welcomes outside traffic. For example, if a person is searching for headphones and land on your page as you are also selling headphones. Even if he just visits your store and leaves without buying Amazon will recognize you as the person who brought the outside traffic and will give you a favor in terms of ranking.

Where to display your products?

Some of the widely known social media platforms for visibility of your products for customers are Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, Personal Websites, Email Marketing, etc.

Now it is important to understand that every product has a different market and, of course, a different category of people looking for it. Hence displaying those products on every social media site or platform may not do much good; For example, if you are selling nuts and bolts, then obviously displaying them on Pinterest may not be very effective as it is a platform where people find some catchy and sight warming images hence your pair of nut bolt won’t attract much traffic.

On the contrary, if you are selling something that has a good outer appearance, such as a candle warmer, then Pinterest is the right place for you as it attracts the customer’s eye.

Moreover, you need to have your product advertised in more spots as usually there are fewer chances of a viewer buying your product by just getting a first-time glimpse of your product. Therefore, you need to get the attention by advertising it more and making sure that a viewer sees it more than once, which greatly increases the level of interest and may lead the viewer to click your product and ultimately end up getting in your online store buying your product.

The landing page strategy

Before getting too excited to drive external traffic and get sales you must keep in mind that it is not always a good idea. Let’s take a minute to learn why it is a bad idea.

Sacrificing long-term relationship: If you drive your customers directly to your product listing then you may lose your customers in the long term. This is because you are just driving them for one product, how will they know when you are offering special discounts and new products? Hence your long-term relationship will be affected by that.

Less conversion rate: If a person directly lands on your listing then there is a greater chance that he may not convert. This will negate the benefit you get from the algorithm of Amazon ranking.

So what to do instead? Build a website or a landing page. Channel your customers through your landing page. This will benefit you in two ways

You will be able to whittle your traffic to potential customers.
You can harvest their emails to send them updates on a daily and likely basis for your future marketing campaigns.

Social Media

Do you want to increase your sales volume? See where people are spending most of their time and where they are most likely to see your products. Yes, you got that right, social media.

All of the social media platforms are now equipped with advertising programs that you can use to passage your traffic to your website. Which makes social media the best platform to showcase your product to increase sales velocity and get a higher ranking.

Facebook Ads

Facebook has the most traffic flux, which is over more than 1.960 billion users a day. Facebook offers many filters to target your audience specifically. That includes age, location, gender, connections, and language. It also offers detailed targeting that enables you to filter your audience based on interest, demographics, and behavior.

Decent Facebook Posts are what you need to do while listing your product on Facebook. Keep your description precise and try to talk more using pictures and demonstrations using infographics and real-life photos. Don’t make too lengthy Facebook descriptions as the customer may lose interest.

Instagram Ads

As FB is known for traffic, Instagram is known for branding and influencing. More than 70% of businesses were reportedly using Instagram. Instagram users are mostly adults, so it appeals to younger demographics.

You can get your product advertised either by having it displayed on your page or through influencer marketing. Hiring some social media influencers to give your product a shout-out and advertise it for you is the most popular strategy in advertising. Make sure to select a social media influencer whose followers are interested in your niche, or you think that their followers will like the product that I am going to get advertised.

In addition, you can have the Instagram story, which is displayed on the top of the Instagram page, contain your website link and make the traffic diverted to your website using Instagram.

Common Mistakes in Advertising

Keep your image quality high: Poor-quality images are not just poor in quality but also poor in attracting traffic for you. Just remember the first impression is your last impression and a person scrolling through the feed will not be reading the descriptions of every product. He will be exploring the products based on how compelling and premium quality his desired product’s images are.

Lack of Creative content: Spend more effort on making creative content for your product; make high-quality and creative videos for video advertisement. Come up with some creative listing and product descriptions highlighting all that is needed by the customer and make the customer feel that he needs to buy this product if he wants to add comfort to his life.

Don’t be desperate: Don’t sound like you desperately want to sell your product therefore don’t try to emphasize more on telling the customer to buy your product, make your description and presentation with such perfection that the customer himself clicks the add-to-cart button!

The Bottom Line

It is to remember that there is no absolute source of external traffic for amazon. It depends upon your product type, niche, and target audience.

For example, Pinterest is only suitable for visual products. Facebook is extremely competitive and favors lifestyle products mostly like makeup, outdoor gear, clothing, etc. but it is costly. The same goes for other traffic channels like Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and Snapchat.

Carefully select your channels and try not to spend money all at once. Choose the promising channel, give it a try and track your results carefully.

Amazon is a big marketplace. If you give proper time to optimize your listing and promote your product, you will be in a very competitive position to beat.

A Deep Insight into Amazon Product Ranking Strategy

The strategy of Amazon is always evolving. This is one of the reasons why people fail to rank their products on Amazon. For a new seller, it seems difficult to take the first step in the right manner. When you start selling on Amazon, it is crucial to have an idea about how to rank your product on Amazon. Amazon is not a place where you can easily get to the top. It takes time and patience to achieve this goal. If you want to rank your product fast, then you need to follow the right strategies.

However, Fear not! As we are here to guide you on how to become a big fish in no time to not only survive but also snatch away sufficient food in form of sales from big fish. All those strategies of product ranking will be discussed that can take your product from level zero to enjoying a fair spot in its niche.

The Basics of Ranking

Product ranking was never easier than it is now as you have bundles and bundles of strategies that you can implement to have a fair ranking leading to generating more sales and making your brand get recognition.

the first and most important aspect of Amazon that you need to know is that AMAZON CARES ABOUT THE CUSTOMER so if you are offering anything that the customer likes and is searching for on Amazon, then surely Amazon will promote your product and helps you grow your business. Therefore, helping Customers on Amazon means helping your own business to grow!!

Before jumping on to the details we need to have a fair idea about the basic things that help you in the ranking process, hence we will start with the Amazon A9 Algorithm.

Amazon A9 Algorithm

Amazon A9 Algorithm is an evolving algorithm that keeps on making “Unpredictable” changes and continuously keeps optimizing the strategies. Being quite a complex and advanced Algorithm Amazon offers the world’s best search bar services related to the product which operates by matching different keywords in your listing and showing your product accordingly to your niche.

Then the question arises of how to take benefit from that Amazon A9 algorithm. For that let us take a tour of the A9 Algorithm pillars

Relevancy: These are the factors that tell the Amazon algorithm when to show your product page in search results. To get a higher ranking the foremost thing is making the algorithm realize that your product is relevant.
Conversion rate: It tells how many customers are converting into buyers. Factors that effects the conversion rate are prices, images, and reviews. We will discuss later how to optimize them.
Retention Rate: It means how many customers are revisiting you. customer retention is aided by Factors that include Order Defect Rate (ODR) and Amazon Seller
Feedback. Make customers satisfied to convince them to visit you again.

Tips That Are Critical to Have You Ranked:

If we summarize the whole ranking strategy in a single line is, “Tell amazon that we are extremely relevant for the product that we are selling and also our product is what people are searching for”

To do that, we need to optimize all those areas that amazon evaluates to see your relevance for that particular product. By optimizing those areas, we will not only tell amazon about our relevance but also, we will start having positive reviews, which will help our customers to convince us.

Some of the key parameters that you need to focus on for getting your product ranked are:

Product Listing Optimization
Keywords Research
Product Pricing
Product Advertisement
Parent-Child variations
Answered Questions

Product Listing Optimization

Listing optimization is a key to whatever you do on amazon. Your product needs to have sufficient ingredients to convince the Amazon search algorithm, the A9 algorithm (which is also called as A10 algorithm nowadays), that you are completely relevant to the customer’s searches.

It also plays a crucial part in making people buy your product. In this way, Amazon, system will keep in its memory that this account is more likely to convert a search term into sales. Afterward, the search engine will show your product higher in ranking.

Now the real question arises, how to do product-listing optimization? Here is the basic model for optimizing your product.

Images

As per amazon recommendations regarding the images, you need to have a display picture (also called a hero image) that attracts the customers to your product and should be on white background, clearly displaying what you are going to sell and what the customer is going to receive in a package. Making a high-quality image that can grab your customer will surely aid in ranking.

Title

The most important parts of your listing are the Title and Images, as a customer on the front end sees these two things, and later on, the bullets are revealed to customers after they click on your product and reach to read out the details. A well-knitted title is in the range of 130 to 160 characters containing the brand name, material, and the number of units offered.

You have to display most of your product’s details in a minimal space in the title and should cover an extremely unique feature along with the brand name. Remember, the title should make the customer feel that this is the product they were looking for!

Bullets and Description:

Bullets and descriptions should be written in such a pattern as to create a need or make the customer think that you already know their problem and that you can help them solve it. (Refer to the Listing Blog for a detailed study on writing a listing).

The most important factor is to use the keywords that the customers will type in the search bar to reach your product. Therefore, extensive keyword research with an intent match method (estimating what the customer is typing) should be carried out.

Please bear in mind that you will be shown to the customer based on the relevant keywords that you have used in the listing and that is how you get ranked organically on Amazon.

Keyword Research

An optimized listing is a by-product of detailed keyword research. The keywords should be placed with extreme accuracy and should be analyzed where to put which keyword because the “keywords used” get your product ranked.

Each keyword placed in a different part of your listing gets your product ranked at a different pace. As the keywords in the title are the most important crucial ones that get indexed first and ranking in these keywords is faster. Then comes the backend search terms that hold the most important after the title’s keywords, then bullets, and then description (this sequence may vary for different niches, but this is the general pattern followed)

Pricing

The lower your pricing; the higher will be customer traffic you receive. This means you will be getting more organic sales leading to faster organic ranking. So, optimize your pricing and convert the maximum amount of traffic into your customer.

Advertising your product to let people search for it faster is the crucial step in increasing your rank. Setting the optimal bids in PPC will allow you to secure a safe spot on the first page, which will be shown to the customers. It will let you have a better conversion rate. (Please refer to the PPC blog for a thorough understanding of it).

This advertisement along with costing you a little amount will also let you enjoy increased organic ranks.

Parent-Child Variation

When a customer is searching for a product he wants every option on the table. For example, if a person is looking for a T-shirt and he landed your page. If you are offering a shirt in multiple colors, then he need not shift at multiple listings to choose the desired product. He will simply check all the colors and sizes you are offering and select from them without leaving your page.

By doing this, not only your organic sales will be improved but also you will be able to garner multiple reviews in a single place. In this way, your ranking will be positively and greatly affected.

Answered Questions

*Figure 2: Answer Questions- Jungle Scout*

Although, Answering the questions has no direct relation to Amazon product ranking but it greatly influences ranking indirectly. It influences conversions which impact your ranking.

Amazon does recognize the answers you give to the questions asked by your product. The number of questions that are asked about your product is placed at the top of your product listing.

Moreover, when you effectively answer a person it can increase the chances of his conversion to a buyer. It can encourage people to buy your product and on the backend, it improves your ranking.

Wrap Up

Please remember, your visibility is the first and the most important step to growing your customers, as you need to make the people aware of your brand along with letting them know that you are offering a better product than your competitor.

All these steps, whether they are costing you an amount or not, are equally important to excel in your business.

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