How to create Amazon product listing step by step 2020

Amazon Product Listing optimization is what we're gonna be focusing on today. So how to create an irresistible listing. Well, this is...

Amazon Product Listing optimization is what we're gonna be focusing on today. So how to create an irresistible listing. Well, this is your guide. This is gonna help you create a powerful listing. It's also giving you tips for enhanced brand content, and something to note. The pink brackets or writing as the sentence is written in, they represent practical examples. It's really important because that helps you understand the theory and how it's gonna relate to whatever product you are busy doing.

We're gonna go through gathering market intelligence, collecting organizing your keywords, understanding the initial listing, okay. 'Cause there's a very big difference between initial and final listing. Then we're gonna utilize important listing hacks which you probably have a lot of questions on. Writing your title, creating the bullets, creating the description, and then optimizing the backend keywords as well. 

How to create Amazon product listing step by step 2020

So first off customer person as. Who is your ideal customer? And this is crucial. Who are you selling to? What are they going to use the product for? I'll give you a great example of where this is often missed. Your product can be used by multiple market segments or different users for different purposes. You have to ensure your listing and its images emphasize each of those use cases, not just one, because otherwise, you're limiting your market. When someone comes onto your listing, they want to feel trust that they should purchase yours, that you're helping them make the decision. How do you do that? By showing them exactly how the product can be used for what they want to use the product for. Can see here we have a middle-class, married woman with kids, between the ages of 30 and 60. 

Now you notice there are three points here, because you may have three segments. Take your time, outline this. Might seem like all fairy dust, this is crucial in how you're gonna write the copy and what you're gonna convey. These are the people who you want to buy your product. These are the people who are gonna bring you sales. You need to know who they are. Secondly, the strongest selling points. So what did customers talk about, again and again in reviews? While you're doing your research on your competitors, what is being mentioned in those reviews? You want to retain and emphasize the most loved attributes. For example, maybe if you're doing a stainless steel chef knife set. Maybe it was sharpness and durability or the ease of cleaning those products. What metals they're made out of etc, list them. The top three that are mentioned most often in the reviews, these are features you want to retain or expand on. 

Thirdly, the biggest doubts. So what holds customers back from buying your product? We must overcome these with our copy and images to make the sale. For example, may be it was pricing or durability, or performance size, color, aesthetics, etc, list them. Again this is gonna come from your reviews, in part, your one and two-star reviews but also why they don't buy a product. What do they worry about before buying that product? They're looking, "Am I gonna have this cognitive dissonance "after I purchase and feel like I made a mistake?" What are those things with your product? List them. Fourth, weaknesses with your product. Nothing is perfect. Being honest with customers about problems and positioning them as small inconveniences while providing solutions in your copy is going to add credibility. 

Why isn't your product perfect? Maybe it's something you just cannot fix or it's something people need to practice before they become a master at it. Maybe it's something where a quick solution or kind of life hack improves that problem or nullifies that problem. For example, here it could take time to master. Just positioning that so. "Okay, I'm already aware of that, "they told me this was going to happen." Rather than, "I thought this would work instantly," because you as the seller have not positioned that. Also important, try and get three here. And onto keyword compiling. So what you want to do is get all your keywords together in either an Excel or Numbers sheet from all the tools that you use, it could be any of these. We're not suggesting a specific one, each to their own on this, it's your preference. 

But remember, it's very important to also include your common misspellings. I cannot tell you how many times I've seen sellers not include misspellings, people often misspell product names, but they're still looking to buy that product. You have to have those misspellings available, cause we want to put them onto our listing. So let's say at this point you've done your keyword research, you've pulled them all into one document. Now what you want to do is you want to order those keywords in terms of search volume, but they have to be relevant keywords. In the end what you're looking for is your most relevant highest search volume keywords, at the top. This way, it's very easy. We know these are our most important keywords. We know on the listing generally the higher up on the listing a keyword goes, the more important it is, the more indexing we get. This way we can go through our Excel or Numbers and put in the very top terms at the top of the listing, title, bullets, etc. 

So the highest search volume, most relevant keywords at the top. Put another way, your most popular relevant keywords at the top, moving down to less and less popular. Keyword indexing. So what is keyword indexing? It generally follows that the more important a keyword is, it should be placed higher up on the listing. And that is because the higher up on a listing a keyword shows, generally, for example in the title is the highest, the more indexing it is going to get. Indexing means Amazon's little robots pick up that keyword and they're gonna give it more prominence if it's higher up on their listing. They pick it up and they say, Hey, this listing represents this keyword. If a customer comes to our site and types that in, this could be a really good option for them, 'cause it's relevant, here is the keyword. 

So that's what indexing is. It's a little robot just checking what keywords on that listing and, "Okay when a user comes and types something in similar to that, we're gonna show up this listing somewhere." The better you index for a keyword, the higher up on search results you're gonna show. It's not the only factor, you also have to consider sales and sales velocity, that also makes you show up higher. But that is keyword ranking, which is different from indexing. When we talk about indexing, it's about those robots just picking up that you have that keyword. So with that said, in order of importance, here's where you want to place keywords. Number one, in the title. Secondly, in the first bullet point. Thirdly, in your subsequent bullet points. Fourth, the first keywords in these search terms are on the backend. And fifth, in the description and then the other backend search terms. 

Now there are certain character limits on certain sections that we've outlined here. But in general, try and maximize them because you're gonna get way more keywords in there. Don't keyword stuff, you're gonna learn in this how-to keyword hinge and make it readable. But you do want to maximize your listings indexability, if you will, by making sure using all these sections and getting your keywords on there. And here on each page, you also have a cool note section. Power keywords. So what are power keywords? Put simply, they are the ones at the top of your list. They are the highest search volume, most relevant keywords to your listing. 

But it's an important concept because as sellers sometimes what we do is we think, "Oh, if I just have thousands of keywords "that way I'm gonna do well." That's not the case. People generally use five, maybe 10 terms to find a product on average. They generally use the same ones. And your power keywords are going to be those keywords. So to find these what you want to do, look at your keyword research and find those that one, appears frequently, have impressive search volumes, and directly refer to your product. They're often also found in your competitor titles, that will confirm these, and they're once you generally assume people just use to find that product. These can be short-tail like chef knife, mid-tail like Japanese chef knife or long-tail like stainless steel chef knife. All of those are gonna be typed in a lot to find a stainless steel Japanese chef knife. As long as they have a high search volume and they are popular and relevant to your product, you are going to list them here. Okay, so you're looking for the most popular, relevant search terms for your product, one to 10. These are critical. 

Not only for your listing now, but also later PPC advertising. The initial listing. So this worksheet helps you create your final listing for marketing and keyword indexing purposes. But to avoid confusion, this is important. We are going to touch on something called the initial listing, and also something called the final listing. And both are different. They are the same listing, but they just happen in sequence, initial listing, and then final listing. The initial listing is a bare-bones listing. It's like a skeleton listing. And it's simply created early to avoid hiccups. You will list early to ensure you discover any hazmat reviews or any product or category restrictions. The most surefire way to figure out if you're gonna get hazmat review or you're selling a restricted product that needs approval is to list it early. And why this is so critical, think about it like this, you're manufacturing your product. 

Now if you create the listing at the last minute and then you figure out, "Oh, I have hazmat review," and that hazmat review ends up taking three weeks. What are you gonna do while you know that inventory's kind of stuck in the pipeline at Amazon's warehouse? Rather do this early, for example, when you begin manufacturing, because now you still got let's say six weeks, two months, maybe even longer before your inventory's ever gonna be held up in a pipeline, you've got time to just clear those issues. Now when you do list early, you only want to fill out certain parts of the listing, as follows. Number one, a short title. This can also be a five-word canonical title, which means a five-word canonical URL, which we will go into. Secondly, the price. Go higher, rather than lower, because lowering the price later is easier than raising it. Okay, if you raise prices too quickly, you're probably gonna lose the buy box. 

So do that, just in general never do that. Always make price adjustments incrementally and over time. Thirdly, you're going to add one image. It can be a stand-in image for now but it has to have a white background. Fourth, one simple bullet point. Avoid using any dangerous keywords at this time. For example, the word sharp might be a dangerous keyword. Fifth, a simple content list or technical specification list, tech spec in the description area. Canonical URLs, this is a big question. You may also choose to create a canonical URL, and this enables you to choose keywords that are indexed by Google, not Amazon. To make your listing rank for these in Google search. So when someone just goes on Google, and they type in colorful sunglasses. 

If you set up your canonical URL in a way that's gonna be picked up for that by Google, then the Amazon result for colorful sunglasses may well be your product. So what you're trying to do is make sure that when Google shows the Amazon result for that product, that link goes directly to your product. That's your aim here, very important to know. This can only be done once and then it can never, ever be changed. Do this by using your top five keywords or keyword string or hinged keyword, that's important to you as your title, when first publishing the listing. Only that, only those words, because it's going to force Amazon to use that as your canonical URL. This is why we speak of the initial listing. This is your initial listing's title. For example here, we could use a stainless steel Japanese chef knife, that could be quite a good string.

Additionally, if you want to check out the keyword search volume on that, because a string that does have search volume is superior. So if users are going to Google typing in that exact thing, then that's more volume towards that link from Google, of that Amazon result, that is your product. Something else I wanted to just point out here, you can go to any Amazon page. Even go to your listing, and you can just right click and then say view page source. You can see we are on these colorful sunglasses here. You will see that the source code comes up, and here, where you find canonical, you will see the actual canonical URL. For this product, it is after the .com slash, you can see WearMe Pro, Colorful, Transparent Sunglasses. One, two, three, four, five, that is their canonical URL. And then if we search for a keyword like that in Google, actually let me do it for you live, so you can see this one hundred percent works. So here in an incognito window, I am going to say, colorful transparent sunglasses, and search. And we can see some results here with Amazon results. 

Okay, here's the Amazon result. Wearme Pro Colorful Trans-- Okay, so if we click on this, you can see. Look who it is, it's that exact result. And so you can see that is what you're trying to do. I didn't even type in the full five keyword phrase, but by this seller creating that canonical URL, even if I search Google. They are coming up as the Amazon result. As you can see when I click on Amazon, I'm not seeing their competitors, I'm only seeing them. And so you can see the benefit of that. Keyword hinging. Now keyword hinging is effective with canonical URLs. You're getting a few keywords in that five-word string. And in your final title, it's also crucial, because you can get multiple keywords into an area that is one keyword. It's just a hinged keyword, so there's multiple in one. 

And of course, it's also just useful throughout the entire listing. This is the practice of maximizing real estate by including multiple keywords in one string of keywords. So for example, if you use stainless steel kitchen knife sharpener. This directly includes knife sharpener, kitchen knife sharpener, steel kitchen knife sharpener, and stainless steel kitchen knife sharpener. It also indirectly includes amongst a ton of others, steel knife sharpener, stainless steel knife sharpener, and knife sharpener stainless steel. So you can see this keyword is much more efficient and better use of space than doing these all individually in the title for example. You're gonna save a lot more space with that and you're indexing for all of these directly. So time to dive into the final listing. Now once your listing has passed all checks and what we mean there are hazmat reviews, any category or product restrictions, anything like that. And you have converted to FBA, really important. 

Most listings start as FBM, you must convert to FBA. It's a critical area where they may ask for more information. Once you have done all of that, you can now fill out your final listing. There is no need to wait on this though. If you don't want to put it in on Amazon yet, do it off of Amazon, but get this built soon. Get this built early as usual. So in your final listing, what happens with the title? Remember, keywords, selling points, and readability, those three. Those are the keys to a successful product title. And your title should at a minimum contain your top three to five keywords or even three to five keyword phrases, as we went through in hinging above. From that, you can probably see three to five, really easy to do 'cause you can hinge as well. Title lengths or character limits do vary per category, but Amazon has not published exact specifics for every single category. Some say 200 characters. That's the traditional method. Some say 80, and some of this site reflects 50 characters your choice on what you believe is correct. 

What I can say is I have titles, well over 50 characters, and they are not being suppressed in terms of ranking, etc. They're showing up just fine. Many sellers still use the 200 character system without any negative effects, and we're gonna use that here. Now that said, 180, is usually a really good level and the reason why is because if you are not yourself, adding your brand name to the front of the title, Amazon, often automatically does that for you. If they do that later, you're still not gonna be pushed over the 200 character limit. So if you are not actively adding the brand name to the front, just keep that in mind, leave a little bit of room. In terms of the finished listing, you're gonna look to stay true to the rule of keywords, selling points, and readability. So here's an example, chef knife in sheath with kitchen knife sharpener. Master Chef quality stainless steel kitchen knife. All in a gift box. Perfect chef gifts. Durable, safe, sharp every time. 

Now, a lot of people would say that's too many keywords, but in my opinion, people don't read the title that much. They look very much at images, very much at reviews, very much at price, they might pick up a few things from the title, but generally they're not reading it that much. This is strong in terms of keyword indexing. It's not unreadable, and we've got some good marketing points in there as well. And now it's your turn. Write your title, and we will edit this as we go. So don't worry about getting it wrong, we do have other sections where we optimize this. That's why I love this sheet is it's actually for you to fill in. Not just theory, we give you sections at each point where you can drop in what you're doing for your current product. And you can do this again and again for every single product you do. And title analysis. So green is the selling point. Orange or underlined is traffic keywords or key phrases. Underlined shows keyword hinging. 

So you can see the first part, the chef knife in sheath. So we've got a chef knife is one keyword, knife in sheath is another keyword. Then we have a kitchen knife sharpener. So kitchen knife sharpener itself is a keyword, but knife sharpener is also a keyword. Master Chef quality is a selling point. Stainless steel kitchen knife's a keyword but so is steel kitchen knife. All in a gift box perfect, those are marketing or selling points. Chef gifts is a keyword, and then durable, safe, sharp every time. Again, selling points. So you want to do this with your title below. Highlight orange, underline your hinges, and highlight green your selling points, just to get a feel for if you're doing all of those together and if you're hinging enough and where you could hinge more or in a more readable fashion. Next is your title checklist. Ask yourself the following. Does it contain many of my top keywords? Did it avoid repeating keywords? Is it easy to read? Are there selling propositions? Can I remove any unnecessary words? And if you answer yes to all of those, then you can move on to the bullet points. The bullet points. 

Now bullet points are uploaded to Seller Central as key product features as you can see here. So this is where you put the bullets in, and what they are called on Seller Central. So when we refer to them, it's just under description key product features. You can add or remove them here but you're gonna use all five. Now to plan these you're gonna want to shape your product benefits into bullet points. So you're going to refer to those benefits we went through at the beginning of this. You can see how it starts to all come together. So here's an example, you'll be cutting like a pro, the chef's knife comes with a matching chef knife sharpener keeping your blade sharpened all times for effortless cutting. Now I'm not going to go through all of these but you can see we're leading with a very strong benefit, it's emotional. It's a benefit to the customer. It's not an attribute, it's a benefit. There's a key difference. An attribute may be that we use a certain grade of steel. A benefit is that you will be cutting like a pro. You can see the big difference there. 

So lead with your benefit, as Seth Kniep always says, and then explain with evidence or explain with attributes. As you can see here, we say it comes with a matching chef knife sharpener so that's why you'll always be cutting like a pro. Now it is your turn. Make it appealing and engaging. You're gonna use emotion and fuse keywords and concepts. Again, lead with benefit, explain with evidence, and you're gonna write your five in here. And onto bullet analysis. So you're gonna read over your bullets above and let's optimize them. Do not edit this immediately. Often you need to come back a day or two later, just to get out of your head. Let that sink in and then you come back with fresh eyes and you're ready to pull out, "Oh, I can do that way better. "That's wrong, this is good," etc. You come with fresh eyes to this. Okay, so you're back. 

Now, eliminate the fluff, and make it more readable. Change the order of words or entire ideas, if necessary. Double-check that you have included important keywords, okay. Too many people forget to use this for keyword indexing. And avoid repeating the same ones too many times. I've seen this often where people use the same keyword again and again and again, rather use a different keyword there. It's the same product but just use a different keyword there. Instead of a chef knife, three times through the bullet points, you're just changing it slightly, still super readable and more interesting of course with higher indexing. And so here, you're going to rewrite your bullet points in the space here. And on to our description. 

So the two primary goals of your description are keyword inclusion. This is a massive section where you can write a lot, and therefore get a ton of keywords in here. You should be able to use your entire keyword list here. The second thing you're looking to do here is sales conversion. Descriptions can be written in two main ways. Before your brand registered you're always gonna do HTML. And after brand registered, you should always be doing enhanced brand content. The big difference is, once you are trademarked and brand registered and have EBC. EBC or A-plus content, enhanced brand content, as it's also known, allows you to use images and just makes the listing look way more professional. It conveys a ton more authority and credibility and to customers, it seems almost like you're a professional on the platform. So absolutely worth it, but no problem if you're doing HTML either, you can use this very effectively. 

Now descriptions should have headings, followed by paragraphs which explain those headings. Headings help the reader quickly identify the areas they need to focus on, not having to read all it. Use bullets to increase readability. Bullet points are gonna help you a ton, especially if you're still doing HTML descriptions. Separate it and make it easy for the customer. Here are some examples of headings. Cook like Gordon Ramsay. Fall in love with cooking again. Cut kitchen cleanup time by 50%. These are strong emotive headings. People can jump to them quickly and then read below. How does your product help them do that? And now it's your turn, you want to write out your description headings. Aim for five here but remember some of you might have products where a tech spec is really important, or an ingredients list is also very important and then you may have fewer of these types of headings. Or one of your headings will be tech spec, one of them will be ingredients. Now you're gonna use this space to write out the paragraphs that follow those headings. Remember to include new keywords, rather than repeating those already used on your listing. 

So at this point, you don't want to be using the same keywords you used in the title or bullets, use new ones. That's how you're being very efficient with the space throughout the whole listing. And that's why we say most important at the top, going lower and lower, as they get less and less important. And here you're gonna have space to write out the five paragraphs of your description. Again, one of these might be ingredients or a tech spec. So once you have those finalized here's what you want to do. Go over to Amazondescriptioneditor.com to easily translate your description in normal text into HTML format. Because remember, if you're still doing HTML, you have to format it as HTML for Amazon to take that and properly display it on your listing how you want. So you have a 2,000 HTML character limit. That's massive. You want to be using that to its fullest. And here is an image of the Amazon Description Editor. You can see here it's just gonna easily allow you to do this. The editors at the top here are highlighted with a green outline. 

And then at the bottom, it shows you what your description looks like. So you drop in your text right over here in this box and then you can for example, bold. And then what you do is scroll down a little bit, and you can see, use this tool to bold. So that has worked how we wanted that to work. You can see using this tool to bold, we just bolded that line. So you highlight, click, highlight, click, etc. And then down here, you're gonna be able to see what that's going to look like on Amazon. When this is done, you're going to copy what's in this box, the HTML box, and you drop that onto amazon in the backend in the description area. When Amazon processes it, it's going to come out like this on your listing. 

But what if you're doing EBC, A-plus content or enhanced brand content. Well, first of all, well done on getting your trademark and Brand Registry. You're gonna follow a similar content outline but you just got so much else at your disposal here. You're gonna use images, really this is gonna make your listing look incredible. Make sure you align your images and copy, that's quite important. So if you're speaking about technical stuff you have a technical image, etc. Something I also find is white images, white background images work well in this section. That's because they tend to just blend in nicer with the Amazon website. They look really at home, rather than colored background images, which have those kinds of sharp edges. 

So, again, personal preference but something to note. EBC, as you've probably seen many times is also a great place to tell your brand's story. If you have a good story behind your brand, a great place to convey it. EBC is found beneath advertising on Seller Central. You can see it right over here. It allows you to select a template for your content. So you can see the template examples here of images of these gray highlights and then the lines are text. So choose a template you like and then you can populate that with images and copies. So here you can see areally nice header image. We got the warranty here. We have a tech spec type image with tech spec info and bullet points here. And then at the bottom features. So it's talking about the answers, milliliters. Talking about something else yeah, something else. You can see a nice way to display the features and the benefits to the user. It's just really quick and easy and this conveys a ton of credibility. This feels like a brand once you're doing EBC. 

And backend keywords ranking for your relevant, high volume keywords is supercritical. The search terms are on the backend of your listing under keywords, where you want to cover all your bases, all the remaining keywords. And when I say search terms I mean this area here. Here's the backend of the listing. Just go to keywords, search terms. That is what people mean when they say backend keywords. It's only the search terms line over here. And the point of this section is for sellers to be able to include keywords they didn't want to put on the front of the listing, that's the main point. It's also highly valuable in terms of your misspells. Backend keywords also combine with all your other keywords on the listing, and that produces variation keywords as well. You have 249 bytes, okay that's characters, and spaces available for your search terms. 

This should be used well and you don't want to repeat any keywords, that are on the listing. Don't use any special characters, like the dollar sign for example, very intensive on bytes. Do not use competitive brand names either, you can get in trouble for that. Do the following. Take all of your keywords including misspells and drop them into Frankenstein on Helium 10. Click on the process to compress them. This will remove all duplicates, and leave you with a few lines of unique keywords on the right-hand side. Download that list, keeping that window open. So we've just compressed all our keywords to remove duplicates. Now, checking the character number at the top, aim to get that number down to 249. The first keywords you want to remove, if you do need to remove are the ones already on your title, in your bullets, in your description so you should be able to remove a ton quickly. 

Once you're happy that you won't exceed 249 bytes in total, add that line of keywords. No particular order is needed either, into the top line of the search terms on the backend of your listing. If it exceeds that recommended amount, it should highlight areas you can see below, and you're going to need to remove a couple more keywords. So here is our example. So we're not going with all our top best keywords here, we're putting in stuff that looks like misspells or random words or things we didn't get specific on the listing. 

For example, misspells or just strange terms which we've noticed come up again and again in keywords. 'Cause remember it's from our prior keyword research list. So this is gonna help you and it's also, remember, going to combine with other keywords on your listing, and that's what's going to help you rank for various keywords. And now it's your turn. No commas, no repeats, include misspellings, and avoid competitor brand names and you are gonna drop in your backend search terms right over here. And congratulations you've created an optimized listing. 

I hope this does help you improve your listings and just give you a kind of end-to-end approach to doing this. Remember to hit that like button for me. Subscribe to this blog.