Search Engine Optimization

Amazon.com Industrial Catalog Optimization

Selling industrial and scientific products with Amazon.com? If so, you'll want to be sure to optimize your Amazon.com listings to outperform the competition.

When most people think Amazon, they think books.

Although Amazon is still the top online book retailer, they have dramatically expanded their e-commerce model - online consumers can now buy everything from CDs to electronics on the Amazon website.

One of Amazon's merchandise categories is "Industrial & Scientific Products". The nice thing about Amazon is that they don't directly stock the products they sell on their site. Instead, they partner with wholesale and retail providers who are looking for a way to market their products online. For industrial product sellers, Amazon offers a ready-made resource for marketing merchandise to a broad base of Internet consumers.

Optimization is the key to a successful Amazon selling strategy. The techniques are different, but the goal is the same as optimizing your website - to raise the visibility of your products in Amazon searches and to capture the attention of Amazon shoppers.

• Reviews. In the Amazon universe, user reviews are a factor in raising the profile of your products. Amazon's "Top Rated" designation is determined exclusively by customer ratings. Amazon's star rating system is fairly straightforward; more stars equals higher ranking. But Amazon also considers the number of reviews your product(s) receives and compares it with other products in the Industrial & Scientific Product category. Manufacturing your own reviews almost always backfires, but whenever possible, encourage buyers to submit an Amazon review of their purchase.
• Keywords. Like Google and other e-commerce sites, Amazon utilizes a proprietary keyword algorithm for product searches. Their algorithm doesn't operate exactly like Google, but it's similar. When a customer enters the Amazon site, they can use keywords to search for products across the entire site or within specific product categories. So as a seller, it's important to use keywords that strike a balance between features that are specific to the Industrial & Scientific product category and keywords that identify your listing an industrial product.
• Amazon Store pages. Once you begin selling multiple products on Amazon, you have the opportunity to create an Amazon store page. Store pages are virtual stores that let customers browse your products on a single webpage. Cluttered store pages are just as detrimental as cluttered brick-and-mortar stores. If customers can't easily locate your products, they will just move on to someone else's store page. You can develop your Amazon page with photos, reviews, feedback and other tools that connect your products with industrial product buyers.

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