The 6 Pillars of Amazon Product Listing Optimization

Do you spend a big chunk of time creating your Amazon product listing? How much time do you spend ensuring it is optimized?

It’s no secret that having a powerful product listing is important. But this isn’t just a one-time investment. After you’ve implemented these quick Amazon ranking hacks it’s time to take the next step!

I’m here to tell you how important your Amazon product listing is, we covered this in our complete guide to selling on Amazon but we went deep in the specifics here of what you need to know when creating a product listing and how you can continue to optimize in the future. After buying UPC codes, creating your product listing is necessary to start selling your products on Amazon FBA.

We’re analyzing the product listing optimization for Jungle Stix which has generated $260,000 in sales. 

Here’s What We’re Covering:

• Why Follow Product Listing Best Practice?
• The Anatomy of a Product Listing
• Grading Your Product Listing
• Product Title
• Product Images
• Key Product Features
• Product Description
• Results
• Product Rating
• Bonus Tip: Hack Your Product URL With Keywords
• Wrapping This Up…

Why Follow Product Listing Best Practice?

If you don’t, your product is less likely to rank well and you will lose sales to the competitor. This is all part of a comprehensive SEO strategy. I know it’s a busy life running your own business but this really does require some of your attention to get the most out of your products.

You need to ensure all of your product listings are optimized so that you can:

• Increase visits

• Boost conversions

• Grow profits

The Amazon platform is pretty set in terms of how your product listing is pieced together and what limitations you have.

A bonus is also a fantastic customer experience that can lead to better Amazon reviews! However, it’s totally up to you how you populate those pages with product info, keywords, and images. That’s where the fun part comes in.

The Anatomy of a Product Listing

There are 6 pillars to every product listing, for either retail arbitrage or private label, that are important to understand as an Amazon seller.

These are:

• Product Title
• Product Images
• Key Product Features
• Product Listing Description
• Amazon Product Reviews
• Amazon Product Rating

You should ensure you follow best practice guidelines for each element of your product listing and then continuing to improve and optimize. Then you can stay ahead of your competitor, add value and the customers will come!

Grading Your Product Listing

Before we take a look at some best practice for each of the 6 core elements of a product listing, I thought it would be useful to explain how important each element is.

The Jungle Scout Product Listing Grader is a useful, totally free tool which gives you an instant insight into where you can improve your listing.

It will give you a rating and a breakdown of how each element on the page performs:

We calculate this by appending points to each element. Below is the maximum amount of points each is worth, which gives you an idea of where you need to spend the most time optimizing:

And this is backed up by data too. Take a look at some of our studies below, where you can see how much some of these product listing elements play a part in the average conversion rates for those products:

So in a nutshell, the more you work towards the upper limitations Amazon gives you in terms of character limits and number of images, the better off you’ll be.

Let’s take a look at each pillar in more detail!

Product Title

You have a 250 character limit or about 50 words for your product title(for most categories), and you should use it. All of it.

Some categories are allowed longer product titles and others require a little shorter titles but regardless, you need to be using the real estate Amazon gives you.

Here’s some best practice takeaways for writing killer product titles:

• Remember you are writing your title for humans – although Amazon has algorithms, these algorithms are based on what real people are searching for. Plus, when people see your product title, they need to understand it and want to click it
• Include something of added value, such as a product benefit or a key element that differentiates you from your competitor. For one of my products, Jungle Stix, we have included all sorts of things people want to know such as the size, material, quantity and even that the marshmallow skewers are eco-friendly and biodegradable!
• Include your priority target keywords, and make sure they’re relevant. Keywords in titles have the biggest effect (compared to features and description) so think about this carefully.

When you think about it, you should probably struggle to fit in all of the amazing facts about your product and your target keywords in under 250 characters. So this one should be easy!

Product Images

You can have up to 9 images including a lead image. Guess what, use them. All of them.

Images are so important, as people are so visual and your Amazon product images are the main thing they are going to use as their first impression of your product.

If you’re thinking, how am I going to create that many images for each product, here’s some more top tips:

• Ensure images are at least 1000px in width and 500px in height (more is better) – this means they will look nice when zoomed in
• Invest in some professional photography to ensure you images are high resolution and potential customers can zoom right in and see what they’re buying
• The main image needs to have a plain white background and cannot include watermarks, infographics or anything in it to deceive the customer
• Show your product from different angles, zoomed in and zoomed out
• Have an image showing your product packaging
• Include some lifestyle images, showing the product in use

• Take some photos to demonstrate the size and scale of the product
• Utilize infographics to demonstrate key features of the product, or to show a money back guarantee or 100% satisfaction guarantee. Here’s an example from Jungle Stix where we used an infographic to show the size of the product:

Get creative – with all of the different things you want to include here, generating 9 images should be easy enough.

Key Product Features

Product features (Bullet Points) Character Limit

Now we have the opportunity to include lots of bullet point features about our product.  It’s recommended that you have 5 or more points in your listing. The official character limit is 1000 characters (250 words).

Key takeaways:

• Put yourself in the shoes of the customer, what do they want to know? Why should they buy your product over the competitors? Remember to add value!
• Put the most important features at the top of the list, many viewers will skim read
• Try to answer any customer objections that might come up – you can also add to this with any questions you get about the product over time
• Include any guarantees or warranty you are offering (Amazon offers the A-Z guarantee anyway so go ahead and play that up)
• Mention what the product is made of – is the material high quality?
• Does the product solve a problem? Explain how

Key takeaways:

• Put yourself in the shoes of the customer, what do they want to know? Why should they buy your product over the competitors? Remember to add value!
• Put the most important features at the top of the list, many viewers will skim read
• Try to answer any customer objections that might come up – you can also add to this with any questions you get about the product over time
• Include any guarantees or warranty you are offering (Amazon offers the A-Z guarantee anyway so go ahead and play that up)
• Mention what the product is made of – is the material high quality?
• Does the product solve a problem? Explain how