Amazon Backend Keywords Optimization is a cornerstone for your Success as an FBA Seller. We have 10+ years of copywriting & sales experience, and 4+ years of experience successfully launching Amazon Products. In this article, you will learn how to optimize your Amazon Backend Keywords to Organically Boost your Product Ranking on Amazon. We will be sharing what’s behind our successful Amazon Business and help you grow your own e-commerce biz, while can sell on electric cars for kids. So, the lines below contain exclusive information about all the backend keywords insights we have collected through all these years of experience.
What are Amazon Backend Keywords and why they are important?
Therefore, Adding Backend Keywords in the right way is a cornerstone step of a strong optimization of your product listings. If you do this correctly, you will increase your chances to boost the discoverability of your product in Amazon and put Amazon’s A9 algorithm to work for benefit of your listing!
Backend Keywords explained one-by-one:
Now that you know the importance behind the Amazon Backend Keywords, let’s explore each field of this tab one-by-one, so you don’t miss any detail.
Search Terms
This field has a limit of 250 bytes, “bytes, not characters”. You should use this section to include the keywords that are directly related to your product but that you haven’t used in the whole description of your product. Some best practices for this section:
DO for Amazon Backend Keywords Optimization:
Add keywords separated by one space (no commas) from the most to least importance, and in the logical order of search. You can include synonyms, hypernyms, and common misspellings, abbreviations, and uses of the product.
DO NOT for Amazon Backend Keywords Optimization:
- Duplicate Keywords already added on the product page content (title, bullets, description)
- Use ASINs or brand names. Don’t include brand names (even your own) or other product identifiers.
- Include keywords that are not closely related to the product.
Target Audience
Amazon has its own segmentation, consider asking yourself who is your product intended for?. For example, if you are selling a feminine product, then choose among your target woman, so you will have more chances that your product shows to the correct customer. You can ask yourself:
For whom is this product?
Who uses this product?
By answering those questions you will be able to define your ideal “Target Audience”
Intended Use
This field gives you 250 extra bytes to fill the intended use in 5 lines of 50 bytes each. Use the extra bytes wisely, Amazon asks the “Intended Use” field to better understand in what activities, conditions, events, or locations the product is intended to be used. So, ask yourself again what the product is meant to be used for and take advantage of every byte available to add useful information about your product.
Other Attributes
You have 250 bytes more that you should use wisely. Write in this field more information about your product. If you provide it, there is a higher chance that your product will be shown to the right shopper. Try to answer these questions, and you will understand what you should add in this field:
- What are the additional attributes of the product?
- What generic properties does your product have?
Subject Matter
Apart from the search terms field, we consider this tab one of the most important to fill out because the good thing about this subject matter keywords is that they get indexed in only 20 minutes. Here you get 5 rows of 50 bytes each. Follow the same recommendation we gave you for search terms, an add keywords, one by one, that you would like to be indexed by separating them with a space.
Platinum Keywords
Many times we are asked about the usage of platinum keywords. In fact, filling the platinum search terms in the Seller Central Account does not hold any value unless you are a ‘Platinum Merchant’. On the other hand, if you are a Platinum Merchant, the Platinum Keywords allows you to customize your products in a structure customers see when visiting your storefront. Using this feature, you will be able to maintain a parent-child relationship in your keyword choices. Child products use Platinum Keywords that are also assigned to the associated parent items.
We just presented some insights that we personally apply for our own FBA business and are the result of years of experience. Don’t forget Amazon provides clear guidelines for adding backend Search Terms, some of which we’ve outlined above already. Ensure that you are following rules shared by Amazon, for your convenience, refer to the image below:
Getting Insights from Amazon to Optimize Backend Keywords
The backend keywords we just presented can be divided by static keywords and “dynamic” keywords. The fields corresponding to “Intended Use,” “Target Audience,” “Other Attributes”, are known as static keywords, which means that once you optimize them, you don’t need to change them. On the other hand, search terms and subject matter keywords always give you room to be optimized. In fact, Amazon introduced in 2019 a new Brand Dashboard feature that you will find in the Performance Tab of your seller central and give you feedback about the efficiency of your Search Terms for every product.
We strongly recommend you to check the performance of your backend keywords 24 hours after you implement them. We also encourage you to do quarterly research to get insights into new trends for your products, so you can always be on the top of your shopper search terms. To do that, just download your Ads Report and review new keywords or phrases that you don’t have in your content and consider adding these new terms to your backend keywords.
How can you check your current backend keywords performance?
Go to the “Performance” menu in Seller Central and then click on “Brand Dashboard.” Then select the “Traffic” option from the left navigation bar. Follow the instructions in the images below to access Amazon FeedBack for your Keywords.
Once you click on “Traffic”, you should be able to see a similar dashboard like the one presented below:
If backend keywords are well optimized, Amazon gives your listing a green checkmark in the “Optimized Search Terms Recommendations” column. Once you access “View Details” from the Actions column in the Dashboard, for optimized backend “Search Terms” you will find that your keywords successfully fulfill the following requirements:
- Keywords are less than 250 bytes.
- They don’t contain superfluous words or unrelated words.
- Backend Keywords don’t contain duplicates.
If your product listing is marked as “Not Optimized”, once you click on “View Details”, you will get insights about which of these three you need to correct.
How to pick the right keywords and where can you find them?
There are many online SEO tools that can be used to find the best keywords to use in your listings and backend keywords. It’s essential for your product listings that you collect the right keywords in order to boost the discoverability of your products organically.
Aside from using online pay tools (that are many in the market), you can squeeze the Amazon autocomplete functionality to get the most popular search terms for your product. To do that, just open amazon.com and start typing in the search bar words related to your product and you will get Amazon suggestions.
Other “free” SEO tools are Google Trends or Google Keywords Planner. With Google, you can type words or phrases related to your product and even choose your market, and you will get insights about the popularity of the search term as well as other popular related search terms for your niche.
Collect keywords and figure out what are the most popular for your product. Get them sorted to apply in your backend keywords tab as well as consider them in your product listing copy (title, bullets, and description).
We all know that time is money, of course, you can do this process of getting the first insights for your Amazon Backend Keywords Optimization manually, but if you decided to become a professional seller, our point of view is running the market analysis accordingly, by using professional tools.
Currently, we are using CashCow Pro and Viral Launch for our personal FBA biz daily. We have tried others but found these are the most comprehensive and reliable to run our market analysis. Both of them offer a Keyword Search Volume tool, which is a must-have for KW research. Beyond the Keyword Research, you’ll get further benefits from these Apps that will help you run your FBA Business.
These apps are featured with assets to run a successful competition assessment, do sales analytics and collect many other stats you need to see as a seller in one place.
CashCow Pro even includes customer Auto-Email automation, which is $29/mo alone on other platforms, like Sales Backer which we switched from.
So at $99/mo, CashCow is actually a deal. We bought the yearly plan cuz, ya know, #BossShit. Sign up here for $15 off monthly!
How to Set-Up the Amazon Backend Keywords for your Product in The Amazon Seller Central
Now that you figured out what are the most relevant and popular keywords that you most use in your product listing optimization, the next step is the implementation of your keywords in the backend keywords tab. To find the location of all backend keywords, follow the next steps.
Under the “Inventory” drop-down menu, click on “Manage Inventory.”
When you find ASINs for which you would like to add or update backend keywords, click on the “Edit” button on the right side.
A new window will open in your browser, choose the “Keywords” tab, and you will see six fields that should be filled out.
Enter your Keywords in every field as explained in this article and click “Save and finish”.
How to Validate if your Backend Keywords Are Indexed
Amazon analyzes all the information provided in your listing, including the backend keywords you just added. Based on this information the A9 algorithm decides whether to place your product for a specific shopper or not.
Once you do all this work, you will want to check if your product is appearing for the keywords you just set, right? To do this, just enter the ASIN (Amazon code) of your product and the keyword or phrase that you want to validate in the Amazon search Bar as follows:
If a keyword is indexed, you will see the message that starts with “1 result for” and then the same text that you added in the search bar with orange color.
If a keyword is not indexed, you will get the message “Use fewer keywords or try these instead”.
If you don’t want to check keyword by keyword, you can add your whole list of backend keywords in the Amazon search bar. If they show up in orange like below, you can be sure that they are indexed.
If only one keyword from the whole list is not indexed, you will get a message to use fewer keywords for the next check.
In these situations, you can check keyword by keyword to see which one isn’t indexed, or you can use some of the online tools listed earlier to check every one of them separately.
In Summary
Learn Amazon Backend Keywords Optimization to Increase Amazon Products Discoverability is a must as a seller. An optimized listing increases your chances to put your product in front of the correct shopper and win! Picking relevant and popular keywords and correctly implement them in your amazon product listing copywriting and in your backend search terms is a cornerstone in your success as an Amazon FBA Seller.
Backend Keywords have the potential to boost the discoverability of your products on Amazon. Remember you need to research the shopper trends and continuously implement new popular keywords and phrases that surge as a consequence of changes in the shopper behavior. The real money in this business is in the follow-up! So don’t leave behind any detail when running your Amazon Biz.
About Riley B.
I’ve been a full-time Amazon seller since 2015. My physical product brand has done over 7-figures on Amazon. I’m also an influencer in the Amazon Selling community: I founded The Amazon Method academy, and I was a speaker at the digital marketing conferences The Nomad Summit 2017 and The Freedom Summit 2019. I have 10+ years of copywriting & sales experience, and 4+ years of experience successfully launching products for myself, my students, and my clients on Amazon. I am super-advanced in PPC, product copywriting, and ranking products.
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