How to choose amazon keywords

As part of my 50 amazon niche sites project, I am literally spending hours doing product research on amazon to uncover good products to promote. Since some of you might also be trying to find good amazon keywords to promote, I thought I will share how I am doing it.

Before I begin, let me state that there is no one way of doing it. This is just my way. I am sure there are other ways that people have found success with as well.

Let's go through the basics

• Expensive products with good reviews: I choose products above USD100 and have at least 5 good reviews. This is quite common advice among many amazon affiliates. There will be some that says you should also sell some cheap but high volume products to bump up your commission rate. I don't disagree with that as well. 

• Sufficient search volume: I target amazon keywords that have about 1500 monthly search from all the long tail keywords combined, not just on one keyword. As I said, my approach to SEO now is not to hammer many links at one keyword and hope that it will rank. I write comprehensive ad copy that targets many different keyword expressions. Linking building is a not the best use of your resources. Think about that for a while. 

So, the above are the basics and the easiest part of finding good amazon keywords. The next part is what will make or break your success.

How competitive are these amazon keywords that you have choose.

Judging competitiveness of keywords is an art, rather than an exact science. There are some who say it is easy to outrank amazon pages and others who say it is virtually impossible. So who is right? The answer is: it depends.

SEO comes down to onpage and off page optimisation.

For onpage optimisation, you can use search engine operators such as intitle, inurl, intext etc to know whether an amazon page has been well optimised. The trick here is to avoid directly competing in keywords that amazon pages are well optimised for.

Keywords expressions can be varied and ever changing. If you are targeting "ballet shoes for kids" and found that amazon pages use this phase in their page titles, urls and text, why not target "kids ballet shoes"? This avoid any unnecessary direct competition. Remember, 20-25% of all keywords are new so that there are always new ways of searching for the same thing.


For offsite optimisation, amazon doesn't directly build links but there are other 2 indirect ways that are attracting links to these amazon pages.

• inner links
• links from other amazon affiiates that are promoting that particular product

These 2 types of links at their strongest for best seller products. Think about it. If a product is a best seller, it will receive inner links from amazon's best seller list as well as  promotional links on the pages of other relevant products.  All these inner links will make outranking the amazon page a much tougher task.

Besides inner links, a best seller product tend to be well promoted by other amazon affiliates since everyone has been taught to do keyword research using this list. Some of these affiliate might not have 'nofollow' tags on their affiliate links, thus passing PR and link juice to these amazon pages and strengthening them in the process.

To avoid the above possibility, the best way is NOT to promote a product from the best seller list. Instead, go really deep and try to dig out products that meet the first two criteria but are not on any list. This is how to maximise your chances of outranking amazon for the product that you are trying to promote.

So, do I make sense? I am not sure but at least this is how I pick my amazon keywords.

Next post will be my progress on the 50 amazon niche sites project.

Posted in: How to make money with amazon,keyword research