How to become a leader on Amazon product search page?
Every day millions of your potential customers conduct a product search on Amazon. The question is how to make your products visible to your targeted customers and make them choose your proposal among numerous similar proposals of your market niche competitors.
Amazon is a very beneficial platform for online merchants where everyone can raise millions of dollars. However, here like in real life, to become one of the TOP sellers, you need to invest your time, efforts, and money in strengthening your positions. Moreover, you should always keep track of all Amazon algorithm changes and novelties.
In this article, we will discuss the latest Amazon algorithm update. It was happened in October 2016 and known as the day when Amazon changed its Terms of Service. This update caused a lot of speculations and discussions with Amazon sellers community. Some online merchants have lost their positions and popularity on Amazon SERP, while others received more chances to boost their sales.
So, let us first discuss how Amazon algorithm update changed the rules of Amazon ranking game and what are the chances to benefit from it?
Amazon products search changes caused by TOS
Taking into account researched data provided by Review Kick, we analyze the impact of Terms of Service change on Amazon sellers. This research showed that among 6,000 products, only 25% of retailers lost their reviews. The categories that were significantly affected by the TOS include kitchen and dining, electronics, health & personal care, baby, beauty, etc.
It means that the market niches with the higher percent of the competition were affected higher than others. According to the statistical data, products that have a considerable amount of reviews before the TOS change tended to lose a slightly higher percentage their reviews. It should be noted that no particular categories have been targeted for removal. Reviews lost of some products caused rankings drop and star rating decrease.
As it turned out, most of the Amazon sellers were not impacted. Only those that have generated hundreds of thousands of reviews among their products were affected by Amazon TOS. It means that Amazon targeted products had aggressive spikes in product reviews. Recently, it was legal to generate a countless number of reviews around Amazon products. However, it is no longer a working ranking improve strategy after the last Amazon algorithm update.
However, does it mean that we do not need to run promotions or work under sales velocity improvement? These questions require an immediate answer as they keep some online merchants backs from efficiently trying promotional and optimization tactics.
Do’s and don'ts
In the light of the last Amazon algorithm update, the following optimization tactics will undoubtedly hurt your brand reputation and page rank.
Nowadays, you can’t incentivize your customers to create reviews for your products. There is no way to ask your customers for a good review in exchange for a gift or discount. Everything should be done naturally and organically. Otherwise, all your reviews will be removed and subsequently all your efforts will be wasted. Moreover, sellers are not able to track customers who receive a coupon code, to check whether they leave a review or not.
All these prohibited acts serve to limit the amount of fake, paid, or incentivized reviews. However, it is still allowed to encourage users to leave organic and honest reviews about their shopping experience.
Post a comment
