Amazon Ranking 📊 Optimize Your Back End Search Terms 💯💯

Hi everyone. This is Yelena from Amazonia BPC and today I'm going to show you exactly how to optimize your search terms in the back end in order to rank your listing a little bit higher on the Amazon search results page. In this video we're going to cover what back end search terms really are, why are they so important and exactly how to optimize them and what are the rules that Amazon set for sellers in order to optimize them correctly. And also we're going to share show a real life example of how it's really done by using Helium 10 tool that a lot of sellers are using. Maybe you will be using Jungle Scout, maybe you will be using Merchant Words or some free tools like Google's Keyword Planner. Uh we advise you to not um not just go blind in the dark but use some of the keyword tools that are there available in order to identify which keywords are the most important so that we can know what to put in the back end of the search terms. If you know all the rules but still not use the right keywords, you're going to uh get a very different result than what you would be getting if you were using the right keywords. So, let's dive right into it. Basically, first of all, a lot of sellers have asked us what what this exactly is, the back end search terms. What is this and why is it there as an option? So, basically back end keywords or search terms are hidden search terms that can be added to a product listing to boost its visibility. Uh what does this mean? By that uh we don't mean that this is a type of a search term or a keyword that you can put in your product title or description. So, basically these are uh keywords optimizations methods that you use for product listing optimization but in the back end so that you are basically when you're using keywords um for your product title and listing product uh description optimization, you are both using them for user visit user experience and visibility for ranking for SEO. You're you're using a combination so to speak. Um that being said, the keywords that you use in your product titles and your descriptions uh should be optimized firstly for users. Um we have to make it readable for users. We don't we should not make them think about what your product is. So, not too many complicated words in it or uh you just have to make it user-friendly first and then optimize for SEO. Uh that being said, Amazon added back end search terms in order for you to just focus on SEO part of your listing. Uh make your listing rank for the words that you wouldn't otherwise use uh to use them in your um let's say product listing front end, the one that users can see. So, these keywords count in for the search terms that you were unable to add to the page or the product listing copy. So, here in the slide um you're able to see how does it look like. Like for example, for one of the products you can see that there are some different um pieces of data just like um related to each other. That doesn't look readable or anything. This is just back end search terms are just 100% keyword optimization for ranking purposes only. So, uh make a distinction between the two. So, I hope this clarification helps you a little uh so that you know the difference between which keywords you can choose uh to use in the product title and descriptions and which one are good candidates to be used in the back end search terms. Um many times when you have a product that's not uh that's new in the market that market doesn't recognize yet uh or there's a low uh choice of keywords that you can use, you will have to be forced to use both and use them both in the product title, description and also in the back end search terms. But also there will be many times when like for example in some competitive niches, some competitive categories, you will be able to distinguish choose between the two. If you're not sure, you can always ask for us but help but also you can find a lot of useful advice in this video. So, I advise you to watch till the end. Uh back end search terms are um basically to wrap up, hidden search terms that you use for ranking purposes only. When it comes to the question how can they help you grow your ranking or why are they so important? Basically, search terms help your listing to rank on Amazon by increasing the relevancy of your product listing. Basically, if you um haven't mentioned something that you still think that's very important, this is like an additional space for you to use it here, to mention it here. And um basically, for example, if you send if you sell a hand lotion product, um hand lotion can also be called moisturizer. It can also be called cream by some people, balm by some people. So, all of these uh different names basically that someone would type in who would be interested in your product. And if you want to optimize it to use um these search terms in your listing, you can only choose one. It would not make sense to to call your product brand name and then hand lotion moisturizer cream cream balm. This was something that sellers used to do in the past but now it's not very recommended at all because it really affects user experience while they're reading it on the page. So, you should really not be doing that. Uh where should you use all of these leftover keywords? Well, basically, if you have multiple names for a product, then try to use it in the product descriptions or key product features. Just try put it as much as you can in the front end that your users can see but if it's affecting user experience, then there's still leftover space for you to use in the back end search terms. Like for example, you will choose two main keywords for your product like hand lotion and moisturizer you will mention in the front end. But when it comes to the back end, you will add cream and balm to it and many others, many other synonyms that you can find for your product. Like you can use Thesaurus site to find some ideas but make sure you combine it with Helium 10 or any other keyword tool that will reveal you the search volumes for that type of keyword so that you know whether this is something worth even mentioning or not. You are Remember that you're using very good um amount of uh space. There's a limited space in the back end. There's only limited to 250 characters. So, make sure you use them wisely. When I say wisely, I mean make sure you use back end search terms only if they have keyword volume, which means only if they have a lot of monthly searches that come from customers that are qualified. So, make sure you're careful with that. We'll also show it an example later in this video. Um I created a table here that shows basic rules for search terms optimization. Like there are a lot of There's a lot of confusion around how this should be approached simply because uh Amazon's been updating these rules frequently and as soon as they update something, we'll update this video so that we always have the latest information in it. Um for now, there are a couple of rules that you really need to remember before going into the back end search terms optimization. First of all, make sure you use all 250 characters. Here in the table you can see some good examples, some bad examples. And good example is where you use absolutely every single space you could uh to fill out these 250 characters. A bad example would be choosing just a couple of keywords or maybe, you know, utilizing 50 characters here instead of utilizing all 250. It's always better to put anything than nothing as long as it's related to what your product represents, what your product is. So, make sure to fulfill and use all 250 characters. Second rule, no filler words are needed or they will just consume your uh space for characters that are very valuable. So, make sure that you utilize all 250 but not like using filler words such as in or a or for or something like that that will be a filler word and not the keywords because Amazon will ignore it anyway and you will waste your valuable space for for search terms that you have only that are only limited to 250 characters at the at this point. Um so, basically, a bad example would be hand cream for women, which means uh you're basically wasted five characters here. If you use this type of uh example, then you have the space space um delimiter that is also being counted as a character here. Then you have three letters and then another space, which is also counted as character. So, you kind of wasted um five characters there. If you use a couple of more words like that, you could easily lose up to 50 characters on filler words. So, make sure you don't use them at all. Instead of that, you could have used women's hand cream or women hand cream. And that will leave you that will save you at least 30 to 50 different characters to use in the back end. Uh rule number three is only use space, no other punctuation. Same with filler words, uh punctuation like uh these um these examples over here is basically something that will take up and consume your uh bytes your characters uh that are limited. So, make sure you avoid that and only delimit your uh keywords with spaces. That's all you need. So, you don't need any additional you know uh punctuation other than that. Uh no other signs as well. Uh all of these signs over here that I've written is something that you should not be using because Amazon will ignore it um anyway and it won't help you rank and at the same time it will just consume your space. Simply just use words. Like in this example over here, this is the best way to go. Do not repeat keywords. This is a rule number four or five here. So, basically um uh don't use keyword duplicates in the search terms. It's not going to help you. If you use different variations and each one of them is unique, that's the right thing to do. And uh like for example, you have a hand cream that is also a moisturizer and also can be called lotion. Uh you should not be using this syntaxes right here like hand cream, hand moisturizer, hand lotion. These are the things uh you should not be repeating. It's It's just enough for you to mention the word hand once in the in the back end search terms. So, once it's mentioned once and you have all these other variations, cream, moisturizer, lotion, and everything else Amazon will pull up all the possible variations that can come from combining all of these words together. So, there is no use of duplicating them. Remember that. Also, don't use singular and plural words, which means lotion or lotions or whatever the the versions are simply because it will count them twice. Same thing as duplicates. Basically, um the plural versions of the words are also by Amazon considered duplicates. Don't duplicate them by multiplying any any versions of the words. So, there are many more examples that we can show and we will show it them in in in a real life example later. Also, um usage of keywords, like I mentioned at the beginning of this video um make sure to use the keywords that weren't mentioned on the page already. Otherwise, you'll be wasting them. They'll be considered as duplicates as well. And basically, if you use them twice, sometimes you won't have a choice. So, it's better to add it to the back end than to leave empty like in this example over here. But, if you can choose, make sure to choose the search terms that weren't mentioned on your product listing on the front end on the end that the users can see. Uh if it wasn't used and it still is relevant to what your product is, then most probably this is a good candidate to add to the back end. So, keep that in mind. Also, one big thing that we've seen a lot of sellers make mistake about, which is ASINs and brand names. If you have a brand name mentioned at the beginning of your product title, which is one of the best practices you can do great job with that. But, do not mention it in the back end search term. There's no need for that. Also, uh you can be punished by Amazon if you use competitors' brand names. This is against Amazon's terms of service. Do not do that. Don't use any type of competitors' brand names. You can use your own, but there's no use in that. You won't be punished for that, but simply if it's already being mentioned anywhere in your listing there's no need for you to use your own branded name in the back end search terms. Um But, when it comes to the competitors' uh listing competitors' names make sure you don't do that. Don't use them. So, to sum it up, these are some of the basic rules for search terms optimization. Make sure you write it down, remember it. And with more practice, you will probably get a handle of that and just remember them all. Hopefully. Okay, so now that we know what the basic rules for search term optimization in the back end is, um let's dive right into an example and show you how it's done um on the real life example. I have um chosen this little product that's um DNA test kit for dogs. Very interesting product and uh basically, this is the product that we're going to do search term optimization for. Um it's going to be effective, not the real one. So, don't get too excited. This is just for uh purposes of showing you exactly how we do it, what our procedure is. What our procedure is. Basically, uh once you have pulled up the product listing page, you need to copy this product's ASIN in order to enter it to the Helium 10 tool. As you can see, we probably We already did this, but uh for the sake of showing you, I'm going to do this again. So, I've entered an ASIN into the Cerebro tool of Helium 10. This is a Cerebro feature, which is basically a reverse ASIN lookup. We want to know what are possible organic search terms that our product was ranking for that we probably weren't even even aware of it. So, this is one of the good uses for of Cerebro uh for back end search term optimization. I'm going to click on get keywords in order to uh pull up all the suggestions that system has for me. This is the old one. We're going to pull up the new one now. Let's wait out a little bit. If you have a couple of thousand of back end search terms that your product is ranking for, this can easily take even a couple of minutes. So, just be patient. It's a very good tool and a very helpful one. So, once we are sure we get the results we're going to download them. As you can see here in the filtered keywords, we have 6 thousand and 600 results. We're going to export that into an Excel file in order to make it more manageable like everything else we do. Okay, let me open up this data file. Okay. Here it is. Um this is uh our list of potential keywords. The easiest way to do a keyword research by using uh Helium 10. This is the reverse ASIN lookup, but you can also use classical keyword research on by using Magnet 2 feature uh from Helium 10 or you can use Jungle Scout, Merchant Words, whatever it is the tool that you're most comfortable with. Um now that I have this list and it's almost like 7,000 uh suggestions here and 7,000 rows, I'm going to try and make it more manageable by using some basic sorting features. Uh first of all, I want to know which ones of them are the most relevant uh by sorting them largest to smallest. If you see some results here that don't make a lot of sense, like for example, if a system doesn't have uh enough data about certain search terms, you just you can just go ahead and delete them. If you don't have information about them, they are not very valuable to you. And now when you have sorted that out, I'm still going to go ahead and select by search volumes and sort largest to smallest simply because I want to find out what it is that uh we're looking for. Here you can see out of the first results, we have a pregnancy test, which isn't something we want to rank for. Uh we're not currently looking for negative keywords, but if you were uh running PPC campaigns and you're looking to optimize for back end search terms and you find something that's uh a very obvious outlier such as pregnancy test uh for a product that's ranking for dog kit, you should not be ranking for that at all. So, specifically, there's a way to protect at least your paid traffic from the uh from keywords that aren't relevant for your listing. So, uh if you find any kind of outliers like these, make sure to add them to some list of negatives that you will later on add to your PPC campaign. So, I'm going to collect that now. Uh pregnancy test is going to be one of my phrase match negatives for the PPC campaigns. Um and I'm going to delete that and everything related to pregnancy from this list right away. As you can see, this is a good move. We have um with one kick, we have killed 130 different irrelevant suggestions from this list. So, let me just go ahead and delete that quickly. Select it and delete it. Okay. Back to our basic list that is um now sorted by largest to smallest. I'm going to just double-check if it's if it's okay now. Okay. Um all of these things uh for example, you should um determine which is the kind of uh baseline search volume for your listing. You should know this. In your category, what's the baseline search volume? How many searches per month is something that you would consider an average? And let's say in this category, we I'd say an average is everything that's above 2,000 would be something that we would want to consider. So, there you have um 90 keywords, the first 90 keywords. Everything else, we would just kind of not disregard, but just like not look at. So, I'm going to go ahead and um just look at the first, let's say, 90 keywords. Like, for example, Ancestry DNA test kit is something that can be very ambiguous because it doesn't mention dogs at all and we know that this type of uh keyword can also be used on humans, these types of products. So, I'm going to go to amazon.com and check that. If you're unsure, just make sure you check your results. You need to know what your product is ranking for, otherwise, you're just not going to do a good job on ranking. That's the patience that is patience that's required with um with wanting to achieve long-term results. Okay. So, for example, Ancestry DNA, you can see that this is a competitor. So, definitely not something we want to do in our definitely not something we would want to use in the back end. And also, I'm going to delete it from the list. Let me Let me uh shorten this a little bit, just to the brand name, Ancestry DNA. That's the brand name, actually. Okay. So, here we have a couple of suggestions that we are going to delete. Move on. Dog canal. Let's check what that is and how connected that is to our product. Definitely not something we would want to rank for. Delete and move on. Uh like canal would be something we would want to add to our negatives. 23andMe is also a competitor. So, again, I'm going to just delete it. You have seen the procedure. If you find a negative, you should add it to the list and delete all the other suggestions from uh from from this list over here. And if you find something that's good, keep it there and just move on. So, we're going to speed this up this process up a little bit. Uh dog clippers now. Dog DNA test is a good good candidate for search terms in the back end. Ancestry test kit, pet supplies. Pet supplies is a good example for a back end search terms. This is uh keyword that has a lot of search volume, a lot of monthly searches. And this is something that's not strictly related to our product um in in general, but it is something that someone who might be interested in our product would type in. So, you make sure you use your core keywords in the front end, like dog DNA test. DNA Ancestry test kit. These keywords are good candidates to be used in the front end. But when it comes to pet supplies, pet supplies for dogs and stuff like that that you know your audience is uh typing in that who might be interested in your product, then this is a good candidate to use in the back end, actually. So, we're going to use use leave it here in the list. Move on. 23andMe DNA test, pet supplies. Okay. Dog DNA. Good. DNA test. Interesting finds is a very good candidate for our negatives list. Dog steps, dog stuff. Cat supplies. Spark and cats, dog DNA. Pet Prime deals. Not exactly. We're not going to include that. Uh that's now dog Prime Day, dog run. As you can see, there are a lot of really bad search terms that this uh ASIN is ranking for organically. So, they probably need to do a better job improving the relevancy of their listing, which means more keywords to be in the product title and description and key product features, the enhanced branded content and everything else. They just have to do better job explaining to the system what this product exactly is. Then, let's move on. Prime Day pets, pet clippers. For some reason, we're showing up a lot for pet clippers. Prime Day pets, puppy surprise DNA kit. Like, as you can see, a lot of it just doesn't have a lot to do with our product. So, we just remove it from this list. Pet DNA testing kit. This is a good keyword. Okay. So, as you can see, we have a couple of things a couple of good examples here. A lot of them repeat the word dog. A lot of them repeat the word DNA, kit, test. What else? Supplies. So, uh the next step in order to fulfill these 250 characters that we have as a limit and to do it right is to remove all these duplicated keywords that keep repeating in every in every of these suggestions. So, I'm going to show you a small example how we do it. I'm going to open up a new notepad, collect them all. This is uh how I call it the peasant way of doing it, but still it works. It's for free. If you have some specialized tools for search terms optimization in the back end, for example, if you have a lot of uh products, then it probably would make sense to do that. But right now, let's uh let me just show you the free peasant way doing it. Okay. I'm going to put this all in like one big chunk of data list so that we can deduplicate them. We want to know how many of really good suggestions are there to put in the back end. That's what we're doing. So, I'm just going to put all of these suggestions together and put them in the deduplicator tool. Okay. Now that I have this small list of these examples, I'm going to go to a tool called um duplicate keyword remover, which is uh by the SellerApp. So, I'm going to put this our original text over here. I'm going to paste it. I copied it and pasted it, and I'm going to set uh some rules, some settings. Like, for example, add only spaces. And we want we want to remove duplicates, protect the numbers, and let's go for process. As you can see, out of this big Sorry. Out of this big uh chunk of data that we have pasted over here, you can actually like extract just a couple of more a couple of real keywords that are good to use in the back end. So, basically, I would go ahead to the into the inventory, and then uh when you go to inventory open up a listing added it and then go to keywords you will find this uh this little uh option here and I will paste it here. So basically you have search terms you have you can paste them there and basically this is the first part of your job is done over here. Now uh uh you should continue your search. This means that the only part of it was done and you have like I don't know how many keywords are there like 50 50 characters were used which means you should continue to search and do this keyword research probably manually would be best in order to extract the ones that are most important for your own listing. By doing this and spending time spending quality time and making sure that you are handpicking the right keywords this will bring amazing results for ranking at your product listing on the search results page on Amazon simply because it's just something that's very important that's dedicated specifically for SEO purposes of your listing and this is something that you should take quality time into doing. Uh That's that would be pretty much it about optimizing the search terms. It's a lot of work and it's a continuous work because keywords are alive feature they change like if something is called a DNA test kit today it might be called something else tomorrow so you have to keep the pace with optimizing the search terms and making sure that you always have the most relevant examples. And it always follow the rules that we have featured in this video. Uh that would be it. Stay tuned subscribe to our channel for much more useful tips and tricks related to Amazon ranking branding and PPC. We'd love to share our knowledge and make sure to ask questions if you have any. Thank you for watching. Bye-bye.