How to Increase Your Amazon Rankings Without Sacrificing Profitability

Nearly half of consumers (44%) are not going past the second page of search results on Amazon and 26% frequently buy the first product listed on an Amazon results page.

Without thorough knowledge of Amazon’s SEO and its nuances, as well as how to optimize your sales rank, you are not only sacrificing valuable sales and traffic, but also giving in to the competition and blending in with a highly saturated crowd. In this article, we will explain how your pricing strategy impacts your sales rank and search position, as well as other KPIs such as discoverability and conversion.

Amazon SEO and Sales Rank Explained

SEO stands for search engine optimization, the process of increasing the quality and quantity of traffic from the organic or natural search results on search engines. However, because of user intent, Amazon’s search engine operates very differently than a search engine like Google. 

Amazon is a product-based search engine, designed to help customers make purchases. It does not need to factor in informational search intent, such as “how to” queries, and can instead focus on pairing consumers with the most relevant products based on their search. To perform a search at scale, Amazon’s search algorithm, known as A9, determines which products are the most optimal matches with the customer’s entry and then scores them based on the product’s relevance to the consumer.

Amazon’s search algorithm is based on two core tenets: performance and relevance. A product with strong sales performance history will rank higher in Amazon’s search results, as will a product that uses the most effective keywords to match a customer’s search queries. For relevance, ask yourself how relevant your product is to what the customer is searching for. When optimizing your detail pages on Amazon, keep these two factors top of mind to increase your chances for higher organic rankings.

Sales rank, on the other hand, is a calculation based on Amazon sales that is updated on an hourly basis to reflect recent and historical sales of every product sold on the vast platform. Commonly referred to as the Best Sellers Rank (BSR), sales rank is a strong indicator of how well a product is performing overall. However, it does not always indicate how well an item is performing among other similar items. How, then, can you measure a product’s performance within its own category and against the competition? We provide the answer in the next section.