You can’t grow your sales on Amazon (or any ecommerce site) if you can’t be found.

The giant in online retail, Amazon is a great source for generating profits, whether as a supplement to other channels or as your main sales channel. But with intense competition and multiple sellers, it takes some creativity to stand out and grow sales.

It turns out the secret to ranking higher in Amazon’s search function isn’t what you think it would be.

Luckily, you can definitely apply certain strategies on Amazon to rank better. Here are tips to help set you up on the right path to success.

How to maximize your chance of shoppers finding your products on Amazon

There are 3 key elements that go into how Amazon ranks your product in a search:

1. Product title
2. Product description and bullets
3. Hidden key words

Amazon’s product title is the most important search factor. While you would expect the product title to be a key contributor to the search ranking algorithm, would you guess that it’s weighted at 60%?

This suggests that you carefully craft your product title. Amazon suggests incorporating the following attributes in product titles.

• Brand and description
• Product line
• Material or key ingredient
• Color
• Size
• Quantity

Another way to think about this is: Brand Name, Model Number, Detailed Product Description, Color. You have to write really detailed titles and include relevant keywords.

Surprisingly Bullet Points and Product Descriptions don’t carry a lot of weight with Amazon’s search function

The bullet points appear underneath the title. Because of the proximity to the title, image, price and add to cart button, you might think it should be treated as an important field for keywords.

Product descriptions are hidden deep on the page but are the one place where you can really provide a lot of detail on the product. Because the descriptions can be so rich, you would think that Amazon would mine this section for keywords to improve search results.

Surprisingly, bullets points and product descriptions are not critical to ranking better in search. Together the bullet points and product descriptions only carry a 10% rank in the Amazon search algorithm.

The optional Amazon hidden keywords carry more weight than you would guess in ranking well in an Amazon search

If for any reason you could not use a keyword in the other fields, by all means add it to the keyword field. Amazon will use it in determining rankings. In fact, these keywords will account for 30% of your ranking factors.

This is a great opportunity to add additional information that is relevant, but would somehow clutter the other fields

I use this field to add richness around a product’s use or category. For example, we have a nautical home décor line that we can make more relevant in search results by using hidden keywords like coastal, beach, cottage, seaside, lake, etc.

Selling success on Amazon starts with being found but it doesn’t end there. Nor are these the only components that go into Amazon’s search function. But they are the critical few factors that you can directly control in ranking higher in any Amazon search.

Good Selling!

Active Search Results (ASR) is an independent Internet Search Engine using a proprietary page ranking technology with Millions of popular Web sites indexed.