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#420 – Top 18 Amazon Seller Strategies For 2023

Video of the episode at the bottom

Are you ready to take your business to new heights this 2023? Look no further because today, we’re diving into the 18 must-know strategies to get a competitive edge against your competitors and crush your Amazon business.

A lot of you may have watched part of it on YouTube, but Bradley does a different version for the Serious Sellers Podcast. So don’t worry if you’ve watched the Bigger Better Launch webinar live or on the replay. Tune in as Bradley breaks down each strategy, explains why it’s important, and provides step-by-step instructions on how to implement them.

So, get ready to take notes. These strategies are guaranteed to give you an edge over the competition and propel your business forward. Let’s get started!

In episode 420 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley talks about:

  • 04:10 – How To Find A Highly Searched Item That Is Easy To Get To Page One
  • 07:10 – How To Find A History Of What Products Are Showing For Frequently Bought Together
  • 09:20 –  How To Get Ideas For Product Targeting PPC Campaigns Or Product Line Extensions
  • 12:10 – How To Find Keywords Your Competitors Are Getting Sales From, But You Might Not Get Ranked
  • 15:10 – How To See Which Child Item In A Variation Listing Is Selling The Best
  • 16:40 – Find Out If You Are Searchable For A Keyword
  • 21:10 – How To See The History Of Your Market Share
  • 22:35 –  How To Automate Amazon’s Request A Review
  • 24:20 – How To Find The Keywords That Most Of The Top Competitors Are Sleeping On
  • 27:50 – How To See What Information Your Competitors Are Missing From Their Listing That Concerns Customers
  • 30:00 – How To Analyze Image Strategies Of Competitors
  • 31:25 – How To Find The Keywords That Your Buyers Purchase Right After They Click On Your Product
  • 35:50 – Find Out The Correlation To Which Organic And Sponsored Ranks Relate To The Top 3 Clicked Products
  • 36:40 – How To See If Someone Has Changed A Critical Part Of Your Listing
  • 38:55 – Find Out What Other Kinds Of Non-Traditional Placements Products Have In Search Results
  • 41:05 – How To Get Money Back From Amazon
  • 42:40 –  How To See Where Your Inventory And Sales Are Geographically Inside Profits
  • 43:25 – How To Make Sure You Are Showing Up At The Top Of Search Results

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today, I’m gonna give you guys 18 top strategies that you need to be doing in 2023 to make sure that you are crushing your competitors. How cool is that? Pretty cool I think.

Bradley Sutton:

What was your gross sales yesterday? Last week. Last year. More importantly, what are your profits, after all, your cost of selling on Amazon? Did you pay any storage charges to Amazon? How much did you spend on PPC? Find out these key metrics and more by using the Helium 10 tool Profits. For more information, go to h10.me/profits. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton. And this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about sir strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And this is our monthly workshop, kind of we call it b l you know, a lot of you guys maybe have watched part of it on YouTube, but I always do a different version here on the podcast where it’s more strategy focused and giving you guys actionable tips that you can apply in your own business.

Bradley Sutton:

So we’re actually gonna go over 18 tips that Carrie, Shivali, and I went over last time in our Bigger, Better launch. And these are all things that if you’re an Amazon seller of any level, you absolutely need to be implementing. We did a poll during the live broadcast only a few hundred people saw this live broadcast. So most of you guys probably haven’t even seen this, but 90% of them guys had only done at least half of the strategies were going over so it’s not like I’m releasing some brand new strategy that nobody’s ever heard of. I mean, this stuff has been available to do in Helium 10 and also in Amazon Analytics for a while. But only half of the people who watched this admitted that they had done these strategies before.

Bradley Sutton:

And it’s not all new sellers. I mean, we had a lot of new sellers on there. I think it was, we did another poll, it’s like 25%, but there was 25% of those sellers who were also over 1 million and even 10% of them were over 10 million of sales, and only a handful had even used half of these strategies. So if you’re a brand new seller, absolutely tune into each and every one of these. But if you’re an advanced seller, you also need to be listening to ’em, because if you’re already doing well on Amazon and you’re not using these strategies, how much more could you be making if you or your team starts implementing some of these? So how this is gonna be structured is I’m going to give like a how-to, to kind of like present what the strategy is, tell you why it’s important to do, and then show you how to do it.

Bradley Sutton:

So for those of you listening in, like on your iPod or something like that maybe you’re taking a run in Miami, Florida, taking a run and trying to listen into this. You know, you can’t be really following along on your computer, but if you’re driving in your car on your way to work in New York or something, you probably can’t be doing, or, or working on your own Helium 10 account along with this. But if you just happen to be sitting on a desk somewhere, I mean, in front of your computer pause this episode really quick, log into your Helium 10 account and let’s see how many of these you can actually implement while I’m displaying it. And the cool thing about this, instead of being live, you can actually just pause it and then implement and then hit play.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s what I really suggest for you to do. If, if you’re listening to this while you’re running or in a car, maybe go ahead and pause. And this is one of the ones that you go to your computer and listen to so you can be doing this along the way. I want you guys to commit those of you who are listening to this, to at least not even 50% implement a fourth of these. What’s a fourth of 18? I don’t even know, is there such thing as a fourth of me’s? Like four or five. So that means I want you to pick four or five strategies from this list guys and implement it. All right, ready to go. Here is the first one. The first one is how to find highly searched items that will be easier to get on page one.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is, if you’re looking for your first product to sell on Amazon, or you’re looking for your next product to sell on Amazon regardless of how you find product opportunity is, you want to be able to find something that maybe might not cost you an arm and a leg to get to page one. So I think this kind of goes without saying of why this is valuable. So how can we do that? Here, here’s basically the steps. You’re going to go into Black Box for keywords, all right? Black Box for keywords, that’s the second tab in Black Box. And you enter in your own criteria as far as you know, what you view as search, a good search volume maybe monthly revenue, price, whatever. But then the one that I want you to focus on after you do all of your regular filters is the title Density.

Bradley Sutton:

And what title density means is it’s taking how many products on page one have the exact searched phrase in phrase form in their listing. I hope you guys remember like why that’s important. Why it’s important is, is that if you have a keyword that has title density of 40, that means that 40 out of the 50 listings on page one all have that keyword in the title. Like collagen peptides, for example. It doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to get to page one, it just means it’s gonna be very expensive. Amazon really favors what’s in the title, and if everybody’s already got the keyword, their title it’s just gonna it’s that much more competitive. Now, if you were to find a keyword with a title density of four or, or three or two you know, just a couple of sales like in PPC could potentially get you to page one.

Bradley Sutton:

If you find a crazy keyword that has a title density of zero, for example, and you’re the only one in the entirety of Amazon with this keyword in your title, in phrase form, it’s possible. I’ve seen it happen, I’ve done it myself. Where day one, I don’t even have one sale. I’m already on page one. So, so here’s how to do it. Like I said, you go in the Black Box and set a max title density of zero, and then what’s going to happen is that you are gonna get some keywords that people just are not putting in their titles. Like there’s one here, Glock Gel Blaster, I don’t even know what that is. It’s, it’s a toying game here, but that has a title density of zero. So I don’t know if that’s that could be a branded keyword or something I’m not saying guys go out and, and source this product, but the point is that this is a keyword that is searched for 12,000 times a month, and not one person, the last time Helium 10 checked has that keyword and phrase form in their listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Even something that you would think is completely saturated, like this second keyword here, iPad Wall Mount, only five people on page one have that in their listing. So again, this doesn’t mean this is, Hey, anything that has less than five means it’s a good thing that you should go ahead and do. But it’s just something to be thinking about, like, hey I should probably or I might consider this because it is cheaper to get to page one. The next one I want to go over is how to find a history of what products are showing up for and Frequently Bought Together. Now, this has a plethora of applications. Right off the bat, the first thing I can think of is, let’s say I’m already selling a product and I’m looking for a product line extension, all right?

Bradley Sutton:

So like, I’m selling a coffin shelf under Manny’s Mysterious Oddities brand, and I’m like, I would love to know of another kind of products in this niche I could sell. How about maybe I want to bundle a product, right? Like, hey, I’m selling a coffin shelf. Is there another product that I can like, make a variation where it’s like a coffin shelf plus this product. You know, so obviously Frequently Bought Together would be a great place to look at because it shows me what people are literally buying in the same buying experience. So if I, theoretically speaking, if I were to bundle them together you know, I would get people interested in it. Other applications would be for product targeting ads. You know, like in PPC, if I want to show up on a certain competitor’s page, the traditional kind of tactic by anybody, even if they don’t use tools, is to target their direct competitors, right?

Bradley Sutton:

If I’m selling a coffin shelf, I’m gonna go ahead and target ASINs of other coffin shelves. But what not as many sellers are doing is they’re not targeting complimentary products. Like, let’s say if my product was collagen peptides and there’s a history of vitamin C being bought with collagen peptides, well, I want to be the only collagen peptides who’s targeting and showing up on vitamin C pages. So this can be very helpful. Now, of course, you can just look on Amazon or on their product page, but only two or three Frequently Bought Togethers show up at any one time. So it’s important to look at a history of that, and you can do that by again, going into Black Box. So in Black Box, you’re gonna go now into the fifth tab, which is called product Targeting.

Bradley Sutton:

Enter the ASIN of your product or your competitor’s product, and then filter for Frequently Bought Together. And that’s gonna give you a list of who in the last 30 days or so we have identified as showing up in the Frequently Bought Together. So really great tactic I want all you guys to, to get started on. Next tip is how to get ideas for product targeting, PPC campaigns or product line extensions outside of Frequently Bought Together. So the same reason you’re going to do this, this is a same reason here, but here is using Market Tracker. Market Tracker is not necessarily a tool for product research. Market Tracker is what you do to kind of show your share a voice. And we’re gonna be talking about that a little bit later. That was one of Carrie’s tips for us.

Bradley Sutton:

But here, what I like to use Market Tracker for is gain ideas. So for those of you watching on YouTube, you’re looking at my Market Tracker stream for my coffin shelf market. So how I created this was I went in there and, and I said, Hey helium 10, here is my product which is my coffin shelf. And here is four or five main keywords I picked coffin shelf, coffin, bookshelf, gothic shelf coffin decor, maybe one other keyword. I forgot what it was. But anyways, what Helium 10 is doing from then on is it’s giving me suggestions on, Hey, we noticed there’s some movers and shakers on this keyword in your in your niche. You know, is this somebody that you want to track as your direct competition? Now what you see here on the screen, there’s a few products that aren’t necessarily coffin shelves.

Bradley Sutton:

So I’m actually gonna hit, no, I’m gonna ignore them. I don’t want to track these, but take a look at these products. One of them is a coffin wall clock, another a coffin shaped serving tray looks like. And another one is not even coffin shape, but it’s a gothic skull candle holder. Now, think about that for a second. If I’m selling coffin shelves and there’s a customer who’s interested in coffin shelves, don’t you think they might consider buying a coffin shaped wall clock? Don’t you think they might be strange enough to want to buy a skull shaped candle holder? Probably, right? So this is now my idea of immediately I have three ASINs here I can throw into a product targeting campaign, or I might want to investigate it further to kind of see, hey, is it potentially possible for me to go ahead and add this as another product even outside of a bundle.

Bradley Sutton:

So another great tactic to use, I want you guys to do that. So go in, make sure if you do not have Market Tracker, and don’t confuse this with Market Tracker 360, that’s our like Market Tracker on steroids for, for big time users. This is just a regular Market Tracker that even if you only have a platinum account you guys have access to in Helium 10. But I want everybody to, if you haven’t done this, pause this episode right now, go in, set up your market. It takes like one minute to do, and then it’ll usually start populating suggestions after about 24 hours. But to set up, it only takes a minute. Just do a new market. Enter your product, enter five of your top keywords that you know are for your product, and then start creating that, and then start getting some ideas for product targeting campaigns.

Bradley Sutton:

Next tactic that I want to go over right now, how to find keywords your competitors are getting sales from, but you might not even be ranked. So why is this important? You might have done great keyword research at the beginning, but maybe you haven’t done it in like six months, and now there’s new players, nine times outta 10. If there is a successful new player in your niche, they might have discovered a keyword because they’re doing keyword research later than you then maybe you didn’t even know was relevant to your niche. So how do you find these ones? Well, again, it is cerebro. So what you’re gonna do is you’re gonna open up Cerebro and you run your regular test. Now, it’s important that you do it this way. The first ASIN that you put into Cerebro should be your ASIN, all right?

Bradley Sutton:

That’s the seed ASIN and it should be your product. Then put 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, whatever number of competitors, ASINs right after that, and hit and get keywords. Now, what you wanna do are the following filters. And by the way, if you guys are on a computer, as I say this, pause it and keep doing my instructions here as I’m narrating them, and then do it on your own account. Search volume, like if you’re in the US market, I like putting like minimum 300 or 400 or maybe even 500 position rank, all right? That’s the very third filter position rank. That means where your ace in is ranking for. Here’s a little tip that nobody knows about, put zero min, zero max. That means that you are not ranking for it, all right? You’re not ranking for it.

Bradley Sutton:

The next one that you’re gonna do is you’re gonna go to advance rank filter number one, it’s towards the bottom of your filter list, and you’re gonna put under ASIN minimum one. That means that, hey, I want one of these competitors to be ranked in a certain range. And where you put that range is in the very next filter, which is called advanced rank filter. Number two, put a minimum one and maybe a maximum of like 15 or 20. So what am I saying with all of this? I’m saying, Hey, here’s my product. Here’s my competitor’s product. Show me something with over 300 search volume where I am not ranked, but at least one of my competitors is at the very top of page one. And what you’re gonna come up with is a whole bunch of keywords, hopefully, maybe only a few. If you’re doing regular keyword research, maybe not many of us gonna come up, but you are gonna come up with keywords that your competitor, like, here’s one that just came up on our coffin, shelf room decor, goth for room decor, goth.

Bradley Sutton:

Our coffin shelf is not ranked, but here is one of our competitors who is ranked page one, position two. Now, why is this valuable, guys, why is this valuable? Well, it’s obvious that you want to have keywords that are relevant to you that you might not have not have known about, but some of these keywords, especially, it might, might be only the newer coffin shelves or the newer players in your niche are even ranking for it. So that means that usually, they might be less competitive than your other keywords that you’re fighting for. So this is a great technique I want everybody to be using. Next method or next tip, how to see which child item in a variation listing is selling the best. So for those who don’t know Amazon reports BSR at the kind of like family level, the variation family level.

Bradley Sutton:

So the number that you see is a BSR for all of them put together. So you sometimes don’t really know what are the top sellers of a certain variation family, like which color, which size, right? So the way to do that is just simple. This is not exact science, but it’s to give you a rough estimate. Like let’s say you’re on a headphone listing and there’s like seven or eight different colors, right? And you see that Helium 10 says, Hey, the 30 day estimated sales for this listing is 218. And it’s like gonna say that for every color doesn’t mean that every color is selling 218. What it means is each color all added together, the total sales of the last 30 days is around 218. So the way to find out approximately which one is the bestseller is just run the Chrome extension called Review Insights, and then take a look at the reviews from like the last 30 to 60 days and the review velocity of each size.

Bradley Sutton:

And almost always, there’s one like kind of hero child item that is getting majority of the sales. In this case, it’s the black color of this headphones that we looked up, and it’s getting 82% of the reviews. So this way you can kind of see, hey, which variation is selling the most? If it’s your competitor’s listing and then, or maybe it’s you’re looking into getting into this niche and you don’t know which colors you wanna start with, that is a great way to have an idea. All right, next one, find out if you are searchable for a keyword. This is important that people understand what is the difference between searchable and indexed, all right? So searchable or index, let me rephrase that. What’s the difference between searchable/indexed and ranking, right? Searchable or indexed means that Amazon has related your product to a certain keyboard and that it’s possible that you would show up in the search results, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Because remember, not every product shows up. You know, like you ever go to a search result page and it’ll say like, here, coffin shelf here is one through 50 out of 5,000 coffin shelves, right? You, you can’t scroll to all 5,000 coffin shelves. US usually you can only go to like page seven, right? So be that’s being indexed means you are one of those 5,000 products, right? Ranking for it means you are on the first seven pages, one of those top 300 or 306 listings. So how do you find out if you are searchable and under what circumstances would you even do this? So do you remember that thing that I was talking about earlier about finding out the keywords that you aren’t ranked for, but your competitors are? Sometimes the reason you’re not ranked for those keywords is because you’re not optimized.

Bradley Sutton:

You might be searchable for it, but you’re just not optimized. Like you don’t have it in phrase form ’em, that’s fine. But other times it could be that you’re not even indexed for those keywords. And if you’re not indexed, you can’t rank for it. So let’s just take that example that I gave a few minutes ago about using the zero and zero technique in Cerebro to find out where you are not ranking for your competitors are. Now, once you get that list of keywords, I want you to copy those keywords, all right? Copy those keywords that you are not ranked for, but your competitors are, and paste them into our Helium 10 tool, Index Checker. It’s under the listing optimization tab. And this is something that any, any level of Helium 10 can do, even the platinum plan, all right?

Bradley Sutton:

Paste them there and then put your ASIN under the ASIN. You don’t have to put a seller ID, all right? You don’t have to put a Seller, ID just put your ASIN into the ASIN field and then hit process. And once you do that, you are gonna come up with a list of keywords. And so for, for this list that I had looked at, I am actually indexed for most of those keywords. So it’s just a matter of like, I’m just must not be optimized, and that’s why I’m not ranking in the top seven pages, but there were two keywords I was not indexed for, and that was coffin dining room and gothic bedsheets. Now, here’s the thing. I know I’m obviously have coffin in my listing, right? Like I’m indexed for the single word coffin, so I know it must have been either dining or room that is making me not index for that phrase coffin dining room.

Bradley Sutton:

So does that make sense, guys? You can be indexed for a single word, but if not every word in that phrase is in your listing, that means the whole phrase is not going to index. Same thing for gothic bedsheets. I’m pretty sure I’m indexed for gothic, but which keyword do I have to add to be indexed for gothic bedsheets? Is it bed or is it sheets? You know, you only want to have to add what’s missing. All right, so here’s the thing. Take those two keywords, phrases, or however many there are that are not indexed according to index checker and paste those back into index checker. You can do it in the same screen or open up a new window for index checker. So that’s what I did with coffin dining room and gothic bedsheets. And then un-click, there’s this box there at the bottom of index checker that says, maintain phrases, un-Click that.

Bradley Sutton:

And what that does is now it means that index checker is going to check each individual word that makes up these phrases. And when I did that, I saw that, sure enough, I am indexed for coffin and I actually am indexed for room gothic and bed. So the only two individual words I was not indexed for is dining and sheets. What does that mean? If I don’t have that in my listing, all I have to do is add dining somewhere and sheets somewhere in my listing, and now I am indexed for the full phrase coffin, dining room, and gothic bedsheets. So guys, this is a critical thing that I want you guys to do, because it’s great if you find those keywords that you’re not ranking for, but it doesn’t do you any good if you’re not even indexed for those keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

You can’t make a PPC campaign on a keyword that you’re, you’re not even indexed for. Amazon’s not gonna give you impressions. So another great tip that you guys need to be using, especially if you do that test where you’re looking for keywords that you’re not indexed for or not ranking for. Next tip is about how to see the history of your market share. And this is like always a pet pave of mine, is when I go into the Facebook groups and people are like, Hey, anybody else’s sales down? You know, my sales are down. Is it like that for anybody else? You should never have to ask that guys. And the reason is because you have, first of all, something called BSR that you can look if your BSR is staying the same, whether your sales are up or down, it means that your sales velocity is kind of similar to those products in your subcategory, but sometimes subcategories are too big, right?

Bradley Sutton:

You know, like coffin shelf is in a probably the wall shelf category, but, but my BSR is not a good indication of how I’m doing relative to other coffin shelfs. So if you’re in a situation like that, you still don’t have to go ask in Facebook groups how your sales are doing. What you do is you just go into Market Tracker and then you look at your market share and if it’s going up or down, that’s what’s important. Cuz you get to be just looking at your sales and your sales could be up, and that technically could be a bad thing. When would that be a bad thing? If your sales is up but your market share is going down, that means, or your BSR is going up, that means that your competitors sales are increasing at a higher velocity than yours.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s why you can’t just look at sales going up or down and like panicking or celebrating nor celebrating, right? So guys in Market Trackers, that tool I told you about earlier, what I wanted you guys to set up, that’s another benefit of this tool, is you are going to day by day, see how your sales for the last kind of running 30 days stacks up against the competition. So another reason to set up your market share. Next one, how to automate Amazon’s request review. So many people say, oh man I want to hit that button inside of Amazon, that that does the request review button, cuz I know it’s not going to get flagged by Amazon. I wish Helium 10 had something that did that and people don’t even realize they do. You know, again, this is something that Platinum, Diamond, and Elite, I don’t care what level you have, you have full access to the Amazon Request Review inside of Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

All you have to do is you go to follow up, you hit email automation, hit send a message to request a review, all right? Request a review that is using Amazon’s template. That is not making a custom email so you don’t have to worry about being non-term terms of service compliant once you do that. Now, here’s the benefit of doing it this way. Instead of doing an Amazon, you could set up different filters like, hey, don’t send this to people who got a discount of more than 30%. You can set up when they receive it. Like, you know what, wait seven days after delivery, then send it wait 25 days and then send it. Only send it to people who have bought more than once. I mean, there’s all kinds of customization you can do in Helium 10. And again, this is 100% terms of service c compliance.

Bradley Sutton:

So I mean, every single one of your products, I don’t care if you’re a private label seller or you are a wholesale seller if you’re a wholesale seller, you care about seller feedback. This request review button will also take care of that. So make sure to get that activated right away guys, because you know, who doesn’t want more reviews? I, I guess if your product is terrible, maybe you don’t want real more reviews cuz you’re gonna get bad reviews, but still the ma 99% of you, I’m sure pretty much are, are gonna want to increase your review velocity. Alright? The next tip is how to find the keywords that most of the top competitors are sleeping on, right? So this is not the first step of keyword research. You know, you should always find the keywords that everybody’s ranking well for, because that means those are usually the most relevant, but sometimes it’s good to find out where only one or two of your competitors are not doing well.

Bradley Sutton:

And the reason is, because these keywords are gonna be less competitive. So picture this for a second. Your main keyword, if you have a coffin shelf, is obviously coffin shelf, right? Every listing who is a coffin shelf is gonna be probably on page one on coffin shelf because everybody has to convert for that keyword. That doesn’t mean that you can’t rank for coffin shelf, no, it’s just that you’re competing though with a lot of people who are looking for the same product, right? Almost anybody who searches for coffin shelf, they kind of have one thing in mind, coffin, shelfs, or the majority of it, right? So when you see a whole bunch of options, now they have 15 coffin shelf options. You know, your chances of getting the sale are decent, but you know, you’re fighting with 15 other people.

Bradley Sutton:

Now. Now, contrast this with another keyword that maybe is not so obvious, like gothic wall decor. Does everybody searching for gothic wall decor? Are they looking for a coffin shelf? No, but there is definitely if a couple coffin shelves are ranking on page one, there’s proof that somebody there, there is a certain subsection of the people who search gothic wall shelf or whatever I said, or gothic wall decor, who actually would be interested in buying a coffin shelf. Now think about this. If there’s only one coffin shelf that shows up on the search results, remember, not everybody who’s searching gothic wall decor is looking for a coffin shelf, but let’s just say 10% of them are searching for that. Think about that. That 10% of people, let’s just say the search one was a thousand. That means a hundred people who are searching it, who would buy a coffin shelf, they’re all gonna buy that one coffin shelf because there’s no other coffin shelves on page one.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you can be the second one on there, or the third one, you’re gonna have a lot less competition on than the, than some of the main keywords. And that’s why this is like such an important tactic to use. So the way that you can do that is by going into Cerebro, entering your ASIN as the seed ASIN, and then enter like six or seven or eight other products. And then you’re gonna, this is so easy guys, it’s one click, it’s called a One Click Filter. It’s at the very top of Cerebro. It’s called Opportunity keywords. Just hit that once, boom goes to dynamite, you are going to come up with keywords that only one of your competitors is in the top ten four or two of them. Like for example, here is I’m showing on the screen right now, goth decor.

Bradley Sutton:

My listing is ranked 271. There’s a couple other products that are ranked only a couple other, and one is ranked 84 and one is ranked 248. They’re not on page one, but there’s one competitor, one coffin shelf who is page one, position seven. So think about that. If anybody who’s searching goth decor really would buy a coffin shelf, they only have one choice right? Now. This one competitor I wanna give them at least 50% of a choice. So I wanna get on page one for that keyword. Another super valuable tip to use. Next, how to see what information your competitors are missing from their listing that concern customers, right? Shouldn’t this be important to you? Like, if, if something is missing from your competitor’s listing and there’s proof that customers wanna know about that, can’t you see how important that is?

Bradley Sutton:

Maybe if you have the same product, you wanna make sure that’s in your listing, right? You might be thinking like, how in the world would we know that? Well, remember on listing pages, there is something called questions, right? There is something called questions. And what these are, are people trying to ask other people or ask a seller questions on the actual product page? If this question was already answered on the product page, they wouldn’t have had to ask the question in the first place. So by the fact that they are asking this question, it means that they either couldn’t find it on the bullet points or images or maybe they just didn’t have it. And so what you do is you run Helium 10 Review Insights on any of your competitor’s listings. Hit the tab called All Questions. You can do this right now, guys, go to your main competitor, hit the Chrome extension button, hit Review Insights, and then there’s like five tabs, six tabs that show up, hit all questions and then sort it by votes.

Bradley Sutton:

So for example, here is a vacuum cleaner listing that we went to. And the number one question was, what is the battery charge time right now? That like, might seem like a no-brainer to you, or maybe you had no idea that people were interested in that, right? I guess it says cordless. So obviously it’s battery this vacuum says cordless, so obviously it’s battery-run, but what should this prompt you to do? Now, what if this was me and I had my own cordless vacuum cleaner, my first bullet point or one of my main images, I’m not my main image, but you know what, one of my secondary images, I’m gonna put the battery charge sign right there because I know this is actually on customer’s mind and they wanna know about this and they’re not getting information from our competitor.

Bradley Sutton:

So a really cool tactic right there. Next one is how to analyze image’s, strategies of competitors. This is important whether you have a brand new product or you’re just wondering like, of all the products that have come out recently, how do I stack up? So what you do is you get your main competitors and you throw them into the tool Listing Analyzer. This is another function that’s available to Diamond and above. Throw them into Listing Analyzer and then hit the button Media Comparison. So throw like five or six of your main competitors into Listing Analyzer, hit media comparison, and then this window will show of the layout of all of your competitors’ images. And, and it’s really great to look at it like this because it gives you a better idea of the theme that people are doing. Like you’ll notice here, every single coffin shelf, their second or third image is a coffin shelf that shows the dimensions of the product.

Bradley Sutton:

So if they’re doing that and you’re not, you should definitely do that. You know, that obviously is working for them. That’s not a fluke that everybody thinks that that is one of the top ones. It’s probably because they were looking at the questions and everybody’s wondering about that or something, right? And you can get ideas of what your competition is doing as far as their images go, that you are not, and keeps you like, kind of like with the times, because you, if you have the same images for three years, I guarantee that’s not gonna be, that’s not gonna work out really well for you because buyer behavior changes and what was trending or what could have been a cool picture in 2019 doesn’t mean that it’s the same in 2023. So another great strategy that I want all of you guys who have Diamond and above to use.

Bradley Sutton:

Next one, how to find the keywords that your buyers purchased right after they click on your product. All right, so there’s this thing called search query performance. So this is for those of you who have brand registry, go to Brand Analytics or brandanalytics.amazon.com. And the very top, there’s this button that says Search analytics, search query performance. Hit that, and then I like to go to the ASIN view. So this tip guys has nothing to do with Helium 10, by the way. This is only for those who have Amazon brand registry, right? Go to the ASIN view. Put your ace in. So what I did here on the screen is I put our coffin shelf, I said, reporting range monthly, and I said, year 2022. And then what happens is I get a list of a whole bunch of keywords that I had traction on according to Amazon for this product.

Bradley Sutton:

And the search funnel purchases is one of the last columns in the search career performance, all right, search funnel purchases. When I go to the very column that says Ace in count, that means how many people bought my coffin shelf after the keyword coffin shelf in this case, and it was right after they searched for it. And let me explain why we, this was talked about in episodes 416 and 417 of the podcast, how I could kind of determine what Search Query Performance is looking at. Because you might think, Bradley, what are you doing? You only sold 16 coffin shelves in the whole month of December. No, we sold like over well over a hundred, probably closer to 200. But this metric here does not pick up every single order. Not that there’s something wrong with it, but it’s only, like, for example, for it to show up here, it means somebody search coffin shelf, they click one of my listings, either organic or sponsored, not highly rated, not Frequently Bought Together, not sponsored brand ad.

Bradley Sutton:

It has to be only organic or sponsored product, and then they kind of purchase my product right then and there, right? For example, if they hit my product in the search results from a maybe I was showing up in the Amazon’s choice widget, that’s not gonna show up here. Maybe they click on another product and they see my product advertised on that page. Theoretically, that’s still coming from a search of coffin shelf if they buy my product, but no, it is not going to show up here. Let’s say they click on my product, then they click back and they start searching other things. They do something else maybe 10 minutes later they go back to my product and they buy it. Now, how did the customer find out about my product? They, they search coffin shelf. That order does not show up in search crew performance because of the path the buyer took another one that’s not showing up.

Bradley Sutton:

Like, let’s say they, they click on it, they add it to their cart even, but then they don’t buy it until the next day. Guess what? That doesn’t show up here. So the fact that it shows up in the Search Query Performance, you know that this is a keyword where the customer most likely just clicked on the product and then purchase it like right then and there. So you know that that is a super valuable keyword. And then if you start seeing a whole bunch of clicks and very few or no purchases, like take a look at one of these keywords here, weird decor. Weird decor, we had 29 clicks after the search of weird decor. Only one person bought it, that means that 28 people did something else, right? So that’s not a great ratio at all. So that means that, hey, people looking for weird decor, something about my listing has not really resonated with them because they’re not taking action.

Bradley Sutton:

So a great kind of unique metric that Amazon has made available. Next one, find out the correlation to which organic and sponsored ranks relate to the top three clicked products. Now this is interesting because sometimes what you think is the case is not the case. Let me give you an example here. I’m looking inside of Cerebro. I think this might be only for this is only gonna be for Diamond members and above who have Brand Analytics, but if I clicked on the Brand Analytics conversion share inside of Cerebro, I would’ve come up with to this widget here that I’m looking at. And it’s telling me like all of the top click ASINs for December, for example. And if you look here in no December and November, take a look at the average rank of our coffin shelf in December. It was 13 in November, it was 16.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, if you just knew that keyword rank like maybe I was tracking this in keyword tracker and I knew that album was 13 or 16, you might think, oh man, I’m sucking for this keyword. Like I must not be getting any sales at all. I’m not even near the top of page one, but look at this, I am one of the top three clicked both times. But then look to the right here. And you see the sponsored rank average is sponsored rank number one for both of them. So now from this, now what I’m doing is I’m comparing Brand Analytics data to Helium 10 data. And I can see, oh wow, look at this. My organic rank average was 13, but my sponsored rank was one. I’m still one of the top clicked. It must be because of my sponsored rank.

Bradley Sutton:

So I know now that I cannot dip on my sponsored rank at all because that is where I’m getting most of the sales from. So very, very unique data point that I want you guys to keep in mind here. Now, next tip that I wanna share is how to see if someone has changed a critical part of your listing. Now sometimes this could be a hijacker, sure, but it could also even be Amazon, the reason this is important is because this could mean money out of your pocket, all right? Here’s an example. Like let’s say the coffin shelf was shape was sized nine by nine by eight, right? And we were doing $6 and 62 cents profit. That’s what you guys are seeing on the screen here, right? At 9 x 9 x 8. But let’s say somebody in a random Amazon warehouse remeasures your product, or if they had a machine that does it AI is all the rage these days, right?

Bradley Sutton:

And they are like, no, it’s not 9 x 9 x 8, it’s 9 x 9 x 9 them changing just one inch on one side. It takes your profit from $6 and 62 cents down to $2, meaning that every single order after that, if you didn’t notice that they changed this, you are losing four and a half dollars. Imagine if you were selling 10 a day, you’re losing $40 a day. That means you are losing $280 a week, a thousand dollars a month, you are losing because somebody in a warehouse changed one inch on one side. That’s the potential of what this can happen. And it actually did happen to our coffin shelf. We lost thousands of dollars because I didn’t catch this. Now it was dumb because I wasn’t looking at my Helium 10 Alerts. Helium 10 informed me when the dimensions change, and so I should have taken action.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is what I want everybody to do. Same thing right now. Go to your Alerts, all right, go to your Alerts. And if, if that right side toggle is not on every single one of your top selling SKUs or every one of your SKUs, if you want, turn that toggle from off to on so that you can get notified if somebody changes your image, if somebody changes dimensions, like you get your category change, if your Amazon fee changes, these are things that you need to take action on right away so that Amazon can fix it, and then, then you’re not losing money. So again, Helium 10 Alerts, guys, this is for whether you’re platinum, diamond, or elite, all of you guys have access to this Next tip, find out what other kinds of non-traditional placements products have in search results. You know, you guys have probably seen in search results, all kinds of sponsored ads showing up nowadays.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s the sponsored brand headline ad. There’s just regular sponsored product ads. There’s a new widget called Highly Rated. There’s sponsored video ads, right? It keeps going. There’s an Amazon’s choice kind of like widget that shows multiple products. There’s a trendy now widget, there’s another widget called top-Rated from our brands. There’s one called editorial recommendations. So in the past you’re maybe just fine, just like knowing what is going on, on page one, right? On sponsored and on organic, which is what Helium 10 has been showing you in Keyword Tracker and Cerebro for years. But now does that really tell the whole story? No. Like I could be on five different places on page one, and that makes a big difference. You know, like maybe I’m getting the same sales or similar sales as my competitor, or they’re, they’re selling more, but I’m like, I’m on the same exact pages.

Bradley Sutton:

They are for sponsored and organic. Why are they getting more sales in me? Well, this could be one of the reasons because they have more spots on page one. So if you want to see where Helium 10 has detected your competitors, this is something, again, I’m not sure if it’s by the time you’re listening to this, maybe it’s available for Diamond members, but I know for sure it’s available to elite members. But once you once you enter in something in cerebral, now what you will see is little letters that show not just organic, not just sponsored, not just Amazon recommended like before, but now you are gonna see if your competitor is showing up in editorial recommendations, the Amazon’s choice, the high highly rated, the sponsored brand header or headline section or the sponsored brand video ads. So really, really valuable in seeing the sponsored strategies and placements of your competitors.

Bradley Sutton:

All right. Next easy one that is gonna get money for in your pocket is how to get money back from Amazon. This is every single person who has not run this like in the last three to six months. Go and do this right now. Go into your Refund Genie and see if there’s any anything to download. Download the report and just go in. So simple guys, especially if it’s like lost, all you have to do is you go to your help section in Amazon Seller Central under support, and usually that widget will show up right there in help section of Amazon Seller Central. It’ll say, investigate an item lost in warehouse. And what you do is you copy the FNSKU that comes from the Refund Genie report, paste it here, two clicks, and they’ll start investigating it. All right?

Bradley Sutton:

Super, super simple. This is like, it could take you literally less than five minutes depending on how many you have, and you could get a few hundred dollars back depending on how long you haven’t been checking this or how much sales you have. So guys, this is something, another one, every single person who has Diamond in the above should go and do. If you have Platinum account, you can still see, I think, how much it might be owed to you. But if you want to actually get the reports so that you can copy those transaction IDs and FNSKUs you need to have a diamond account to actually see the full report. So make sure to do that if you have a diamond plan. Next thing is how to see where your inventory and sales are geographically. What’s going on geographically inside of Profits.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so this is our heat map. So just go anywhere in Helium 10profits, go to your heat maps, and we have an inventory heat map and a sales heat map. And this is valuable to be able to know, like maybe some people want to pause their PPC on a relaunch of a product or on a launch until the inventory is distributed across the country. Pause PPC, or maybe even pause the ASIN. Well, this will give you a daily look at where your inventory is so that you know when it is distributed enough. And conversely, you can actually see the sales heat map to see where like are there any hot pockets in the country? I’m not talking about hot pockets like you microwave up, but like these hot areas in the country where you might be getting a lot of sales or maybe you’re not getting enough sales.

Bradley Sutton:

So very insightful Inventory Heat Maps, Sales Heat Maps inside of Profits. Next one, I think this is the last one. How to make sure you are showing up at the top of search results. Real simple. And this is something that every single one of you guys needs to go ahead and, and put into your you know, keyword tracker. If you don’t have it done yet, go into Keyword Tracker, you put in your top ASIN and then put your top five or 10 keywords. And even if you are just starting from right now, you’re for anything with over like a couple of thousand search volume, you’re gonna probably see a history of the search volume or none of the search volume. Of course, you have that a history of where you’re ranking for. So like right now I’m showing you guys our coffin bookshelf, I see that for coffin bookshelf, our number one important key where we are rank one organic and one sponsor.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s what I like to see. And then if I’m not, like, look at this, our coffin shelf, we just dropped four spots in the rank into number seven. So you may want to take a look at that. Maybe I see right here, wait a minute, in sponsored rank for gothic bookshelf, I’m showing up at 24. I’m like, not even on page one and sponsored ads. So maybe I want to increase my bid. So there’s a lot of different actions that you can take if you have if you’re accurately tracking your keyword ranks through Keyword Tracker. All right guys, so there’s our 18 tips right there. Again, I hope you guys are gonna do at least four or five. I mean, if you guys have all the time in the world, hey, do all 18. Every single one of these, I think you can see is gonna benefit you if you do all 18. But I want you to commit to at least doing four or five and then tell me about it. Next month’s Bigger, Better Launch that we are going to do. So, hope you guys enjoyed this episode. Please share it with your friends, share it with your workmates, your team, if you have it. Get them working on some of these strategies so that you can make 2023 your best years of sales yet. See you guys in the next episode.


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Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started:

  • Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business.
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  • SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.
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