Feasting on Crumbs: How to Leverage Small Gains and Rank Higher on Amazon (Follow the Data Ep. 26)

Feasting on Crumbs: How to Leverage Small Gains and Rank Higher on Amazon (Follow the Data Ep. 26)

Understanding the nuances of Amazon customer search is what can really help you rank higher Amazon in the most efficient way possible. Just a handful of small opportunities that other sellers might consider crumbs, really add up. Join hosts Casey Gauss and Cameron Yoder for a conversation about how to feast on the crumbs of your product markets. 

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Follow the Data Show Notes

• Learn more about Keyword Research here: https://viral-launch.com/solutions/keyword-research/
• Be one of the first to use our newest software tool, Keyword Research! 
• Check out the video of the Launch Event for Keyword Research to hear more about the tool and see it in action!
• Listen to Episode 25 where Casey discusses the unique and powerful features of this new research tool or read our announcement blog post
• Wondering how Keyword Research works? Let Amazon expert, Cameron Yoder, walk you through the tool.
• Not quite sure how what Priority Score and Relevancy Score mean? Check out this guide to the Keyword Research scores. 
• Rank Higher on Amazon with a Listing Optimization and a Viral Launch. Email a coach at [email protected] to get a custom strategy today!
• Keyword Research integrates seamlessly with our other research software, Market Intelligence and Product Discovery. Find product ideas with high search volume, and see exact and broad match volume as you do market research.

Episode Transcript

CAMERON YODER:
Hey, everybody, what’s up? My name is Cameron Yoder, and I’m here with Casey.

CASEY GAUSS:
Hey, guys.

CAMERON YODER:
And we’re actually in – we’re actually in Las Vegas right now. We hit up a couple conferences, a couple Amazon seller conferences. And it’s been a good time. We’ve had the opportunity to meet a lot of really awesome sellers, and Casey actually spoke at one of the conferences here. And it’s just been honestly a really good time to meet some of you, and to talk to some of you, and meet some people that we haven’t met before.

And as always, it’s just good to be in the community, you know, just meeting and talking with people. Anyway, so we’re actually going to dive into more about Keyword Research, not exactly specifically the tool that we introduced last week, or the tool that we just came out with, but we’re going to talk kind of deeper level strategy behind – or basically deeper level strategy that you as a seller can use when you’re researching keywords, the mentality that you should be developing. And we’re going to talk about, again, just deeper level strategies and strategies that you can implement today when it comes to research.

CASEY GAUSS:
Hey, guys. I do want to stipulate that, you know, we are not planning on – we’re not trying to shove Keyword Research down your throat. We really just think that, you know, there are some really cool opportunities that have to do with Keyword Research just in general that we really want you to be aware of because whether you’re in a high, highly-competitive market there is still so much opportunity.

Whether you’re in a low competition market, I imagine there’s tons of keywords that you’re not targeting. So yeah, we’ll jump into just high opportunity keywords. So one, you know, so there’s always people jumping into markets that they really have no business being in, or maybe you’ve just been in this market for a while, it’s just gotten so competitive, and you’ve kind of just lost market share.

Well, there’s still, from what we’re seeing, generally so much opportunity that’s out there. So let’s take the Garcinia cambogia market, for example. If you’ve been around for, you know, more than a year you probably know this product to be somewhat of a joke, right? So there’s a ton of products out there that everybody is sourcing, and everybody knows that everybody else has sourced it at some point. These are products like grill gloves, Garcinia cambogia, turmeric, fish oil, grill brushes, garlic press; you know there’s a number of these products.

And so Garcinia cambogia, like I mentioned, is one of them, a very, very competitive market. At one point it was insanely high-volume. I think it’s still pretty high-volume, but there’s definitely some more mature players in this market. So when we go and we run keyword research we find, you know, just quickly scanning through I found 10 words, each with at least 1000 searches a month in volume, all with over 900 opportunity score.

So the one keyword for this is luxury Garcinia cambogia. There’s over 2000 searches a month for it and 990 opportunity score. What this means is – to recap the opportunity score, basically what we’re doing is for each word we’re going to look at the top sellers for this word, and we’re trying to understand do they have this word in their listing. And if so, where do they have it, and how are they using that? The reason being is we are trying to help you understand how easy it would be to rank for a particular keyword. And so to understand how ranking works on Amazon it’s important to know that Amazon is paying attention to the very specifics of keywords and how they’re used in your listing.

So the rules of indexation and the rules of ranking are different. So if you put brush in your listing you will be indexed – meaning Amazon associates this keyword for the product – you will be indexed for, you know, the singular and plural form of that just by putting one version in. So if I put brush in my listing I’ll be indexed for brush and brushes. But one thing that is – and it, you know, generally doesn’t matter where you put that. You know there are limits in terms of back-end search terms. But regardless, you know, if you put it in the bullet points, you put in the title, it all is indexing the same.

But when it comes to keyword ranking, though, this is quite a bit different. And so, you know, basically Amazon is looking at the content of a listing at the time of a sale. So as a sale goes through they’re looking, okay, what words are in the title, what words are in the bullet points, what words are in the back-end, and so forth, to then boost them up in the search results. And so what we see is that words contained within the title get more rank power per sale than words found anywhere else in the listing.

And so this is a very important thing to note. We also see that the specifics are important. So if you only had brush in your title, but you had brushes, you know, in a bullet point, then each sale that happens the word brush is going to be getting higher ranking or moving up the ranks faster than the word brushes. And so these specifics, these nuances, are very important for you to understand how to build the best listing possible and get that advantage over the competitors.

So taking all of this into account plus a bit more, all the data that we have found through our 30,000+ launches, we’ve put into this opportunity score. So we’re looking at, okay, for luxury Garcinia cambogia, how are the top-ranking products using it in their listing? Is it found in the front end? If so, where and how? And so a thousand is the top opportunity, meaning that nobody has it in the front end of their listing in any form.

So for luxury Garcinia cambogia the opportunity score is 990 with 2000 searches a month. All that to say you’re selling Garcinia cambogia, this really competitive market, but there is plenty of opportunity for you to kind of, you know, get the crumbs. Like I said, I think there’s six words or something like that that combined have over 8000 searches per month. Each one has over 1000 searches individually and an opportunity score of 900. So collectively, you know, these crumbs add up to, you know, half of a piece of bread – or half of a loaf of bread.

CAMERON YODER:
A cookie.

CASEY GAUSS:
Adds up to – I don’t know what it adds up to, but I don’t know what the analogy is, but regardless, you know, you can add up these words. So for example, luxury Garcinia cambogia, misspellings as well, assuming that they do not auto complete within their search results. But here’s a word that has over 1000 searches a month, but is Cambodia Garcinia, but reviews on Garcinia cambogia, there’s over 1000 searches a month for that. So you could just prioritize the word review somewhere in your listing, and now start getting significantly more boost in the search results and another misspelling, Carcinia cambogia.

So if Amazon isn’t auto-completing these words you can throw them in your listing, throw them either in the front end or the back end. Misspellings probably belong in the back end, but it really kind of just depends on what your brand looks like and what the misspelling is to see if you can throw it in the front end. Again, the title provides a really distinct difference in terms of rank power that it is driving. So all this is saying is even in really competitive markets there’s tons of opportunity out there. Go position your product well. Make sure that you’re doing your keyword research to really understand where are the holes – where are the gaps in the market so that I can push my product in there?

CAMERON YODER:
I just want to add a little bit to that. I think high-level sellers might take this piece of information and think that there aren’t keywords that they haven’t seen yet, that they could apply to their listing. But this advice honestly applies to all people. I mean it’s not like every single person knows every word in the dictionary, right? And just because of that, you yourself cannot determine if there’s a group of people searching a word that you don’t know about.

And because of that I would really encourage you all, if you’re low, or if you’re a beginning – if you’re a beginning seller, or if you’re an advanced seller, to go and find – do keyword research with the purpose of finding those words that you haven’t seen yet because you will find them, and all of those added up, even if they’re small, to stick with the crumb analogy, can make a whole piece of bread or an entire cookie, whatever the end result of that analogy is.

CASEY GAUSS:
Yeah, another one that we were doing some demos here at one of the conferences and people, you know, could not believe that one, people, other top sellers for these words did not have these words in the front end of their listing, and then they were blown away that, you know, some of the most popular tools out there were just missing these really, really important words.

So another high opportunity keyword, if you search trash can you will find trash cans, the plural form, with over 10,000 searches a month, 1000 opportunity, meaning no one has the plural form of can in the front end of their listing, which is just insane to me. The fact that you don’t think to throw cans, the plural form, in your listing is crazy. But there’s over 10,000 searches a month. Easily just throw cans in your title and now you get all this additional traffic without doing much work at all.

So next up I think we are going to talk about horizontal markets. So horizontal markets, again, from kind of a technical perspective can be difficult to find. So there are some popular keyword tools out there that are missing a lot of these horizontal markets, and this is something that, you know, is really important. So one example is going back to trash can, you know this word, we keep using the word but it just has amazing examples.

For example, a horizontal market would be a word where there are no root words contained within this new word. So basically what that means is let’s say we are selling a trash can, a horizontal market would be kitchen garbage, or garbage bin, or waste bin, because you do not find trash or can anywhere within the word. And so there’s tons of these horizontal markets. They can be difficult to find. Another example would be, you know, let’s say you’re selling a first-aid kit and trauma bag would be that example for you. There’s so many of these horizontal markets. Again, make sure that you’re hitting them. A lot of tools that have existed on the market have not been doing us a good job of finding them. But there’s a ton of opportunity out there.

Next up, so this is talking more specifically about Keyword Research, our tool, but we do want to highlight some benefits of the integrations. This is one thing that, you know, I’m just really excited about. But I guess I get excited about a lot. So one benefit of Keyword Research being now integrated within Market Intelligence is too often we see someone going after a very, very niche market, and the sales on Market Intelligence look amazing.

So if you were – but you don’t really know in reality what keywords are driving those sales. So on Market Intelligence or any tool that, you know, this Chrome extension or whatever that’s showing you estimated sales, these sales are for the product as a whole independent of what words it is not ranking for and where. So people can get confused pretty easily.

So if we look at the water bottle market, let’s say someone searches 32 ounce insulated water bottle, and they think you know, the sales look amazing. The top seller is selling $230,000 a month, the third ranking product 100,000, and you know, 26,000 and 40,000 in between those. So it looks like sales are amazing, but if you look at the search results that are now showing within Market Intelligence you see there’s only 378 searches over the last 30 days for this.

So that is a clear indicator that wow, if there’s only 378 searches this revenue cannot be coming from this keyword. So then if you go and you look at insulated water bottle, what you’ll find is okay, there’s a lot more searches, almost 29,000 searches over the last month. And you can, again, see the revenue. If we were to go to water bottle I would imagine we would see a lot of these same products showing up and obviously much, much higher search volume. So basically what we’re hoping to do here with Market Intelligence is just to help you understand that you should, when doing your product research, you should be looking at the main keywords that are driving the sales. And what is the best indicator of that? That is search volume. Cam?

CAMERON YODER:
Yeah, I just want to maybe say this in a different way because I think without a visual picture it’s a little hard for listeners maybe to picture something like this. But I just want to give a picture. Again, let’s stick with the insulated water bottle. So you search 32 ounce insulated water bottle, and you see – you’re pulling up all the results and you’re looking at sales information, so monthly revenue, right? So if you pull up 32 ounce insulated water bottle, and I’m a seller looking to maybe get into the insulated water bottle market, I’m going to see all these huge, huge monthly revenue numbers, right?

And I’m going to think, well shoot, everyone is killing it in the 32 ounce insulated water bottle space, so I’m going to source insulated water bottle – or 32 ounce insulated water bottles. What I don’t know, however, is if those sales are being attributed through other keywords. In other words if someone else, or if other people are buying these insulated water bottles through a more primary keyword, such as insulated water bottle, or water bottle in general. So what I need to do is make sure that people are searching for that specific term or that specific market. And in some cases like this people can easily get tricked into buying a very specific product.

Maybe it’s something that’s a little bit of a longer tail keyword and they think it’s a great market when in actuality it’s actually those sales are being attributed through another keyword. And finding the primary keyword is going to give you a more accurate picture of that market, and it’s going to give you a more accurate picture of maybe what you’re stepping into, to either validate that idea or save you from stepping into a market that will underperform, basically.

CASEY GAUSS:
And last topic, integrations with product discovery. So this is something that I have been dreaming of for a while, and especially when I realized that we would be able to integrate keyword research data with product discovery. And this is – it’s because you cannot do this literally anywhere else in the world, and that is find underserved markets on Amazon. So what, you know, we did a webinar last night and we were walking through some examples, and you know, it just made perfect sense.

So basically what we mean with an integration with product discovery, which is a product finding tool, you know, we’re tracking coming up on 100 million products on Amazon. We’re tracking millions of keywords, brands and categories to help you identify, you know, great product ideas, great product opportunities, brands that are killing it so you can emulate their success or find, you know, what tactics or driving such.

Anyways, so if you go to the keyword search type in product discovery you can now put in search volume exact, and the search volume, again, is coming from Keyword Research, and here’s where this gets really cool. So basically by having search volume and sales volume we are able to find markets that are underserved. So what I mean by underserved is people are, you know, searching, you know, bachelorette or bridal shower gifts, let’s say.

So they’re searching bridal shower gifts, and they go there and they’re not finding anything that they want, and so they just end up not purchasing something. The opportunity here is for you to find these markets where people are running tons of searches but no one is buying because they aren’t finding what they want. And this gives you validation to understand people want this, no one’s finding – you know, there isn’t a good option available, so I can bring something totally new to the market that satisfies this need.

So one like amazing example that Cam has ahead, or up on the screen right now, is gender reveal. So people are searching gender reveal, and there’s over 25,000 searches a month for this, and there’s only $6000 in average revenues. Gender reveal party supplies, 33,000 searches, and the average product is doing $4,900 a month. So there is a ton of search volume. There’s very low revenue coming in on these products, and that is just one keyword.

If you were to go add up all of the keywords that were related to gender reveal, gender reveal party supplies and you were to look – because the revenue stays the same. The search volume just continues to add up. So anyways, these products are doing, you know, $5,000, $6,000 a month on average, but collectively you know there’s got to be well over, you know, 75,000 searches a month. So just a ton of volume, and basically people just are not buying what they, what they’re seeing.

And so this, you know, go see what’s out there. Obviously people are not super happy. Maybe read some reviews to see what people are really looking for. Go do your research. Go see what you can source, and then bring that to market because you know people are looking for these products. They’re just not finding what they’re looking for.

CAMERON YODER:
Yeah people, so people – it’s been very interesting for us to be in Vegas and to be talking to people here just about keyword research in general, not specifically about our tool, but talking to other people and how they use keyword research tools. It’s very interesting for them to use them to find untapped – or to find product ideas, right? So they’re using Keyword Research, other research tools, to find product markets. They’re using the tool for the purpose that they weren’t intended for, right?

And so they’ve asked us – people have asked us about, well should I use Keyword Research? Or can I use Keyword Research to find other markets that I am not in right now? And the answer is yes, you can because other markets are going to pop up. Like if you search trash can, something specific like another horizontal market will pop up or something like it, like mesh bin or something like that. That includes another marketplace for you to jump into. But the integration here with product discovery allows for full search of new product markets that you’re not in yet using Amazon keyword search volume.

So Casey, where we touched on searching for markets that have a high search volume and low sales because that’s indicative of a lot of people searching for a product but not buying, which is indicative of a market that people are not happy with necessarily, or an opportunity for you to make a better product in. On the other hand, let’s say you flip the – so we set a minimum search volume, and we set a max sales number, right, to limit the amount of sales that are popping up for these keyword markets.

Let’s flip that a little bit, and let’s search for markets that have a minimum search volume. So we’re searching for markets that have a high search volume, and we’re searching for markets that have a high revenue, whereas before we were capping the revenue. Now we’re finding markets that have a ton of sales, right, and a ton of search volume. At the same time we’re going to throw in one more metric here. We’re going to cap out the review count.

So we’re searching for markets that have high number of sales, high number of searches, but a capped out number of reviews, something like 100. This, this is a small – and I’m just keeping it simple for podcast’s sake, but this then is indicative of markets that are getting a lot of searches and a lot of sales but are still young, right, so the markets that are still opportune for entry, basically if a market has a lower number of reviews but a high number of sales that’s a better chance of you entering in and competing.

Well this pulls up markets that a lot of people are searching for, that a lot of people are buying in, but that not many other people are competing in, something like that. Our goal with this is to really challenge the mentality of people when it comes to keywords, when it comes to research, when it comes to product research and just keyword research in general. So I would honestly, honestly encourage each of you to begin to question the way that you think about keywords and begin to question yourselves with what you’re looking for, how you’re looking for it and maybe even how you can optimize your processes and your listing optimization.

Well, everybody, we wanted to – we want to thank you so much for sticking with us. We hope that you found some value with this, especially when it comes to just thinking about processes in a different way. That’s what we want to do. We want to challenge sellers to better themselves. We want to challenge sellers to improve and scale their businesses and honestly have fun while doing it. So we thank you so much for tuning in.

Thank you so much for listening. Again, if you have any questions feel free to send us an email, hit us up on Facebook. We would love to hear your feedback on the podcast or just any general questions that you have. Whether it be something about researching keywords or researching markets, we want to hear from you. So hit us up. Thank you so much. We do this for you. If you said hey this weekend, thank you so much for stopping by and saying hey. Hopefully we will see you all sometime in the near future. Anyway, thank you guys so much. Until next time, remember, the data is out there.