With more than 5 million sellers on Amazon, there’s clearly no dearth of options for a customer. As a result, you are required to deal with a huge competition in order to stay ahead and get noticed by the buyers. For that to happen, you’ll have to give your buyers a reason to pick you over the rest. Analyzing your competitors is the first step to coming up with a strategy to persuade your customers to buy from you. A detailed competitor analysis will provide you with just the right information about what’s currently working on Amazon. But then again, it’s only going to benefit you if it’s done right. Competitor analysis tends to involve multiple aspects, with each needing equal attention.
That said, here are some of the key pointers you need to double-check to ensure that you’re analyzing the competition right:
1. Make a list of relevant keywords
First things first. You’ll need a list of keywords for which you want your products to rank. For that, you’ll have to find out what all keywords are currently trending, and are most likely to direct the customers/visitors to your products. Conduct an extensive research to list all such relevant keywords. A good way of going about it is to use a keyword research tool. However, it is even better if you go for a seasoned professional, one who renders Amazon listing services.
2. Analyze Amazon search results
Once you have the list of relevant keywords at hand, you’ll need to examine how well they rank according to the Amazon search results. You can start entering the keywords in the Amazon search box and see the results that pop up. Focus on the first two pages of the search results and look out for certain patterns. You might notice some keywords appearing regularly in the titles, or an average number of product reviews in all the listings or the type of product image mostly used. Identify such patterns to devise your own strategy.
For instance, if you notice that certain images are being commonly used in many listings, you could come up with product pictures that are different from the ones already in use.
3. Find the top ranking competitors
After analyzing the high-ranking keywords and jotting down the patterns, your next step would be to list down the competitors who are ranking high for those keywords. In other words, you’ll need to identify the top players for your relevant keywords. Once you do that, you’ll be able to deeply analyze their product pages to find out what they’re doing to rank their products on Amazon. It might be their pricing scheme, number of positive reviews, etc.
4. Carefully scrutinize their listings
The next thing to do would be to carefully analyze their product listings. This will require you to go through every little thing in their product listings. Here’s how you can proceed:
- Product titles
Analyze the product titles that the top-ranking competitors have used. Notice the placement of keywords, the details they have included, title length, formatting, catchiness, etc. Take note of the patterns you find here.
- Product pictures
Notice the kind of product pictures they are using. Things like the background color they’re sticking to, the product angles shown in their images, the number of images included, etc. must be made a note of. You’ll notice that most of them have used high-quality images for their products, which is only possible with professional Amazon image processing.
- Product descriptions and bullet points
Notice how they’ve written their product descriptions. What kind of information have they included: is it only a list of the features of the product? Or have they touched upon the benefits as well? Have they used any of the visual aids to explain their products better? What information are they revealing in their bullet points? What structure are they using to organize all this content? Analyze and take your cue.
5. Put their product reviews to use
Reading your competitors’ product reviews (especially the negative ones) can reveal a lot of information about where they’re lagging behind. Negative reviews will highlight the problems that the customers are facing. You can then use this information to your advantage by offering a solution in the form of your products. You can also use positive reviews to find out what the customers love about the competitors’ products and then work on bringing yours up to par.
6. Leverage Amazon’s Q&A feature to your advantage
Studying the Q&A section of the competitors’ product listings can be quite helpful in finding out what your customers actually want. These questions also reveal the pain points of the customers and the areas where they’re facing doubts and problems. Find out what details your competitors are falling short on providing. Include them in your product listings to gain the customers’ attention.
7. Monitor their PPC strategy
Find out if your competitors are using PPC ads. Notice the way they optimize their ads using keywords. Find out how they make use of the long tail keywords in the sponsored ads. You can then plan your PPC strategy accordingly.
Once you are through with the aforementioned pointers, you’ll be able to devise a strategy for building your own product listing that not only gets customer attention but works at increasing your conversions too.
Conducting a detailed competitor analysis can be intimidating but not when Data4Amazon is here to your rescue. With our Amazon listing services, not only your analysis hassles will be at bay, but you’ll also be able to attract more customers with a better-optimized product listing. You can also go for Amazon image processing, and raise the quality of your listings. Connect with us at info@data4amazon.com to get started.