2 Things Brands Can Start Doing Now to Raise Your Amazon Rankings
Even top global brands have questions about optimizing their performance on Amazon. And a common, pervasive issue is falling rankings. Like other brand problems on Amazon, falling rankings can happen for many reasons, but are most often due to growth in marketplace competition.
Amazon reports over 1.9 million selling partners worldwide, and that number is increasing daily. Strategies that used to work for brands are simply not effective, and brands that have access to the right specialized knowledge and full range of marketplace resources will be able to overcome their growing competition to gain and keep their ranking status.
Pattern is an ecommerce accelerator with all of the expertise and data-driven insights and technology brands need to gain control on Amazon and maintain their competitive niche. We know what works in resolving issues like falling rankings, price erosion, losing the buy box, poor product listings, and more.
Below are two strategies to improve rankings for brands and, ultimately, grow their sales on Amazon and gain (and maintain) control.
1. Leverage Small Wins to Gain Performance Momentum
Winning on Amazon, like winning on other ecommerce marketplaces, comes down to data and patterns. You can use data to understand what’s working in your strategy and what’s not, then use tried and tested patterns to optimize for the areas you’d like to improve.
Raising your Amazon rankings is no different. The brands that are winning the Best Seller badge, and capturing the most valuable real estate in search results, are doing so by taking advantage of the favorable patterns in Amazon’s algorithm. The patterns operate like a cycle—improving your performance in one aspect leads you to improve your performance in the next and so on.
Winning creates more wins, and losing creates more losses. Amazon’s rankings are determined by many different factors, so if you don’t have the data to understand where you’re winning and losing, the scales can tip and lower your rank without you knowing why or how to fix it.
You can combat falling rankings by becoming aware of your Amazon performance data and using small wins to build positive momentum, elevating your rank and enhancing your sales. Pattern helps brands accomplish this with strategies like winning on less common, but still relevant, search terms for your products. As you optimize your listings for smaller wins and Amazon recognizes your relevancy, you’ll be able to compete more effectively for higher-stakes searches with more traffic. As your momentum ramps up, you’ll see your rank, traffic, conversions, and revenue rise.
Another feature working in your favor is Amazon awards a Best Seller badge for both categories and subcategories. That makes it possible to win the badge for a subcategory relevant to your product and still show up and compete alongside the Best Seller for your overall category. Amazon users don’t know the difference, and increasing your visibility is another way you’re building positive momentum toward raising your product rank.
2. Create a Holistic Performance Strategy
Building out a robust ecommerce strategy for your products goes hand in hand with building momentum through small wins. In the past, many brands have won traffic and conversions on Amazon naturally, through having great brand recognition online. Now, in the advent of Google, Amazon, and other search-based means, companies are having to work much harder to keep their footing.
The key is understanding the algorithms—how people search when they look for your brand. Staying competitive takes thinking about the right keywords to optimize for and how different marketplaces and consumers use different terminologies in their searches.
But this doesn’t mean that your brand should start haphazardly stuffing keywords throughout its product listings. Search algorithms are more sophisticated than they used to be, and it takes a multi-pronged optimization approach to authentically get your products rising in their ranks.
Now, not only do brands need video content in their listings and well-written copy, they need to incorporate ratings and review management to keep their positive ratings seen and promoted. In addition, brands need a strategy to drive outside traffic to their listing. Overall, you’ll need to provide a great experience for customers searching for your products, and that takes the right, specialized expertise and tools.
Pattern Ranks Brands on Amazon
Pattern has all of the resources and ecommerce specialists you need to take control of your Amazon strategy and create true, long-term profitability for your brand. With rich historical marketplace data and technology to provide real time insights and trends, we know how to take top global brands out of negative cycles that pull down rankings and decrease profits so you can be more competitive and successful in your ecommerce strategy.
Ready to take control of your product rankings? Contact us to set up a meeting.
More Resources
How LifeSeasons Took Back 91% of the Buy Box
Download 1-Page Case Study
8 Signs Your Brand is Out of Control on Amazon—CEO Cheat Sheet
Download 1-PagerExplore Our Ecommerce Resource Library
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Aug 9, 2022
The Ecommerce Equation: 4 Levers CEOs Use to Drive Marketplace Revenue
Developing your ecommerce strategy for digital marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart, Tmall, and Alibaba gets complicated fast—there’s a lot to think about, including marketplace SEO, product photography, advertising tactics, disjointed sellers, distribution logistics, managing ratings and reviews, and more. It can be overwhelming for brands, especially those with small teams, to know which behaviors to optimize for for the highest gains in profitability.
The good news? Revenue performance all comes down to data. Pattern was built on a data science approach to ecommerce success. We find the patterns that drive profitability, then apply them to boost our brand partners’ revenue on ecommerce channels.
And a key pattern we follow for all brands on digital marketplaces is the ecommerce equation: revenue = traffic x conversions x price x availability. As brands zero in on these four pieces of the equation, they can simplify and focus their efforts to reach truly profitable ecommerce growth.
1. Drive Traffic to Products
The first part of the equation is traffic—you need to get people to see your listings if you want to generate sales. There are two ways to drive traffic to your products: through organic search and paid search. Striking the right balance between both for your brands is crucial to driving enough of the right traffic to your products, ultimately increasing your ecommerce revenue.
Knowing this, Pattern provides the resources and technology needed to drive traffic to your product listings. Our brand management team, advertising specialists, and SEO technicians work in harmony to create a unified strategy to boost your brand’s organic profile and balance that with a paid advertising approach that works for your brand and listings.
Using this method, we took Feetures socks from ranking on longer-tail terms like “no show athletic socks black” to driving traffic on parent keywords like “no show socks.”
2. Create Content that Converts
Getting customers to your product listing is only half the battle. Once on your listing, you need customers to convert. Conversion is key to the ecommerce equation because it leads to real product purchases and revenue. Traffic without conversion leads to more time and ad spend without the ROI.
Optimizing your images, product description, bulleted details, customer reviews, and buy box performance is key to successful conversion. If you’re going to spend time and effort driving traffic, you should make sure customers can easily and clearly find what they’re looking for when they arrive at your listing.
While your imagery and descriptions are important, you also need to build customer trust to drive conversions. Studies show that your customer service efforts matter too—84% of people trust online reviews as much as friends, making strong reviews an important factor of conversion on marketplaces.
The good news is as you provide a quality product and a great marketplace experience, you’ll build brand equity, increasing your customer loyalty. Then, as your reputation, reviews, and traffic grow positively, marketplace algorithms will recognize your popularity and improve your rank accordingly. Rank drives both traffic and conversions, helping you to optimize your performance further. As your brand equity grows, your conversions will continue to grow with it.
3. Control Your Price
While setting a strategic price is an important step in your ecommerce strategy, it takes more than that to truly control your price on marketplaces.
Without proper control and with wide distribution, your product could end up in the hands of disjointed sellers who lower your marketplace price to sell their inventory and make quick profits. With one seller lowering price online, other authorized sellers and retail partners are forced to lower their price to compete, creating price erosion and sending your brand down the profitability death spiral.
This Death Spiral damages brand equity, hurts conversions, and can lead to Buy Box Suppression on Amazon, hindering traffic as well. And as prices get lower and lower, your profit margin withers away, decreasing your overall revenue.
Using our data-driven insights and Pattern’s eControl partner Vorys, we help brands implement narrow distribution, identify and take-down unauthorized sellers, eliminate price erosion, and control their price online. Focusing on price control, Pattern helped LifeSeasons, a premium supplement company, take back 91% control of the Buy Box on Amazon.
Download the LifeSeasons 1-Page Case Study Here
4. Optimize Your Product Availability
The last piece of the ecommerce equation is availability. It makes sense to think of availability as a contributing factor in conversion, but we felt that it’s important enough to call out on its own—you can fully optimize your traffic, conversion, and price, but without availability, you can’t grow revenue for your brand.
A lack of availability leads to stock outs, losing conversions to competitors, losing possession of the buy box, poor customer reviews, a decrease in traffic…the list goes on. The best-performing brands on ecommerce digital marketplaces optimize their availability with high-end technology, optimize their cash on hand, and inventory time on hand to keep the ecommerce equation powered and optimized in their favor.
How Pattern Drives Revenue Using the Ecommerce Equation
Pattern is committed to solving the ecommerce equation. We partner with brands to provide the expertise, resources, and technology needed to drive traffic, create content that converts, protect price, maintain availability, and ultimately accelerate ecommerce revenue and profitable growth.
Interested in improving the results of your ecommerce equation? Schedule a call.
