Amazon SEO Playbook: How Products Actually Rank in 2026

We're going to be talking about something that we don't normally talk about on this show, which is Amazon SEO. How to get found on Amazon. And you are. This is going to be like an Amazon SEO playbook. And you are an expert in Amazon and Amazon SEO. So, I'm really excited to have you on, Nicole. Thank you. I appreciate it. Could you share uh your background like your experience with Amazon? Yeah, for sure. So, I I've been serial entrepreneur my whole life. Uh always loved starting my own thing. um started a um gummy vitamin company back in college. Sort of actually all on DTOC, built that up to multiple seven figures and then we went Amazon. I met a buddy of mine that was doing 30 million a year on Amazon and he's like, "Dude, you got to do this, this, this." Starts telling me all the little factors and then you'll scale. So, we did that. I scaled it pretty substantially. Then we went retail. When we went retail, we went 0 to 25,000 points of distribution within 2 years. So then I start hiring these agencies because I'm like, dude, I don't have time anymore. I've got to have other people doing whatever. And my freaking sales dropped 15% when I had hyper growth in a retail channel. And so after I was like, I got to I got to launch my own Amazon because no one knows how to do this stuff. Well, I I ended up doing it myself and grow 450%. And the craziest thing with Amazon is, and what we'll go through this deeper, is it's a snowball effect. And so like the organic and the paid goes together. And I don't know if Google does that, but I'm like there's definitely no Facebook. Facebook does not care about organic and you pushing your stuff out or whatever. They're like you pay every dollar for everything. So then I started an Amazon agency helping really I I should say I started helping people on Amazon that I knew and really I was testing to see do I actually know this stuff or was I just lucky with my product or did I just know my product so well and we just saw ridiculous growth. And so now we've done this with dozens and dozens and dozens of companies and it's just nothing but fun. How does how does Amazon rank products? Like how does the Amazon algorithm work? Yeah, if if you break down the A9 algorithm as a whole, it's all about conversion rate and velocity. And so like breaking that down even further is like Amazon's trying to make money from their customers and from their vendors. And so when a consumer shops and they look, you know, we've talked about, you know, these uh microphones that we use. Well, the one that's going to convert the best is what the typical person out there would buy, which is a $30, $50, $60 mic. I look at it with headphones. I looked up highest quality headphones on Amazon, and you're going to find the $40, $50 pair is what is the best. The $15 pair is probably like a total piece of junk. 3.8 star review, not really good. But your Apple $500 headphones, majority of America can't buy those. And this is also where the shift is coming in. Now, on the velocity side, everyone's always said on Amazon, it's this chicken in the egg. But the reality with it is if you're super highly converting and the other one's super highly converting, but they're putting a bunch of money towards ads, Amazon likes making money, so they're going to start pushing you up a bit more. How about like uh keyword usage? Like how I mean, I would assume that relevance is pretty important. Relevance is the most important thing. So, back in 2016, you used to be able to, even if your product wasn't this, put melatonin gummies in the title and you would start ranking up. Now, it's incredibly difficult to do that. Like, Amazon is scraping everything on your page, making sure, is this actually what this person is looking for. So, in in 2026, beginning of 2026, right now, you will find that keywords are still highly highly important. However, AI is coming in very quickly as a shift of how consumers are changing their searching behaviors. That's interesting. Do you think that Amazon is using an LLM to like or or or or maybe something similar to like earlier Google algorithms kind of to create an entity of like what the Amazon listing is actually about cuz like you know you don't want to you you don't want users to go to a page that's targeting a keyword but that page is about something completely different. And so how how is Amazon able to tell if the if the actual product is accurate to the keyword that they are targeting? Yeah. I mean nowadays you from the back side of Amazon they've got Cosmo and Cosmo is like an AI background like is going through all this LLM reading all the listing doing all this stuff. Rufus is the front end. So, if you go hop on your Amazon app right now and you go and search, it's funny because searches are up substantially on Roffus and all this stuff, but it half the time it automatically does it for you. You weren't trying to do it. It just did it for you and it starts comparing the different products or whatever. Rufus is kind of like the front end to the consumer. They call it like their selling agent. And um you you'll start to see that consumers are whether by choice or not, it's it's pushing them to that right now. Amazon is you said Amazon is pushing consumers to Rufus. Yeah. Like automatically like they say the search volume and everything is up on Rufus, but the reality is if you go hop on your phone and type a couple of things, one thing that you're going to find over time is boom, Rufus pops up and you're like, I didn't search for that and it gives you three options rather than 375 options. Okay, so let me let me ask you this. Let's say uh let's say you actually don't have a big paid budget and you want to start on Amazon and you want to have like a really good optimized profile and you believe in your product. You you want to be able to do organic on Amazon and and I'm going to say you're not in the most competitive niche cuz like if you're in the most competitive niche like you know probably going to Yeah. Uh so you're not even in the most competitive niche. I think this is a good a good question to understand like the fundamentals of like how the Amazon organic algorithm works. So like walk me through from like step zero to actually showing up. Yeah. So there's a couple of tools that people will use. Helium 10 is like the common like the biggest tool that everyone always knows about. There's another one called data dive. There's a number of other tools that you can use. The tools itself will give you the framework, but you've got to actually know how to implement and do this. And so when you're when you're building this out, one, this method of marketing is so effective, I had to make sure it wasn't against Google's rules before I kept doing it. It's a form of SEO I call compact keywords. Whereas most SEO focuses on putting up articles to answer questions, how, what, when, compact keywords focuses on putting up dozens of pages that sell to searchers who are actually looking to buy. These pages rank on Google and convert so much better than normal that when I discovered this years ago, I couldn't believe this was allowed. It's less work, too. The average Compact Keywords page is only 415 words. Compact Keywords is a 13-hour deep course on getting sales with SEO. A customer recently said, "Each lesson is dense with information. You're giving years worth of experience boiled down into 15 to 30 minute lessons with no filler or fluff. I feel like I'm gaining a new superpower. Compact Keywords is about setting up an SEO funnel that brings you sales for years and years and years. It works with AI. It's less work than traditional SEO and it makes way more money. You can get it now at compactkeywords.com. Back to the podcast. One, make sure that your product is highly relevant to what you're actually going after. Right? So, if you're um I was in the gummy vitamin space, I'll always talk about vitamins or supplements or gummies or whatever. And so, if you look at collagen gummies and your product is actually a biotin gummy, but you're trying to hit on the collagen gummy just cuz you're it will not rank on that. It will be incredibly difficult to rank. You may rank 50 because there's 30 other actual collagen products, but it'll be incredibly difficult to rank there. You've got to go through keyword stuffing is not a thing anymore. In fact, Amazon does not even allow you to put the same word more than twice in your title. they will pull out on all of that stuff. They are very they're much smarter than what like we think that you know Amazon is. And so you've got to go through and there's the roots which the roots are like collagen let's just say collagen gummies and then you got like collagen gummies for women and collagen gummies with biotin collagen gummies right and so once you figure out all of those roots you want to really honestly I always go back to product development make sure that your product goes after this. I was just talking to someone that does a protein bite, like a little protein ball, and they were talking about like, "Oh, I'm going to launch this wild flavor that I've never heard of, like some strawberry, vanilla, blah blah blah blah blah." And I'm like, "Don't do that. It says in the search volume of what everything is, the most common commonly searched thing is peanut butter. Go after peanut butter. Go after cookie dough. It's the highest sold one." And so you want to make sure that you you mix your product development with what people are already searching for. And then you've got to go through title is going to be your most important, then your bullets, then your description. Your images actually are being completely read. So you want to make sure that you're showing not only what is your product and does it hit the keywords, but also the advantages. So go look at the questions and answers and then the reviews to figure out what consumers are talking about. You're saying put text in the images? Yeah, absolutely. Wow. Uh, how do you when you have all these like different keyword variations like you said, uh, what was it like collagen gummies for women and and then like collagen collagen gummies for women, collagen gummies for men, collagen gummies for elderly, like you know, you have a hund variations. How are you are you using those in a single listing? Are you creating multiple listings? What what does that look like? You depending on search volume. So, and depending on the brand. So, I've got a brand that I was talking with and they are very like woman focused. We'll never launch a men product because it doesn't fit the brand. Um, but there are certain products like uh creatine right now is getting massive. Well, everyone's been going after the men. Oh, let's get jacked and blah blah blah blah blah. Right. Well, now it's oh, you want a bigger build a bigger booty, you know, whatever. So, it's like now we're hitting the woman, you know? I don't know. I'm sure there's men that want to do that, too. But now they're like gradually getting towards that because the volume is so massive and the market is huge, but it's so competitive, especially on the men's side, that they're like, "All right, let's go hit this other side of the market that they don't want this like screaming rage like, oh, I'm creatine." They want the oh, this is gonna, you know, the woman side. I wonder I wonder to what extent this was discovered through looking at like marketing data versus uh there versus being like you know let's like everyone's going after creatine for building muscles let's actually like we know that like women okay women want to build their booties let's and some men want to build their booties let's try creatine like how much of it my question is how much of it is it just like throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what sticks in terms of like identif ing trends, too. Like if if we're talking 2 years ago when AI wasn't really a thing at all on it, um the whole like gluten-free this or a feature benefit that was almost never a thing. People were looking strictly for collagen gummies, collagen powder, collagen pills, collagen, whatever. like they were not like even today when you look at search volume for keywords, we're not seeing we're seeing a small small shift small shift on getting longer tail and more specific of what they want. But most people know like I've been getting targeted non-stop. Nitric oxide I have no clue what it does. It's something for working out. I think it puts more oxygen in your blood or whatever. I I want nitra. I want nitric oxide. Which one do I want? I want the one with really good reviews that actually works really well, but like I don't know enough on it. So then you go through and you look at the pictures and you're like, "Oh shoot, this one allows 33% more oxygen, which allows you to have a better workout at BL." So now you're selling the benefits later. From a keyword specific, it's one thing that I always tell people. I'm like, "Hey, hey, I know what you're saying. There was a lady that had a brain supplement and it really worked well for um people with Parkinson's and dementia. It was fiber and it was brain. Well, she wanted to go after all these keywords like brain bar. Well, no one's searching for brain bar. So, while someone may look at it and be like, "Oh, this also helps my brain." That's a cherry on top, not why they're buying. Wait, wait, wait. What was your what was your answer for um the hund keyword variations putting them? you do is it one listing or like you just have to pick the top five and use those like it cuz like you don't want it to seem like spammy if you say like uh you know key if you say collagen gummies for men, collagen gummies for women, collagen gummies for the just do one listing, hit whatever your target is and go after just that one. If you can start to rank on that one, you can change it out for the next one. So you're saying cuz like what if like your product can apply to like many different many different uh like customers? So what are what are you doing there? So I I go after so so on Amazon you've got um search volume but then you've also got keyword sales and so bachelorette gifts is going to be very broad very low conversion rate because they don't know what they're buying. Whereas collagen gum is for men it's going to be very very specific. What I personally would go after is one what does my brand fit? So if my brand fits men or women that's going to be the answer but let's just say it can go for anyone. It's fairly generic. I'm going to go after what I believe that I can win the most on. Now, what I'll go after is how much competition is going after it. How many uh competitors have this in their title, in their bullets? Do I think that I can actually win against them? And then I'll just start I I'll put it in my title in my bullets. Just one of them. Just one. Do not keyword stuff. You cannot put a bunch of these in there. It does not work well. And you get penalized for that. And um at this point, uh they say they'll penalize you. It's marginal the difference but they won't even allow you won't work well you I mean they won't even allow you to for for a title specifically if you put collagen gummies for woman collagen gummies for men that's fine collagen gum is for elder two times that's all you can do okay I interrupted you I'm sorry no no that's good and and yeah so so what I would do is focus on one thing and so if no one's doing it for elderly and you have like a real advantage what I'm not a big fan of is don't be for everyone before someone and so pick that person and go with it. But if you're not seeing your organic rank move up, then don't go after. What you can do is this is a good way to test it too. Do it in a sponsored side and do collagen companies for men, for women, for elderly. See what kind of impressions you're getting and see what the cost per clicks are on each of those to see because really the organic and the sponsored together work really, really well. And so you can get data faster like that, but you can always test from an SEO side, one thing at a time. Let me see. So wait, you said you like you like playing in the most competitive niches. That's is that what you said? You like No, I I'm the opposite. I am like Oh, cuz I thought you said you like I thought you said you like going where like you see a lot of other people like you see a lot of other people in that and so you like going there. No. Um, I will take I will take what other people are doing and I will niche down. I will never I I hate going super generic really big. I actually was just talking with someone like using AI to find products right now is horrible. It is the worst thing ever. Go look at it and it will give you the five worst categories that you should get into. Yeah. Yeah. It'll give the most generic stuff. Uh, so here's an interesting question in when it comes to the the most competitive niches. What ma what causes uh products to win out on organic? Yeah, early days always helps. So if you're really early on, I launched the second creatine gummy, fastest growing, biggest creatine gummy out there or whatever, you you get the testing and you get the learning early on. So just because you're early does not mean you're going to win. Product has to win. On Amazon specifically, if you do not convert, they do not care. conversion rate velocity, just remember that through everything that we talked about. But as you're going from like an organic side, again, if you can convert really, really well on some of these certain keywords. So, let's just say collagen gummies for men just does not convert, don't try to force it. If you're crushing with woman and elderly, then just keep with that and go after the elderly woman or whatever it may be. And so, you really want to just double down on the things that you're doing really, really well on. I mean, literally, this sounds crazy and it it like today it's a little bit different than what it was even three, four years ago. We won non-stop on collagen gummies, which we were fortunate because I was the biggest keyword for collagen gummy specifically. But collagen gummy we could not get. It was the exact same products. It was I mean there should have been no difference in it, but for some odd reason, we just would not convert as well on it. I don't there's still to this day no reasoning. So the wait sorry the keyword was collagen gummies and you and you were doing really well on that and you couldn't you couldn't hit collagen gummy singular? Yeah. I mean were we still bringing sales from it? Were we still like you know a top 10 top 15? Yes. But like collagen gummies we were one. I could never get collagen gummy which today they kind of like combine them together. Singular plurals all that stuff whatever. But just bull the data on this and watch your keyword ranking as you change your title, as you change your description, as you change your uh bullets and your images. What software are you using to to are you are you tracking rankings? Like what are you how are you looking at keyword volume? Like what other tools like anyone who wants to succeed uh on Amazon? What tools do they need to use? These are the three I'd use. Helium 10 gives you just overall just really good. Um data dive will be another option. What is sorry what does Helium 10 give? It's always gives you like you can look up another product. They call it Cerebro and you can literally like do a reverse as lookup. So I can look up a product and I can see what keywords they're ranking for organically sponsored, what the average cost per click is, all that stuff. You can look up what products do you want to launch and it'll tell you all the different categories and it'll go through all these different things. They they've got like 15 tools within it, but one of the big ones is like the SEO and how do they rank organically? how does the 10 companies that you're looking at altogether where where's the average ranking? So they'll do stuff like that. Data value is a little bit more specific and you'll be able to see the organic rank for each product. So you can have 10 products together. So Helium 10 will say, "Hey, here's all 10. The average ranking is this." Data Dive will go out and say product one is this ranking. Product two is this rank for all these different keywords. And they'll put the relevancy of the keywords on it. So you can see highest to lowest. And the last one is let's just say you already know the keywords that you want to go after. Um this is more on the sponsored side but is uh skill insights and you can see keyword ranking if you're just looking strictly SEO trying to grow. Helium 10 is just a common that everyone uses and I would also use a data dive. What are the what are the elements of a high converting Amazon page? So if your product is really really relevant, I always go through the funnel. Next thing, next most important thing. So when it's relevant, is the price and reviews within reason to all the competition? I'm not saying you have to be better or cheaper than the rest, but can you be better value? Have you really, especially over these next couple years, we're going to see even more. I've seen it more in the last 12 months than I saw in the last 10 years before this. That product matters more than anything. And so if you have a product that is really really good that is going to be here for 10 years plus that's a really good thing always be adjusting and fixing and making the next best things or whatever. Um and then and then it's main image. So main image is going to show relevancy right and and some of it is just like collagen gummies massive on the front or it's collagen with a gummy in the bottom right with a really good image or whatever. A lot of people have pretty images on their listing. Pretty is fine, but there's no real value. You need to sell and you want to sell in a nonchalant way. And so you talk about benefit on one, benefit on the second one, benefit on the third one. Don't go show 10 benefits on one. People need to be like walked through it. And I always tell people, think of your listing like a book. Read it top left to bottom right. That's why your images are up here and then go. And even on your images, top left to bottom right. Don't put the most important thing down on the bottom right. And so once you get all that stuff, then it goes to all the secondary things, which is then your bullets and then your description and then your A+ content and all of that. About um a AI product images, bad or like okay slash passable. Six months ago, bad today pretty good. I'll bet you in three, four months really freaking good. Interesting. I'm really glad I'm not a designer. Design is not my favorite thing. And so this is like the biggest blessing for us. What these AI images are doing. This is so cool. Is they're pretty much reading like how Rufus would or Cosmo would on Amazon. The AI of the back end of Amazon. They will go through and read all the reviews of your product, all the questions and answers, figure out all the things that are super important. And then there's a structure, right? So main image, you want to have this as this. Second image you want to have main benefit of you know avoiding some of your negative reviews. Second thing you want to do blah blah. So it'll go through all that stuff and it will literally create all of that stuff. So when you say like how are the images the quality of some of them like could definitely be improved but I could go the most recent thing that you've bought on Amazon I could go take it and put it into some of these tools and I'm like they're pretty amazing. You think Amazon will uh lower listings in the future that are using AI product images? If so, I think it'll be temporary because the reality is on Amazon the best the best main images are mockups. I think if I I honestly don't even know if they will. If they did it, it would be a temporary thing. They would find that it would actually these AI images will start to do better than the main real images. That's a great point. Yeah, you're right. They're mock-ups. Uh, what are the what are like the general just like Amazon mistakes that everybody Yeah. Actually, no. First, the just SEO specific like your top three biggest SEO mistakes with Amazon that everybody makes and then just the top three general Amazon mistakes. Yeah, let's go through SEO first. So, um I may need you to remind me on the other one even though it's uh general. Um f first biggest thing just keyword stuffing. They're going through and they're just keyword stuffing everything. Second thing is the relevance of the product to that. Everyone wants to I love tools, don't get me wrong, but everyone wants to know the tool and they're just going to use the tool and they're just going to take it as fact. Don't do that. Take it and then go search on Amazon the specific keywords because if you look at collagen, if if you were to ask me is collagen gummies and collagen the same thing or is it a collagen? Yes, it is a collagen. Well, you go look up collagen and it's vital proteins powder powder powder. So, that's another really really big mistake. And the third thing is just not knowing, you know, what do we actually go after verse the competition? And this one's a really really tough one to get to because it's it's so dynamic all the time. So, do you go after college and gummies when it's X players versus Y players? You know, if there's some major brand that I know is just blowing a bunch of money on ads or just doing things that are sketchy, Chinese companies do this stuff, all this stuff. Got to be careful on that. So those are those are the three biggest for overall mistakes. I would say the first biggest mistake that people make is the wrong product. Wrong product will put you backwards forever. It just it's awful. So you've got to make sure that you pick the right product. Again, I like I was talking earlier, do not pick the biggest products unless you got 10 million bucks that you're willing to blow and then maybe potentially win. I would not do that. Just go into a super small niche. One thing I'm looking at from a gummy side, Tart Cherry Gummies has been great. two years ago was doing 50 grand a month with one other competitor. Now the whole market does half a million dollars a month. That guy does 90 grand, another guy does 120 and there's four other players and no one's overly strong. Um then the next biggest mistake is the structure of how people do the campaigns and are they actually setting it up correctly? Right? And then the third thing is people don't work this together. People treat it like other platforms where when you look at Amazon as a whole, it is about organic and sponsored together. It's about that velocity. They're trying to make more money. They're a public company. I don't know if Google does this, but I'm like, it's a snowball effect if you do it the right way. All right, this actually kind of a crazy question. Do external backlinks affect Amazon? Um, yes, in a good way. Amazon loves getting free traffic and so they're they're actually going more into it. I don't know if I would call it the same as the way that Google is with like the back links and all of that, but same idea of it is I mean they've got creator connections now. They've got um your own affiliate links. They will give you 10%. So Amazon's typical fee is 15%. If you send someone from your email or from your Facebook ad or from your name, whatever influencer campaign with this link, they'll give you back 10 of the 15%. So they're like, "Oh, shoot. We got another customer because of this. They didn't go buy on your site. Well, let's encourage you." But yeah, so you don't know if it's like a ranking signal like it is with Google. It's It could be It could just be affiliates. It's hard to track. So like there's no software or tool or anything that you can see like the direct correlation, but I promise you if you see the outside traffic that is coming in for your product, it will continually grow. Yeah. And actually uh so you know it's you know you know yeah I I'll ask this question first and then I'll then I'll say my my thing with Google. But so why um you were talking about how sponsored and organic together is like so much more powerful. How come? Well, one, if you're converting on one, you likely will convert on the other. Amazon's, if you go back to the A9 algorithm, it's all about conversion rate and velocity. Well, velocity is by the keyword, by the product and by the keyword. And so, if this product and this key for this product, this keyword works really, really well. You might as just go invest. The 8020 rule 100% applies on the Amazon side. if you're starting to see it from either side, from an organic side. The problem is with organic is I don't know organically how I'm converting on that term. So, you have to see it from a sponsored side and then you can start to put those. So, what typically people would do today is they go out there, they go do a sponsored ads campaign and they do collagen gummies. They see how they're converting and the cool thing is now you can see how you're doing versus the market. And if you're above the market, you likely will rank higher. Well, so let's just say you're at a 17% conversion rate versus competition being at a 14% conversion rate. If that's the case, you should be putting that as another keyword within your title. We don't want to be fighting uphill and backwards on this stuff. I like easy wins. That's just my favorite thing. Then I don't have as much stress in my job. But uh so I'll go out there and we just go find what works really well and let's go after it. If I can't rank on that collagen gummies for men, it just is not hitting. Not hitting. Not hitting from a sponsored side. It's not going to work from an organic side. So, why am I It's just a waste of a I should just change it to something that will actually work. And we'll just call that one a bit of a loss. How do you get more velocity? Is it just like you got to have a good product and then it just sells itself or like uh Yeah. Or is it do you got to pump more into ads? Like Yeah. I go back to the basics of like how do people shop? And so it's it's about conversion rate, but then let's break that one down a little bit more. So we talk about relevance to what people are searching, right? And we talked about like SEO and then we're talking about like AI search as well. And so are they are are both of those actually aligned? Um or is your product aligned with both of those, I should say. And and then and then you're going through and figuring out like relevancy of the product. Is it what people actually want? How are your reviews? How many reviews do you have? And how good are the reviews? What are the bad reviews? And what are they saying? Have you have you fixed the product since any of that stuff? And then price is a major factor. So struggling on Amazon and your conversions less than competition. Lower your price. I guarantee it goes up, right? That that's just like the easiest thing. That's just like the easy like, eh, I I'm going to be lazy. I don't want to change my images. I don't want to change my product. I don't want to change anything. Well, changing your price will make the conversion go up. If you have something that's super low rated though, the reality is like we talked about these microphones or whatever. If this thing comes in and like horrible. It really doesn't matter how cheap it is. It got horrible reviews. It don't work. It doesn't turn on. It doesn't, you know, whatever it might be. So, you've got to get the product right. Uh what are some um I don't I had a different question. I can't remember it, but okay. What are what are some paid mistakes that everybody makes when it comes to uh when it when it comes to doing sponsored uh structure of the campaigns is the biggest issue. People will go out there and they have one campaign, multiple ad groups, multiple products, multiple keywords. And the problem is you can't you can't uh hone that in on what what is the issue. And so what I was talking about earlier from like an organic and a paid side, you want to make sure that you know this collagen gummy, we keep going off of this one, so we're just going to stick with it. Um, collagen gummy specifically. You put an apple cider vinegar in there. You put all this other stuff. Now, that one's probably, let's just say red shirt, blue shirt, red shirt, blue shirt. You don't know which one works for shirt, men's shirt, men's t-shirt, you know, whatever it may be. And so, you go out there and you try to then expand this by putting it into a new campaign on a single keyword. But that works on the black shirt, not on the blue shirt. And so, you don't know where to go. So, what I always tell people is I'm like, "This is a pain in the butt to do, but it's 100% worth it because it'll help you scale substantially. Single campaign, single ad group, one product, one keyword." Now, don't do this with something that has 200 search volume a month. But if it has reasonable maybe a couple thousand searches a month, do it in a singular way. more to manage, more scale available, and then you can put that into your organic listing to start getting the organic rank pushed even more. I remember the question that I want to ask before it was uh is um is review I mean it is I'm sure it is but like Yeah, I just love to hear your general thoughts on it like on gaming reviews. Yeah. Do not and how and how important reviews are. Reviews are important. Amazon is way more than what people think they are. Uh the don't get me wrong, I used to game a bunch of stuff in Amazon. There was a bunch of what we call grey hat, which were probably closer to black hat things back that I did 10 years ago that you get away with anything. Amazon got sued, I think it was 2022, 2023. They got sued by the FTC for fake reviews. You'll see this through all of their channels here soon. Go do your fake reviews somewhere else. I've got a buddy of mine built a company, sold it for uh hundreds of millions of dollars, starts another company, builds it up to $60 million for just this one brand. All the other brands altogether were doing $100 million a year within like nine months, crushing it. and he went out and was doing these reviews on other PE. He would have his influencers from Tik Tok go out there and leave negative reviews on competitor products saying, "Oh, product A sucks. I really like product B, which is product B is my product. We'll never be able to sell on Amazon again." He'll probably find some hack or whatever. It is like the most intense thing. Don't get me wrong, I wish that we Wait, he was he was caught? What do you mean? He he'll never be able to completely ban on Amazon. Wow. Products shut down overnight. Every single one of them. Every account that he was associated with. They know your Wi-Fi, your IP, your who you've been around, what other Wi-Fi addresses you've been with, what people you've been with. When you try to send it to your friends and family, okay, if someone really wants to go out there and they want to send to a few friends and family, that's fine. Amazon, though, um I I had another company, this was super smart, too. I I'm just like I know a lot of these hacks or whatever. I know how to do them. I would not do them. If you want to have a long lasting business or really a business at all, I would not do it. This other guy went through anyone that was following him and engaging on his Instagram. They would message him and say, "Hey, we'd love to send you a free bottle if you just buy on Amazon and leave us a review." How does Amazon track that? Well, the reality is Amazon looks at this as a full algorithm and they say, "Hey, the average review rate for electrolyte drops is 1 and a.5%." you've got a 3% flagged. Now, we're going to go figure out anything and everything. And they're going through all these different things. They're scraping all these pages of all these people that are doing all this hacky type stuff or whatever and finding the next new thing. They'll buy the product. They'll open the product. They'll go through do not do product inserts that say leave a fivestar review or leave a review with a five star above it. They're so picky. But the reason they're doing all this is because they got sued and they want to have like real good brands that people can trust. How about how about um just asking for a review in general? Amazon's super tight on it. So they they have like a um a review template that you can send. That's it. That is it. People always want me to say like, "Hey, give me the new hacky." Okay, so we used to do all the hacky stuff, right? And it's this is so simple today, but we were one of the first to do put a card in there. We're so grateful for you. We have a free gift for you. Send them to a website. If they're a one, two, or three star review, send us feedback. Four or five we send back to Amazon. You know, all that stuff, right? Like this like it's probably common knowledge today, but we were one of the first ones to do that. Unfortunately, like that is like the easiest thing to get caught in now. And it kind of sucks because it's like gosh like and that's fine because that is like hacky but I'm like it sucks you can't even just say like you can say we would love your feedback. That's about it. It sounds very similar to uh Google Maps and and when it comes to reviews there Maps. Yeah. Very very strict. Very because like the things that you were describing that's that's something that people used to do with uh with reviews in Google Maps. What are what are other like actually this is super interesting because like so many people use Amazon. I use Amazon. So what are like tell me how the sausage is made when it comes to like some of the crazy things that people are doing with Amazon. Man today it really like it I actually appreciate it. So Amazon I believe that Chinese sellers will gradually fade out of Amazon. And the reason why I say that is because whether there's relationships up at the top with government and politics and companies and blah blah blah or whatever, or just like trying to not become Teimu, which everyone knows if you go hop on Teeu, I guarantee you're getting 99% off and $300 in free credit and only one left and urgency, urgency, urgency, and it's like scammy. Amazon does not want to become that. And there have been so many Chinese sellers that come in and Chinese play really dirty on Amazon. Not all, a good amount. Um, I like I will look at products and if all of the competitors are Chinese, I don't want to be in it. And how can they tell? Uh, softwares and tools. So, you can use like the Helium 10, Data Dive, any of that and you can pull it in. You'll see all across the board. If these are all Chinese companies or whatever, it's likely not great to go after because they Well, you said they they play really dirty. How are they playing? Although they were the first ones to go do that review stuff where they'd go after your product and leave a review and say, "Oh, instead of instead of um product A, you choose product B." That was like one of the first things that they did. They'll go out there. They've got all these bots and all this stuff that will like go and run and do all this stuff. They'll take they don't care about patents. Just do whatever. Sue us, whatever. We'll we'll change one small thing. We're we're manufacturing that product anyways. So, it's just it's really really tough to to win over there. I mean, they they win, that's for sure. They know how to win. Um, but it doesn't always come out the cleanest. So, but I mean, Amazon's even talked about taxing them. And so, like, if you are a Chinese entity, you will be taxed at a different rate. Now, again, that's where I say like I don't know if that's part of a political thing or a a bigger thing, but I'm like, Amazon is trying to get things where it's way more legit from a review standpoint and from um just like an overall platform, but also productwise. And so, that's why products are just it's so important. So, sorry, going back to your question is like, hey, what's the sausage below all this stuff personally if it's me that the this isn't even there's no hacking on Amazon anymore, but the level of hacking that I can give you is go once you think that you have a product one, the idea that you have in your head is not going to be the product that you launch. It should not be the product that you launch. Figure out the product that you want to get into or the category or the industry, make sure that you go into that, figure out is it worth going after. So, we're looking at again SEO is super super important. However, you've got to pay for stuff, too. So, if cost per clicks are $8 a click, don't get into it. If they're less than a dollar, usually usually pretty good depending on your price point. Um, go look through all of the reviews on these competitor pages and scrape every one of them. And then go ahead and figure out um what are the things that they do really well. And I always like looking at as a percentage. If everyone says that it tastes really good, yours has to taste good. Has to. That's a bare minimum. Then you go down into like I will say like 65% of reviews talk about the taste is good. 35% talk about how they like the chew of it. On the negative side, 35% of the negative reviews are saying they don't like that it's too sticky. 25% don't like the packaging. Okay, change those things. It's too sticky. Do we put a carnoba wax? Do we do a this duh? Oh, the packaging isn't good. Why is the packaging not good? What's the consistencies? Oh, it's a bag rather than a bottle. People like putting a bottle on their shelf. whatever it may be. Listen to those people and you've already got all these competitors out there doing it. So, just take that and then make your product based off of that. How can you tell the fake reviews from the real reviews? I can't even tell. I mean, like, are they are fake I mean, are fake reviews really prominent still or like has Amazon done a really good job of getting rid of them? They've done the best job that anyone's done. What I would worry about is going to Home Depot or going to Lowe's or going to Best Buy or going to these like secondary websites the FTC doesn't really care about and especi especially Shopify sites. Every Shopify site is totally freaking rigged. Like my wife will tell me sometimes, oh well it has a 4.8 star review. I'm like I've sold plenty of 4.8 star reviews that turn out to be a 2.7 star review on Amazon. And I'm like they just delete them. So the Amazon because I think a lot of a lot of people who use Amazon wonder like how real are these reviews? I mean I've wondered that many times. Yeah. Well, the one thing that used to be this is an old hack too is you have child parent variations. And this is this is like kind of one of those cool fun things. They have a program called Vine. And Vine you can get up to really up to 30 reviews but you can send it out to 30 people. Usually get like 25 20 to 25 reviews off of that. Well, what you could do is I could launch a one pack, a two pack, a three- pack, a four pack, a 5, 6, 7, 8, 19, 11, 12 pack. I put all of them together and now I immediately got 12 times 25 reviews. I got, you know, whatever 300 reviews within a couple weeks or whatever. That wasn't even like that was totally legal. 100% white hat. Okay, they've diminished that. One thing that I found was look through the reviews. Like, you know, there's times where it's a $10 product. I don't care. I just add to cart and buy it. I bought my office chair. Every office chair, if you go look at office chairs on Amazon, they're all like a 4.0 star. And I'm like, dude, I like a 4.5 or above. Mine was a 4.5 star. Got it in. It's a good chair. It's not It's nothing crazy. It's not amazing. It's not horrible. And um I went back and looked at it. All the reviews are about a pillow. What they did is they took a category where everyone was super happy. It's a pillow. There's nothing to it. And they had really, really good reviews. Instead of getting rid of the pillow, they put the FNS, the Amazon barcode. Instead of doing it on the pillow, boom, now they're putting on the chair. Well, the chair starts out with a 4.5 star review with 5,000 reviews. If you don't read them, you don't realize that all the reviews were for the pillow. So, they've also nixed that. They started it as the pillow and then and then switched it to a more expensive chair. Yep, that's right. Wow. What are they acted like, oh, here's the new one. I do. What do you think the consequences to like that seller was? Do you think like their whole account is like No, that one's not going to be like a whole account. That's going to be like a maybe that product gets suspended. Mhm. Um something like that. you'll find like I mean Amazon's serious now about the SDS and the COA and all these like you know FDA or regulatory type things to make sure like hey is this actually legit or did you just go make this out of your backyard or is this just some jank thing. Um that stuff is a smack on the wrist. You're going to get it taken off but like they'll bring it back. playing with the reviews though, they are like I mean they ban 200,000 sellers and the common thing I heard was like, "Yeah, but I do 50 million a year." They don't care. They do not care. $200 million sellers. Empow it was the back I was making seven grand a year. Made no money. And this company, I think it was Impal and they were doing 200 something million a year off these dinky little $20 headphones and every electronic you could think of. Chinese company banned completely overnight. Wow. Yeah. Crazy. Are there any other mis Are there any other like common risky moves that you see new merchants making that that you haven't talked about? Like just like I think this is a thing that I see all the time in SEO is that like people who are starting in SEO they all they all think that they are smarter than Google. They all like they all think that they can outs like they're just starting in SEO. They have some like crazy new idea that they don't realize a million people have had before them and they like yeah and you probably see this the same thing with Amazon. They sound so good in theory. Um so Amazon knows so much about all these consumers. The two the two real things obviously reviews is one of them and then there's the search find buy. So again it goes off of conversion rate and velocity. So technically what you can do is you can say hey I'm going to I'm going to give you that free coffee mug. Type in black coffee mug. Scroll down to my listing. Click it. Buy it. and then I'll reimburse you for the product. That was an older thing. It does still kind of work, but you just got to be a little bit careful. Those are the two main things that I see today that are like people are very deceived with and just like you said, they think that they're smarter than Google. The reality is they just don't have the industry knowledge to know that like, yeah, that did work and that was creative 10 years ago. It's just not today. How do you get higher uh click-through rates? Is it just relevance? relevance, uh, main image, um, pricing, and reviews. Do you do you add do you do things like adding like benefits? Like thinking through like something that I advise when you're doing like traditional SEO is think through the search intent and then adds like you have the the target keyword right at the beginning of the page title. The page title is what shows in Google. Right after that, you say the benefit that the person is going to get. Do you do something like that with Amazon? Do that do that one from a um from a title standpoint and from an image standpoint. So don't just put, you know, your bottle of your supplement. Is it a powder? Is it a pill? Is it a gummy? Is it a liquid? Okay, so put that there. Like make sure that people immediately know. You want people to read the image cuz that's really what they read. So like, yes, the SEO part, it is really really important to put that up and up at the first part and all this other stuff. But from like a click-through rate, it's going to be the image. And so what we always talk about is like this usually goes against most companies brand guidelines, but hit exactly what it is and make it the most apparent thing where everyone even if the words weren't on it, they would know exactly what it is. That's awesome. What I I I just have a few more questions. Um what uh what what products are hot right now and what products are out? Um when you're saying hot, are you saying selling a ton of volume or worth going into selling? Oh, selling a ton of volume and then go worth going into. Okay, first one is going to be completely different than the next one. And this is just go look on claude. It'll give you chatb any of them will give it to you. I actually did this in a in a previous call cuz I want to show how bad this was. The five products I would never get into that are the hottest products on Amazon right now or what chatbot will give you. Magnesium glycinate, AG1 style greens powder, a creatine monohydrate, createn peptides, and ashwagonic KSM. Okay, those are like hot hot products. Protein, creatine, all all of these on like the supplement side or whatever. We can go to different categories and see like the biggest ones or whatever. Do not go after that. If if you're spending your money and you're actually trying to grow a profitable business to actually bring home a dollar, do not go after that. What I always like doing is I like going after like niches within. And so whatever the niche may be, I'm trying to find then this is not going to be a direct answer, but like I just help I'm helping a uh a company, fairly large company, but they've got a bunch of these products. They sell a um tool like a hand tool for your home. And so it may be like a trim puller. There's two companies. One's doing 130 grand a month, one's doing 20 grand a month. the 20 grand a month product should be able to take some more volume. Um, anything with very very little, this is very common in any business or whatever. We want super cheap cost per clicks and we want very little competition. I like to win early. I like to be profitable. I don't need to make a million bucks a month with each product. If I can bring in 20, 30, 50 grand a month per product, there's nothing wrong with that. Said, so there's you have one that's doing 130k a month and one that's doing like 20k a month. So, like, how are you how is that one that's doing 20K a month getting getting more market share? Uh, they're going to they just have to market better. If you were to look at their listing, you would immediately see how bad they are. And I love that because if you're if you have optimized your images and optimized your SEO and done all this stuff and you still can't win, I'm like, you're probably sitting with an AG1 style greens or a creatine monohydrate or a collagen peptide. Like, you're in way too busy of a category. So what I always do is I try to figure out exactly what the product is that I want to go after and then I go into that market and figure out whatever once it gets too big then bunch of competition comes in. You said you have friends who who are doing tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars a year. Yep. What makes them and their brands and their products different? What allows them to do that when the common person on Amazon is struggling? Yeah. Well, almost all of us are in the same group. And so there's a couple different groups. There's million-dollar sellers. There's just being friends with a bunch of them. So I've been friends with the top Amazon sellers for a number of years. And we're all talking about like what are the next things, whatever it may be. The reality though is like back in the day, they invested before other people invested. From an SEO standpoint, from a PBC standpoint, from the image standpoint, they understood all that stuff. AB testing non-stop. They're figuring out like what images work, what, you know, whatever it may be. And then a lot of them, they got into a space where like they did hit really well on where the trend was, whether it was pet supplements or Physicians Choice with their probiotic products or, you know, Mary Ruth has hundreds of products that are all supplements started with kids and go into everything now. So, but of all those right there, you'll see that they're not worried about making money for 3 months, 6 months. They're worried about making money long term and they also have factors that that will cut them back and say, "Forget that product. We're done with it." Really? They'll just And so you said they're like ruthlessly testing things. Yeah. Always AB test everything. Really? So the image and when like what does an AB test in Amazon look like? So you can I mean they they have more AB testing now. Really, the best way to do it truthfully is take data from January, take data from February, have your have your one change, whether that's all of your images, that's fine, all of your images or one image or whatever it may be, and then see what the conversion rate difference is. Sometimes you want to look on specific keywords and stuff like that. Amazon does have some tools. That's Oh, so the because these people who are doing all this money, are they are they using the tools? Is it a mix? Are they doing the the mix? for sure. Amazon platform itself is not ideal on it. Uh there's one I think it's called Profitero or something where you can figure out like the price equilibrium of highest conversion rate and the best price for you to make the most profit. That's always ideal. Um and then they're they're just they're willing to be flexible. They don't care. Like I mean I help this $50 million pet brand. Actually, I think they're substantially bigger at this point. And they'll they'll launch a product even though they're this massive company. They launch with minimum quantities and just every single time that they order they're changing something on it. So this was like a dog eye wipes and they would change the size of it cuz they said it was too small and then they changed the thickness of it and then they changed how wet it was and then they changed the packaging style because this was like constantly the thing that consumers were talking about. Not just one Karen out there complaining but rather multiple people saying the same thing over and over. Oh, it's too small. It's too small. It's too small. Okay, cool. Let's make it bigger. When they make a product change like that, are they using the same listing or is it a new listing? Same listing. Usually, usually, unless it's horrible, then they'll launch a new one. Okay. Uh, last question. How much does ex I mean, sounds like a great deal, but it'd be great to hear you talk about this. How much does external brand building on social media or public relations affect uh how you're doing on Just say from a Tik Tok side is the biggest thing that we're seeing today. Tik Tok is like it's just blown up. so many brands. I got a buddy he was doing three million a year two years ago. Now he does 60 million all from like the Tik Tok and then it builds all this crazy hype and then you see it 42 times because anytime that you watch a video for more than 5 seconds, you know, and so um that I mean is it is massive you know the PR side it it definitely works like if you do it the right way with the right companies with the right you know your product it fits it well. It is still very very important. I think it'll become more and more important through Amazon. Um, but you've got to get the basics to Amazon done right. When you're saying Tik Tok, is it Tik Tok and Instagram reels or primarily Tik Tok? Tik Tok is the majority. The algorithm that they have is just so like beat you dead. Once you look at one thing, I mean, you look at anything and you're just three videos later, it's, you know, that 100 times over. So, that's the typical, but really all of these social channels are starting to switch towards like the Tik Tok. I mean, even LinkedIn is going towards that. You don't even send anything to your followers anymore. Followers don't even matter. How about live shopping? Live shopping, I think, is going to be crazy big. I Gary Vee talked about this a number of years ago. I didn't understand it. I thought it was so dumb until I see every morning the charges of my wife on whatnot, buying more and more and more. And I did it one day and I was like, actually, this is super convenient because now I can go out and ask all the 10 questions I have. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And I'll just buy it right now because you just answered everything I had rather than me doing my own research. So, I'm like, I'm not as innovative as him. But I definitely think it is huge, Nick. You're awesome. Where should everybody find you? LinkedIn. I'm going share all my secrets out to everyone so that everyone can have a better knowledge of it. Thank you. Thank you for coming on the show, man. You have great energy. This was this was a lot of fun. Yeah, this was great. Uh, all right. This is episode 983 of the Edward Show. 983 days in a row doing this podcast. Thank you again, Nick, for joining the show. If you watched us on YouTube, thank you so much for watching. If you listened on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, thank you so much for listening. And I will talk to you again tomorrow. Bye now.