Unlock Synergies Between SEO and Advertising on Amazon

As a brand or an agency, search engine optimisation (SEO) and online advertising (Pay-Per-Click; PPC) in Google search are probably pillars of your online marketing strategy. You most likely have dedicated teams for each area that are equipped with the necessary skills to drive success. But while SEO and advertising are distinctive, separate disciplines in the Google universe, they heavily affect each other within the Amazon environment.

As an increasing number of people start their product searches on Amazon rather than on Google, Amazon’s status and importance as a search engine as well as an ad provider is booming. Subsequently, brands as well as agencies need to understand the mechanisms of the new holistic approach to SEO and advertising on Amazon.

SEO and Advertising in The Google Universe

The Google ranking algorithm decides how visible websites are. To improve their organic rankings, brands need to engage in SEO by optimising their keywords, their content and more. Google search and display ads help drive additional website traffic. As customer journeys on Google are very diverse and fragmented, aligning and optimising SEO and advertising together is very hard to implement in an effective way.

Users start their Google search for highly different reasons; some searches might have a purely informational character, while other users intend to buy something. Users switch from Google to a variety of other and very different websites and platforms that again have entirely different goals – from traffic creation to brand awareness, lead generation or purchases. Some websites even pursue all of the above simultaneously. That’s why almost all brands and agencies keep SEO and advertising in different silos, optimising them in separate teams.

A New Paradigm: Understanding SEO and Advertising on Amazon

Of course, there are plenty of similarities concerning online marketing on Google and on Amazon, for example optimising keywords and creating appealing images and texts. However, a key difference is that on Amazon, almost the whole customer journey or purchase funnel happens on the same platform, from initial searches for products and brands to the actual purchase (and repeat purchases). Additionally, this whole funnel is designed around a single goal that is shared by customers, sellers and Amazon: product purchases.

Compared to Google, these differences show that there are much more interconnections and synergies between SEO and advertising on Amazon. That’s why brands and agencies need to take a holistic approach to succeed on Amazon.

Keywords, Content and Reviews Impact Both SEO and PPC on Amazon

Here’s an example for synergies and interconnections between SEO and advertising on Amazon. For a PPC campaign on Google, brands can design both customised ads and landing pages. For PPC campaigns on Amazon (Sponsored Products ads), however, there is only one landing page for both advertising and organic traffic – the product page – and ads are created automatically based on this page. That’s why the product page needs to be optimised for both SEO and PPC simultaneously. If keywords, content or reviews on a certain product change, it affects both the product’s SEO and PPC performance.

Researching the right keywords is a key success factor for both areas as it determines whether a product will appear in organic search results in the first place and whether it gets impressions for the targeting keywords used in PPC campaigns. Continuously analysing and optimising keywords in PPC campaigns will therefore not only help with advertising success but also with the SEO performance.

Good product content and reviews affect both the organic sales performance, leading to better rankings in organic search results, and the ad performance, increasing the overall advertising efficiency. That means investing time and resources into well-crafted, convincing product descriptions, high-quality product images and a stellar customer service will pay off twice or hurt twice if it’s not done well. While stellar customer service helps with good reviews, increased sales velocity driven by PPC ads helps getting more reviews, again improving the overall performance.

The Amazon Approach to Online Marketing

These examples show that brands and agencies cannot just copy their strategies from the Google universe ¬because Amazon is different. Amazon requires specialised skills, teams and, most importantly, a synergetic approach, because on Amazon, SEO and advertising are strongly interconnected. That means that SEO and advertising teams need to work together very closely and align their activities. They need to invest the time to understand their interconnections and track as well as analyse them to unlock all the key synergies driving business growth.