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Input a seed term (i.e. football) or an ASIN to uncover thousands of related terms (i.e. football gloves, whistler football, etc.)
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Eliminate the guessing game and make informed decisions with Magnet!
- Identify high-volume / low-competition keywords to validate product opportunities
- Leverage our filtering mechanisms to really hone in on qualifying criteria (i.e. sales, volume, paid and organic competitors, etc.)
- Compile a high-quality list of hyper-relevant keywords for Amazon PPC and SEO
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FAQs
Amazon keyword research is the process of locating search terms (keywords) your target audience is actively typing into Amazon’s search engine, which you can then incorporate into your product listing to position your product to rank well on Amazon’s search engine for that search term (called Amazon Search Engine Optimization (SEO)) or leverage as keyword targets in Amazon Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns.
Keyword relevance refers to the context behind why someone is typing a specific phrase into Amazon’s search engine. If you’re selling soap that’s shaped like a football and one of your keywords is simply ‘football,’ the user searching for ‘football’ likely won’t be interested because they’re looking to buy an actual football, not soap. In that case, the keyword ‘football’ has little to no relevance for your product listing. You can discover search intent by plugging a keyword into Amazon’s search engine and analyzing the top (non-sponsored) products. If the results aren’t similar to your product offering, chances are it’s not a viable keyword opportunity.
There’s no limit to the number of keywords you can incorporate into your product description, but there is a limit to the number of back-end / hidden keywords you can have. The number of back-end keywords is limited to 250 bytes (text length in terms of pixels), which is roughly equivalent to 40 keywords. Letters and numbers count as a byte, while spaces do not. Typically, 250 bytes equates to 250 characters, except in the case of letters with accents or foreign language characters.
Helium 10 also has a ‘Subject Matter’ field within Listing Builder so that you may input additional keywords that will be applied to the listing directly on Amazon, which other tools on the market do not offer.
If you have Amazon Brand Analytics, you can sync your Amazon account with your Helium 10 account to discover trending keywords within our ‘ABA Top Search Terms’ tab in Black Box.
In order to select the best keywords for your listing, you should look for: keywords that are relevant to your product listing (first and foremost), keywords with high search volume, high keyword sales, high click share and conversion share, low competition (in terms of the number of competing products), a high Magnet IQ score, low number of sponsored ASINs, and low PPC bid costs. All of these metrics are available within Helium 10’s Magnet tool. In terms of keyword relevance, you can use the ‘Phrases Containing’ filter on Magnet to hone in on keywords with specific words in them.
Style keywords appear in the left-hand navigation to enable potential customers to sort through the search results by ‘style’. To add these to your back-end, log in to your Amazon seller central account and click ‘Manage Inventory’. From there you can find your listing, select the ‘Edit’ button, the ‘Keywords’ tab, and you are all set to enter style keywords in the search terms field.
Golden keywords are keywords with strong potential for your product listing, but are under-leveraged by the competition. You can find these golden keywords by applying keyword filters within Magnet (i.e. greater than 100 in search volume, phrases containing the stem phrase, competing products less than 200, etc.).
Hidden keywords (keywords you add to a product listing on the back-end which don’t appear on the front-end for users to see) are visible in the “Search Terms” area under the “Keywords” tab on the product listing builder page.
Helium 10 offers a free Amazon keyword tool embedded on this dedicated landing page (a limited demo of Magnet), but we highly recommend signing up for a free account with Helium 10 to gain access to all of our data within Magnet.
Helium 10’s Amazon keyword research tool (Magnet) processes billions of data points each day and has the largest database of keywords on the market, making it one of (if not THE) most accurate tool out there.
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41 minute read
#383 – Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass – Part 1
10 minute read
Amazon Keyword Tips: 7 Mistakes New FBA Sellers Make
The Details
How to Conduct Amazon Keyword Research With Helium 10’s Amazon Keyword Tools
The tactics below are inspired by the information Bradley Sutton (our Director of Training and Chief Evangelist) presented during a recent Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass. These tactics could potentially generate thousands of dollars in additional revenue for your Amazon business, so be sure to check out these tactics and try them out for yourself!
Tactic #1: Identify Keywords That Competing Products Rank For
The first tactic involves identifying your direct competitors’ products, collecting their ASINs, and running them through Cerebro (our reverse ASIN lookup tool) to see all of the keywords those products rank for. Within Cerebro, you can apply various filters (Exclude variations, Match Type = Organic, Search Volume > 100, Keyword Sales > 10, Phrases Containing ‘coffin shelf, coffin shelves’, Competing Products < 1,000, Sponsored ASINs < 100, Organic Rank between 1 and 50, etc.) to start narrowing down the field, however we recommend focusing on keyword relevance at this stage and not worrying too much about all of the other data (that can be addressed further down the line). As you come across relevant keywords, checkmark them and add them to a new list.
Tactic #2: Check Search Volumes Averages, History, and Trends
Now that you have a long list of keywords that are hyper-relevant to your listing, it’s time to start cleaning the list by focusing in on the metric that matters most, which is search volume. There’s a finite amount of space where you can incorporate keywords into your listing (whether it be the title tag, product description, back-end keywords section, etc.), so you’ll need to narrow down the list to only include keywords with the highest potential to generate sales.
What you can do is pull up the list you created, and start to hone in on 4 primary metrics (search volume averages, search volume history, search volume trends, and keyword sales). Within the ‘Search Volume’ column of Cerebro, click on the graph icon next to the Search Volume and review their search trends. Look at the trends over the last year and last couple of years to see which ones offer more stability and overall higher volume levels. Also look at whether the keyword’s search volume is trending upwards over time (by checking all time data). And finally, take a look at the keyword sales estimates to hone in on ones with the highest potential.
For ones that have seasonal spikes but didn’t make the cut, you could build out a spreadsheet with those keywords and the specific months those keywords experience spikes so that you can run Amazon PPC ads during those months.
Before we conclude this tactic, we should note that there’s no magic number you should be looking for when it comes to minimum search volume levels (whether it be 1,000, 500, or even 100 monthly searches). The key here is identifying all of the keywords that are hyper-relevant to your listing and comparing them against each other rather than comparing them to every keyword on Amazon. If you’re still in the product research phase, this could be helpful to determine whether or not it’s worth selling a specific product, but if you’ve already chosen a product and ordered inventory, you need to work with what you’ve got.
Tactic #3: Reverse Engineer Your Competitors’ PPC Keyword Strategies
Within Cerebro, you can copy your competitors’ PPC keyword strategy by leveraging our various filters to hone in on what they’re doing. For instance, if you’d like to see all of the keywords that your competitor is targeting on Sponsored Ads, simply change the ‘Match Type’ to ‘Sponsored Product’. From here you can get a strong pulse on their overall keyword strategy (i.e. broad match, phrase, or exact match) and use that to inform your own strategy. If you see that their product is crushing it within Xray, and you see that they’ve really honed in on 10-20 specific keywords with an exact match type for their keywords, you could bypass all the time and energy they invested into dialing in their strategy and simply emulate it. You can also use it to see where their strategy might be missing the mark by identifying additional keywords that are hyper-relevant with strong search volume and low competition with good keyword sales.
Side Note – If you’d like to drill down further and take a look at the keywords they rank in the top 10 for, you can change the ‘Sponsored Rank’ filter to be between 1 and 10 to get a pulse on the main keywords driving traffic for them via Amazon PPC.
We also include a ‘Suggested bid’ column to let you know how much you can expect to spend per click, which you could then leverage to calculate your expected monthly PPC costs (Keyword Volume * Expected CTR * Suggested bid = Monthly PPC Costs Per Keyword) and add them all up (across all of the keywords for that product) to figure out if you need to adjust your product pricing strategy to remain profitable (while still remaining competitive in terms of price).
Last thing to note in this section is the number of Sponsored ASINs. Ideally you’d find keyword opportunities that meet all of your core criteria, but also have a low level of competition in the Sponsored Ads section of Amazon Search. You can validate this by looking at the ‘Sponsored ASINs’ column within Cerebro and Magnet to get a pulse on this. If you find a handful of good keywords with a low level of competition, that means you could likely lower your cost per bid and still rank on Page 1 of Amazon Search.
Tactic #4: Find Long-Tail Keyword Opportunities
A long-tail keyword is a keyword that generally contains 3 or more words in it. Rather than going very broad with keywords that don’t accurately describe exactly what your product is (i.e. nightstand), it’s generally recommended that you find those longer tail opportunities that will also be less competitive with higher relevance (i.e. nightstand with charging station). People that are typing very broad terms into Amazon tend to be those who are simply browsing, while others looking for something very specific tend to be those who are more interested in buying within a shorter timeframe (buyer intent). Within Magnet and Cerebro, you can adjust the word count to contain 3 or more words to start honing in on those longer tail keywords.
Beyond the ‘Word Count’ filter, you can also check the ‘Word Frequency’ box (below the filter section within Cerebro and Magnet) to see how often a specific word occurs within the list of keywords that were generated to find some common themes. From here, if you find that the keyword list is still all over the place and you want to hone in on keywords that only include a specific word (i.e. nightstand, nightstands, night stand, night stands, night table, night tables, bed table, bed tables, bedstand, bedstands, bed stand, bed stands, etc.), you can apply that filter in the ‘Phrases Containing’ section. On the contrary, if there’s specific keywords you’d like to exclude because they contain irrelevant phrases or phrases you can’t compete for (i.e. an illegal drug or another company’s brand name), you can add them into the ‘Exclude Phrases Containing’ section.
Tactic #5: Find Keyword Targets That Are Low-Hanging Fruit
The quickest and easiest hack to rank well for a specific keyword is to find keywords that your competitors don’t incorporate within their product listings’ title. Within Magnet and Cerebro, you can navigate over to the ‘Title Density’ column to quickly see the number of competitors who include that specific keyword in their own title. It’s not guaranteed, but if you’re the only one with that specific keyword in the title, there’s a very strong chance your listing will skyrocket to the top 10 results for that keyword very quickly.
Keep in mind that you shouldn’t use this as the only qualifying criteria for selecting a keyword; if it passes all of the other criteria (i.e. hyper-relevant to your listing, high volume, upward trajectory of search volume growth over time, a strong number of keyword sales, etc.) but there’s 20+ competitors with that keyword in their title tag, you may still want to target it, but go into it with the expectation that it’s going to take some additional work (achieving a high sales velocity through Amazon PPC, a high number of 5 star ratings through the Amazon Vine Program, etc.) to get into the top 5-10 positions. You can also use the Cerebro Product Rank (CPR) number to further inform your strategy, which estimates the number of units you’d need to sell in order to rank for that specific keyword on Page 1 of Amazon’s search results.
Conclusion
We hope that you found these tactics useful and have begun to see the incredible value that our Magnet and Cerebro tools bring to the table! For more information on how to do Amazon keyword research like a pro, be sure to check out Bradley’s 3 part Masterclass series (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3) on the Serious Sellers Podcast!