#540 - Amazon Title Changes Are Coming: What Sellers Must Do

What you need to know about this new title change happening July 27th, including a way to edit all of your titles to the new requirements in bulk. Hello everybody and welcome to the AMM podcast. My name is Bradley Sutton and I'll be your host and this is the show where we discuss all things Amazon, Tik Tok shop, and Walmart private label and how to generate recurring revenue streams 24 hours a day during the AM and the PM. Hence the name of the show, get it? AM PM podcast. [music] And as a matter of fact, this week I'm taking eight flights in 6 days and interviewing a lot of sellers for [music] the podcast. But while I'll be on the airplanes, I'll still be making money. How cool is that? Pretty cool, [music] I think. So, in case you guys didn't know, a few weeks ago, it was announced by Amazon that there are new requirements for titles. All titles are going to be changed either by you or Amazon is going to change it with AI. And what are those changes? Well, according to the article that had come out, starting July 27th, titles in all categories except for media will need to be 75 characters or less, including spaces. And then it said item highlights provides an additional 125 characters for sharing materials or recommended use cases that help customers compare options. So, first of all, the highlight is no, titles aren't going from 200 or whatever you had to 75, per se. It's still kind of going to be 200, but it's now split into two sections. One is title, and then the other one is called item highlights. So, now the question is, how are you going to change your listings? If you only have one listing, it's going to be pretty easy to update it, right? You got five listings, 10 listings, probably won't take you that much time. But what if you have hundreds of listings or even, you know, a thousand listings or more? What are the different options uh that you have in order to change it? And what are the things to keep in mind? Let's talk about that for a second. Regardless if you have one listing or a thousand listings, we know that the title historically has been the most important part of an Amazon listing when it comes to SEO, relevancy, and uh ranking, right? Um we have a metric in Helium 10 called title density. Title density measures how many listings on page one have the searched term and exact phrase match in the title. And this is actually an indication of how easy or difficult it might be to rank for that keyword. Why? Again, because title is so important. Let's say there's a keyword with a low title density of less than three or four. Meaning that out of all the listings on page one, if the keyword is coffin shelf and that keyword has a title density of three, hey, that means only three listings have the word coffin shelf in exact phrase in all of page one. And what happens if you have title or if you have coffin shelf in your title, you're the fourth listing, you could be on page one theoretically from day one of your your launch just because of how much importance to the to the SEO algorithm is placed on the title. All right? If you're the only one with a keyword in the title, it's almost guaranteed after a couple days you're going to be on page one without even having sales for that keyword. So again, title is super important. That's why a lot of sellers were very worried about this. Hey, what's going to happen if this changes? Hey, now I only have 75 characters. I've got some pretty important keywords. So, what are the keywords that you should be putting in your title in the first place? These are the most important keywords that represent your listing. Now, first of all, the name of your product should be in the title. That's always been a requirement. And also, the brand name of the product should be in the title. That has not changed. All right. So the first part of this first 75 characters should be the the brand name and then the name of the product and then like some distinguishing uh features perhaps like the size of it or if it's a variation the color etc. Now if you want to see what Amazon's AI is going to do on July 27th or following there um for your listing watch how you can see that. go to manage inventory in your seller central and then look for the as that you want to check out. Now, interestingly, you actually need to pick to edit the oldest skew. You know, like for example, me, I've got multiple SKs per AS. You know, one is a fulfilled by merchant skew, one is a fulfilled by Amazon skew. So, look at the date of which one was the oldest. So, as you guys can see here, this FBA skew was the first one I did. uh then hit the dots on the right hand side and then hit edit listing. That's going to pull up the traditional edit listing in seller central. Now there's going to be this new button that you can see where you can preview what Amazon's changes going to be. I'm going to show you in a little bit how once if you do nothing there's there should be a page where you're going to be able to see what are the pending changes. you'll be able to see from there too. But you can literally do this even now one by one. On the left hand side of this edit uh listing button, you're going to see something that says view enhancements. Hit that button and it's going to show you how Amazon's AI is going to change the listing. Now, let me just tell you, first of all, it's not terrible. All right? It is not bad at all compared to other things that Amazon has had with AI, which you know, I'm sure those of you who have dug into it are like, uh, this leaves a little bit to be desired here. This is actually not bad as far as removing keywords and stuff. Is it perfect? No. No AI is perfect. Not even Helium 10's AI is perfect. However, it's one of the best AIs I've seen. That being said, let's break down what Amazon is doing. As you can see here, it is showing you the original title, which was Manny's Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf and Coffin Gift Box with Spooky Accessory Set, small cute goth Halloween box, 14x7 in black. All right. Now, the AI generated content, it put it down to 75 characters or less, and it says Manny's Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf. So, it got the brand name correct. It got the the the main keyword, which is the name of the product, correct, which is coffin shelf. And then it said, "And gift box, black, 15 by 8 in." All right. Um, it got the color in there because this is a variation. And it got the gift box. Now, eagle-eyed people might notice here is where sometimes Amazon's AI might kind of uh set you back a little bit. This is not a deal breaker, not terrible, but do you see how I have it in my original listing? I have the word coffin gift box there. Why do I have that? It's because coffin gift box is actually the second highest search volume and relevant keyword. This product is a coffin shelf and a coffin gift box. The Amazon did it and it called it coffin shelf and gift box. It took out the second word. Now, does this mean I'm not going to be indexed for the keyword coffin gift box? Oh, it still has coffin in the listing and gift box, but now I don't have that full like relevancy signal to Amazon that hey, in my title I have the word coffin gift box. So, in this situation, yes, my ranking, my advertising potentially could be affected a little bit. It's not, like I said, it's not like a gamecher or deal breakaker, but these are the little things that, you know, might give you pause about just blindly accepting um what Amazon says for the highlights. Uh the speaking of highlights, it says with spooky accessories set small cute goth Halloween box. So in other words, there is no individual keywords in the whole original title from Amazon or that we had in Amazon that Amazon took away. Pretty much has 100% coverage. The only small thing just on this listing by itself is the fact that it took out my coffin gift box phrase. Um probably assumed, hey, you've got coffin in there already. You don't need that, right? So, anyways, this if you do nothing at all by July 27th, then what's going to happen is or if I did nothing, this new AI rendition of my title is what's going to go live. Now, what is supposed to happen on July 27th is you are going to have 14 days to review, modify, and approve. All right? So this July se 27th deadline does not mean that hey Amazon is just overwriting all your listings on July 27th. You're going to have an additional theoretically speaking 14 days. It it could be delayed even further. I don't know. We'll see. But at least 14 days. And then what you're going to do is you're going to go to review listing changes in Amazon. And as you can see right now in my review listing changes, there is nothing here because nothing is pending. Theoretically speaking, if I don't do any changes on July 27th, this is when this review listing changes is going to populate with a bunch of the uh the AI changes that Amazon is going to do. So, you're going to want to look at this. All right. So, now the question is, what about those of you who have hundreds of listings? You're not going to go in one by one maybe and check all of all of these in this format where you have to hit the edit listing and then you got to hit the view enhancements and then you got to go one by one and look at it. That's kind of like crazy to to have to do that if you have a thousand listings. It's literally humanly impossible unless you have a team of 10 people maybe doing it around the clock on July 27th, right? So, what are some other options? Well, for those of you who are Helium 10 dime members in Helium 10, go to listing builder and at the top of the page for now, um, hit this bulk optimize button. All right, this is going to disappear probably by the end of August once all the titles have been changed. Either way, you're going to hit bulk optimize and then select all of the listings that are active that you want to have Helium 10 AI, which is using Chat JBT, um, recommended titles. All right. So, so like for example, I already went through this and I clicked a whole bunch of my active listings and then once I did that, I just hit this rewrite button. Okay? So, I hit rewrite and then now the AI gave a recommendation. Now, let's just compare the the AIs. And again, no AI is perfect. I'm sure if I were to do this on a thousand listings, I might be upset about a few of the ones that Amazon recommends. I might be upset about the a few of the ones that the chat should be inside of Helium 10 recommends. Um, that's just the nature of dealing with AI, right? But here here's here's the good thing that I like. I looked at the Manny's Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf one and take a look at what it has here. It says Manny's Mysterious Oddities Coffin Shelf Set. All right. Right. So, it's a little bit different than what Amazon had. Small black 14 by7 in. Now, here's the thing. Look at the item highlights that Helium 10 suggested. Coffin gift box, spooky accessories, cute goth Halloween box. So again, looking back at the one that Amazon made, this is almost identical to Amazon's AI, but instead of taking out the keyword phrase coffin gift box and replacing with just gift box, the Helium 10 one allows me to include in my title highlights the keyword coffin gift box. Is this going to be the difference of me getting a,000 sales versus zero? Of course not. However, this is going to uh change the relevancy if I had taken away the coffin word from that phrase. All right. So, in this sense, I would definitely go with the uh Helium 10 suggestion. Now, the other difference about the Helium 10 one is once I do that, I can select all of these once I'm happy with them and I can just with one button, I can hit sync to Amazon. What does that do? it is going to go ahead and update the item name and the item highlights to Amazon's listing. So, let me go ahead and do that just with this coffin shelf one since I checked that. Uh, let's go ahead and hit sync. And now it's syncing with Amazon. And look at that. It's synced already. Now, it's going to be too early to like actually check in the Amazon listing if it updated. It's not going to be live right now. Probably this is not these are not not going to be live until July 27th. But if you want to see if it worked, go back, you know, maybe after a couple hours after the sync and go back to product details inside of your edit listing and then look to see if it actually has item name and item highlights um active. Uh it's possible that it won't be active here and then you might need to sync again. I'm not sure. Amazon hasn't said if you're going to have to sync again on July uh 27th, but here is where that is going to be. So again, what I would recommend for those of you who've got the Helium 10 diamond plan, and if you guys don't have the Helium 10 diamond plan, you're you're looking to um uh upgrade, use the code uh SSP20. SSP20 will save you 20% off for 6 months. You can just have it for one month and do this change and then downgrade, you know, after after one month. But trust me, guys, the diamond plan has so much good stuff. I don't think you should want to uh downgrade it. But anyways, hop in here, get the diamond plan, and then run on all of your listings this AI and then analyze it. You know, if you have thousands of listings, you might not want to check everything. You might want to check a whole bunch, and then if it's pretty good, then then maybe just blindly accept uh the rest. But I if you've got the time, um I do recommend just verifying. It's all going to be on the same page here, unlike an Amazon where you have to hit edit on every single one. But what Helium 10's AI uh and shout out to Andrew Bell who helped a lot out a lot on this. He designed it and you know I gave input and the team gave input of course too was like hey we need to make sure that the uh brand name is at the beginning the the product name is right after that and as best as possible try and keep the search term phrases in phrase form that were in the original title so that we're not losing any potential relevancy or um indexing. All right. Now, what if you had titles that were not in compliance and they were over 250 characters or over 200 characters? Well, the Helium 10 AI is probably going to whittle it down and obviously you're probably going to lose some of those keywords um in there. So, that's just something to keep in mind. But again, the new title seems to be pretty strict at the max 75 for the title and max 125 for the item highlights. Now, what if you're making a brand new listing going forward? Well, you will notice in the regular Helium 10 listing builder, um you now have the item name and item highlight. And so once you hit the start AI workflow, uh you'll be able to create your listing and it is going to automatically populate the item name and item highlight from scratch. You know, the other tool is a bulk tool that again probably will go away at the end of August because it'll be irrelevant. And then going forward, whenever you create a brand new listing, you are can enter in the item name, which is like the the new title and the item highlights directly from here. And and we're designing it to be again for best practices for the Amazon algorithm. And like I said before, if we do test and it shows that relevancy has drastically changed based on what's in the the top part versus the highlights, then of course we're going to make changes to our algorithms and our AIS. So that when we create the listing with AI, it'll keep that in mind and you'll be rewarded with a higher listing score based on where you have the phrases. uh if there's any change at all and even now I would assume that the first item name or item title is going to be the most relevant part those first 75 characters and and actually that's kind of like how it is now not your your whole title is not treated equally like if you have the word coffin shelf at the very very beginning of your title that is not the same as having coffin shelf as the last two words of the title Amazon does not give it the same amount of importance so theoretic ically speaking, that's going to be the experience. And so again, there's no difference, you know, like if that's the same. Now, what is going to be weird is if if like the difference in having at the beginning of the item name versus having it at the end of the highlights, is that going to be some drastic bigger difference for relevancy in the future? Time will tell. We'll do those experiments so that you guys don't have to worry about that. You'll just be able to uh create the listing based on what we already found out for you. All right, so let's recap this. July 27th, Amazon is going to switch to this new format. Basically, this new format is going to have item name, which is the title, max 75 characters. It is supposed to have your uh brand name followed by the product name, and then distinguishing features, especially if it's a variation such as color, pack size, etc. And you can actually have some some additional keywords there if it fits in the 75. And then now the rest of the title is going to be in the item highlights. And the item highlights are other distinguishable features and use cases of your product. Again, same thing as like your title right now. How this is going to look, we'll see. You know, I've seen some some pictures floating around, but um should be the item title is going to be in bigger letters and the item highlights in smaller letters. Uh that's how it's supposed to look on mobile, how it look on desktop. uh we will see if it's a similar uh experience but theoretically now there's not going to be truncation where now you're going to be able to even in the search results see the entire uh title on that date July 27th it's not going to switch over automatically if you do nothing on July 27th Amazon is going to like put you in this kind of like countdown where it will switch your titles over to this new format based on their own AI recommendation and you're going to have 14 days to review it and be able to say yes, you'll accept it or no. Otherwise, it'll just go through. Now, if you before July 27th uh or at any time want to see what Amazon's AI is going to do, go to edit listing in your manage inventory in seller central, hit the view enhancements and then see the before and after titles. If you want to do this in bulk, uh it's recommended that you use the Helium 10 listing builder bulk tool. Just go into Helium 10 listing builder. If you have a diamond plan, you'll be able to do all of your listings right there with the click of a button. See the Helium 10 recommended title and item highlights that's designed to try and keep all of your keyword phrases that were in your original title. And then you can actually sync it directly from Helium 10 into your Amazon listing. And then going forward, uh, you'll be able to create new listings in listing builder or in seller central and just type directly into those two fields. Just make sure you stick to these new guidelines of 75 characters for the title, 125 max for the item highlights. Usually, it's best practice to fill those up. Unless you're in a category or niche where the the most the the best listings have shorter, you know, titles potentially, then that's probably the way you should go. Now, if you guys remember about 10 minutes ago, I actually hit sync on listing builder. I had said that you have to wait a couple hours. Take a look, guys. I just refreshed the screen. Do you remember uh what Helium 10's suggested new title was? Well, it actually already updated the Helium 10 suggestions. And you could see it's like in this pending form right here in in this letters. It's not visible uh yet on the listing. I don't think it is at least. Uh but you can see that the Helium 10 Sync worked. And this was only like 15 minutes later. So it looks like once you hit the Helium 10 sync, if you want to make sure it went through, just wait 15 minutes, 30 minutes, refresh your edit listing page and then look in the box uh above the item highlights and item name and you'll see what is theoretically going to go live on July 27th. I'm sure you guys might have some other questions uh about this. Put it uh in in the comments below or reach out to Helium 10 customer service and the team would be happy to help you out. My last advice is don't worry too much about this, guys. The worst case scenario, you do nothing and you allow Amazon's AI to change everything. Yes, you might lose some keywords, but it's not going to be the end of the world. For now, we need to just go off of Amazon's word and and and that advertising and relevancy and indexing and searchability is not going to change at all if you don't change your title, if you're just splitting into the two. Uh, so time will tell, but nothing to like lose sleep over. um right now. Uh I'm sure Amazon has done a lot of testing on this and they're they're ready to go. So, uh guys, uh wish you the best of success in this new Amazon title world that we are living in and it's going to be exciting to see um how this, if at all, changes, uh Amazon ranking and stuff like that. I'm sure we'll have some other updates on like the weekly buzz in the future for this. So, make sure to stay tuned to AM PM podcast. All right, guys. Thank you very much and see you in the next episode.