
Ecom Podcast
#699 - Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass
Summary
"Unlock the power of AI-enhanced keyword research with Helium 10's latest strategies, potentially boosting your Amazon listing sales by revamping your keyword approach for 2025, and learn how the misunderstood 'Rufus' tool can significantly impact your bottom line."
Full Content
#699 - Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass
Speaker 1:
It's time for another Bali Blast episode. That's where I give you the most comprehensive keyword research strategies for Amazon listings in 2025 and beyond. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.
Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I'm your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that's a completely BS-free,
unscripted and unrehearsed, organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. Now, this is an episode that I do once every other year and we call it the Bali Blast episode.
The first time I did this episode, I was recording in Bali and I wanted to come up with some unique name for SEO purposes so that somebody could just write in YouTube or somewhere,
Helium 10, Bali Blast, and then obviously only this video would show up. I'm not in Bali right now, but I am in Indonesia. I'm actually in Jakarta, Indonesia.
I'm still going to call this the Bali Blast episode so that you guys can find this and bookmark it later. But basically what this is, is a deep, deep,
deep dive into every aspect of what you should be doing for keyword research for a new listing or perhaps to like refresh a listing. Now, the Maldives Honeymoon episode, which is right after this, it's kind of like part of this.
Back in the day, I used to do like two Maldives Honeymoons episodes and one was just about keyword research, kind of like the prep.
This is about the prep for launch but just from a keyword research angle and all the steps that you have to take. Now, the Maldives is every year because things with launch are changing all the time.
I don't do this one every year because keyword research for the most part stays very similar. There's not too many new things.
There are new things that we have to do this year and there's new things we're going to talk about like Rufus and stuff. I was like, hey, it's time to do a new one.
You probably won't see one for another couple of years unless a whole bunch of things changes from now until next year. So anyways, we're going to talk about two main aspects here. First,
there's going to be some stuff you've never heard before that might prove to you that people have been lying to you about Rufus. Now, I say that just for clicks and drama. I don't think anybody really lies to people.
There's people who might be misguided or people might be interpreting what they say. Nobody's purposely giving you misinformation, I don't think, on Rufus. But what I mean to say is the narratives that you guys are operating under,
I think you might look at them differently once you see about Rufus, what I'm going to show today. So we're going to talk about how AI has changed keyword research, if at all, how people are using Rufus.
I'm going to show you some staggering numbers. And also we're going to talk about All the different ways on Amazon, off Amazon with Helium 10,
without Helium 10 that you should be doing keyword research and how much money it can mean to your bottom line just by changing a couple things here and there. All right, so let's go ahead and hop into it.
If you want to watch the Serious Sellers Podcast in video form, make sure to go to YouTube and check out our brand new YouTube channel. Just type in the search bar Helium 10 Serious Sellers Podcast and you'll see our S logo come up.
Make sure to hit that subscribe button, go to the channel and binge watch any of our episodes that we have done lately. We'll see you there. Now, the first one I did, like I said, was in Bali a couple years ago.
I was doing this cool event and I broke away from the event to do it. Tomorrow, I'm actually doing an event here in Jakarta, breaking away from that here at 4.20 in the morning to record this.
Now, the first question we want to talk about is, does keyword research even matter? Because this is one of those narratives that you might have heard out there like, oh, no, you just have to optimize for AI. Oh, no.
AI is the way that people are going to shop on Amazon. Rufus is the way. Isn't everybody shopping with Rufus? Who needs keywords anymore? But is that true?
I'm going to talk about some things I've been talking about on the speaker circuit the last few months. I know not everybody gets to see me out there, so you might have missed my presentation,
so I'm just going to rehash a little bit of this, but how things show up in SEO, how keywords get indexed, how AI changes things. This is not new. It's definitely not from Rufus as far as when it started.
There's an episode that we did, episode 499. We're now in episode 699. This episode was about two years ago or more than two years ago where we were interviewing somebody talking about a noodle camera.
There was no such thing as a noodle camera. We talked about that episode. There are no products on Amazon that have the word noodle camera in it. However, there are results when you search up noodle camera.
What it is is like a stethoscope camera that kind of actually resembles a noodle. Even two years ago, that was just when we caught it. It could have been even before then.
Amazon was kind of like making you index for keywords based on its own AI of learning how people could potentially describe a product even though the product didn't have those keywords in there.
So this is like, you know, not something completely new. Now, another example here is a winter coat. Somebody pointed out that one of the page one position one in the Amazon search results a while back for winter coats,
actually this year, is an Amazon Essentials winter coat. Now, what's notable about that is that the word winter coat does not appear anywhere in this listing. So what we did, I actually looked at what's called the AJAX URL.
It's like a special URL to be able to analyze both the front and back end. Sure enough, the word winter does not appear anywhere in this listing, but this listing is page one, position one.
At the time, you know, I had originally grabbed this screenshot for the word winter coat. And then if I run it through Helium 10 index checker, sure enough, it's absolutely indexed for the word winter coat. Now, here's the interesting thing.
In Helium 10's keyword tracker, no other tool has this. Whatever other tool you're using, you're only going to get keyword tracking from when it started. Here, I threw this word winter coat in this listing in Helium 10.
I found that this keyword did not start ranking for the word winter coat until October of 2020. However, if you look at the BSR history, the product has been around since at least 2019. So, one point is that, hey,
Does Amazon eventually figure out what a product is for and thus will index you and make you searchable through AI or for whatever other means? For keywords,
not in your listing because it understands kind of like semantically what your product might be for and how users are going to buy it. No, this is not new. This has been around for more than six, seven years. All right. And Amazon can do it.
However, do you want to wait one year, six months, whatever the case is for Amazon to figure it out? No. Like if winter coat is an important keyword for your listing,
put the freaking word winter coat in your listing so you can be indexed from day one. All right. So this is one misconception out there is, hey, let me just like talk about what my product can do and let me let Amazon fill in the blanks.
Sure. Amazon's going to fill in the blanks. After a week, after a month, after a year, like why do you want to like, it doesn't make any sense. Why would you want to wait to be indexed or searchable for keyword?
If it's important to you, be searchable from day one. How do you do that? By putting it into your listing. Let me, let me show you how I prove this point. What I did with that very winter coat listing,
I made a completely identical listing on the Project X account and I did not include the word winter coat in it. Day one of this listing, was I indexable for coat? Sure. Was I indexable for winter coat? Nope. Why not?
Because I didn't have the word winter in my listing. So the Amazon one didn't have winter, but it was indexed because Amazon eventually figured out that, hey, by the way that people are buying this product, it probably is a winter coat.
So this still is the case, even this year. Most of the time from day one, if you do not put a keyword in your listing, you are not searchable. What did I do?
I went back to that listing, added the word winter somewhere in like the bullet points, updated the listing, ran index checker, boom goes dynamite. I was indexed for the word winter coat.
So the traditional keyword research and indexing still works pretty much the same way. Don't wait to be indexed for something. If it's important, be indexed for it right away.
And again, I always have to give this disclaimer because then people say, oh, why are you anti-Rufus? I'm anti-Rufus in that I don't use it as a buyer much because I don't like it. There are some things I do like it,
like being able to look at price charts if I don't have Helium 10 handy or being able to set alerts and stuff like that. Rufus is pretty cool. But for like searching, yeah, I don't like Rufus.
But again, I am not anti-Rufus from an Amazon seller standpoint. You absolutely should be optimizing for Rufus. My point that I'm going to make here is it should not affect what you're doing for keyword research. How do I optimize for Rufus?
What I do is I look at the questions that are showing up on my listing and I make sure my product has a good answer to it. Here's one example I'm showing on the page where it says how steady and durable and the first time my coffin shelf,
it says, oh, I'm sorry, product description doesn't mention durability. What did I do to optimize for Rufus? I added, hey, this is made of MDF wood, so it's very durable.
Fifteen minutes later, what did Rufus say when I asked the same question? Oh, the description says it is sturdy and durable, right? So like that's a very actionable thing you can do for Rufus. It's something that I literally do.
So I am not saying, oh, disregard Rufus altogether. Absolutely, be optimizing your listing for Rufus, but this should not be in place of your keyword research. This to me is kind of like what we've always been doing for 10 years,
analyzing reviews, trying to get customer pain points, making sure that customer reviews or customer questions are answered on our listing. Rufus is just another way to do that. Absolutely, you need to be doing that.
Now, I have some theories about Rufus because Amazon hasn't really given out a lot of exact data about Rufus. We don't know how customers are using it.
There's no search query performance for Rufus where we can see the number of times people are answering queries or how people are using Rufus. We have no idea. My theory has always been, hey, People might be using it similar to how I use it.
They don't use it too much in search, which is my theory, which I don't. I figured that, hey, they're probably using it, those who are, and I don't think it's that many people.
They're probably using it on the actual product page itself because it can do some pretty cool things like, hey, analyze the reviews. Give me a summary of the reviews.
Let me ask follow-up questions about this product so I don't have to read the whole thing. What is the price history of this product? These are all things you couldn't have done before as a buyer, and now you can.
So my theory was, okay, that's how people are using Rufus. So months ago, I ran a Helium 10 audience or PICFU survey, 50 prime members, and that's some overarching survey, but I'm like, hey, did you guys, do you use Rufus? 76% said no.
8% said they use it with searching. Now it's actually a significant amount. 8% is pretty, pretty decent, but 16% sure enough said they're using it on the product page itself.
So not many people using it, but the ones who were using it in that small, small survey was on the product page itself. So again, kind of showing you This is not about SEO. Now, one of the ways that I was tracking before,
I'm going to show you that it's not possible now, how was I tracking if people were using Rufus in search? Well, before, if you type in a question or you hit one of the auto questions in the search results,
At the end of Amazon's long explanation, they would give you four or five keywords and if you hit it, it would actually bring you to a search. Before that, here's the one that's so hilarious where I used to make fun of Rufus.
Asking questions that are commonly asked. Because it says here, are coffin shelves suitable for displaying memorabilia or keepsakes? Right? Come on. Do you think my target market of Gothic people are searching for that? No.
The people who are searching for the, you know, coffin shelves have like, you know, black makeup and eyeliner and nose rings or I don't know, I'm stereotyping here. But you get the drift, right? They're not typing that.
Now, The funny thing is if I did type it in those days, what would come up is a few different keywords and each of these keywords would actually take you to an Amazon search. This is not a Rufus search.
It would literally put the keyword into the search bar. And so in this way, I could tell that almost nobody was using Rufus in the search and clicking this because, for example, on these keywords that it would come up with,
my products would be at the top of the search results, but there would be zero impressions for it in search query performance unless I did it. Search query performance would show me that hey, nobody's searching for this. Guess what guys?
Amazon figured that out. The last time I had done this was like four or five months ago. If you type right now, coffin shelf, and hit Rufus, it's funny.
It's still saying, do you want to do something for memorabilia or keepsakes, which again, nobody's asking. I don't know why it has that, but now it actually shows products.
At the end of it, because it realized, hey, nobody's even searching these other keywords that we're doing. So again, Rufus, not for SEO, not for people are not using it necessarily too much in the search bar experience.
So the question is, has it changed at all? How people search, because this is important. I think in the future, it's going to be used more and more as it gets refined. And guess what? I think it will change the way that people search.
Now, my theory is more, I think discovery commerce, if that's what we call it, or discovery purchasing is going to happen more.
All directly on Amazon as opposed to chat GPT or Google where people don't know what they want and they're going to start having conversations with chat GPT or Google trying to research something and then figure out what they want and then search.
That's kind of like what's going on now, but in the future of Rufus gets better. I think. ChatGPT, Google is skipped. Somebody is going to do their research right in Rufus. But anyways, I digress. That's just my theory. I have no proof of that.
But do we have documented facts of if buyer behavior has changed because of Rufus? I had our team who did a deep dive into thousands and thousands of keywords that we have in our search query performance database.
The search query performance database is directly from Amazon. This is not Helium 10 estimations or anything. We took the search data directly from Amazon. And the first thing we're checking, all right, has search volume changed?
Why would I look at that? Well, search volume is only in search performance is only if somebody types out a keyword and presses enter, okay? If somebody goes to Amazon and is just going directly to Rufus to search, what should we see?
If there's a drastic change in search, the search volume is going to go way down. So we analyzed thousands of keywords that we have at least 18 continuous months.
Unfortunately, there's not much, you know, we can't go back further from Amazon's API. And interestingly enough, search volume has actually increased.
It's almost stayed the same, but if we're going to say something different, it's increased 1.4%. And you could see this chart here, month over month, it's either up only it was down one month or one month down by point or negative 2%.
All right. Search volume 2024 versus 2025 has been almost identical. Okay. So first of all, maybe if there was a such thing as search query performance years ago, perhaps we would see that search volumes increasing every year.
We're not sure because we can only see data from 2024. But the point is, hey, if 100,000 people were searching your product last year, guess what? 101,000 people are searching it this year. The same amount of people.
So should you have taken away focus from keyword research and shifted it to Rufus? Absolutely not. The same amount of people are searching your product today than last year before Rufus existed,
which was July of 2024 is when it had its big rollout. So again, you still have got to be doing the same stuff. You just add on the Rufus research. Okay. What's the second thing I checked? The number of clicks. Now, why would I check this?
All right. Let's say there's a search volume, right? When is a click registered in search query performance? It's if somebody clicks on a sponsored product ad or an organic placement without interacting.
As soon as they hit a sponsored brand ad, there's no click. That click is not registered. If they hit one of the filters, now it's not registered. Does that make sense? I wanted to see, hey, my theory is that no, clicks are not affected too,
too much because I don't think that people are hitting Rufus. Like if people hit Rufus in after the search, now that's not, there's no more clicks. The clicks are not going to be counted. All right.
So again, my theory was, no, I don't think clicks have been changed too much. What did the data show? Clicks are actually up. All right, so the click-through rate is up. That was kind of interesting to me.
The search volume was only up like 1%, but clicks are up over 5%. But again, the main point being when July 2024 happened,
there was not some big shift in the number of clicks that would happen that you would think would happen if all of a sudden people are not clicking products anymore after the search. Instead, they're going to Rufus.
So again, more data that we have that no, In the search experience, people are not using Rufus that much. The number of clicks compared to search volume is kind of like the click-through rate, all right?
Now, interestingly, it's not the same pattern as we saw with the clicks. The clicks were going up. Click-through rate has also gone up a little bit, but you'll notice, I don't know,
I might be just looking into things, but in July of 2024, click rate did go down. So to me, I think people were experimenting that July. Maybe I could be wrong. And when I say it went down, I'm talking like literally 2%. Okay.
So, so this is not like some drastic decrease, but it's interesting that when Rufus came on in July 24, the click through rate went down as if people were like, Ooh, what's this showing up.
But then what happened the very next month, it shot back up 3%. So my theory is that people are playing around with it. That's what I did in July when I had Rufus. I was like, let me play around with it.
As a buyer, I'm like, oh, this kind of sucks. I'm not going to use this anymore. And that seems to be what happened here. Now, maybe I'm drawing too much from that, but you can clearly see from the data that there was a dip in 2024,
July, but then it kind of went back up and started slowly declining. But the main point is not a huge, huge difference with the click-through rate percentage going on after Rufus.
Now, one of the most important ones is conversion rate because remember, like I said, In my opinion, if things are happening that are different with Rufus due to search, it would be or not due to search or just with Rufus at all,
it would be on the product page because there are some pretty cool things that Rufus does on the product page. So has that been happening? Ava on my team as a data scientist was actually like,
I don't know if I want you to show this information because it looks like The numbers from Amazon are a little bit wonky, so I'm going to show you the numbers as is. I told her to just show it to me.
You're going to see some strange stuff here, but you're going to see something fascinating, in my opinion at least, to kind of prove what I had been theorizing on for months.
First of all, the weird data that you see is in 2024 January, it said there was a 37% conversion rate, all right, which is kind of crazy. But in February, it went down to 21%. But anyways, after that, the data kind of normalized.
But when did Rufus come on? July 2024. Look at this graph, guys. What happened from June to July of 2024 with the conversion rate? It dropped pretty significantly.
And again, when I say significantly, I'm talking like, like what, 10% here or something like that, right? 10 percentage points from what was it? 28, 25% to 15%. Okay. So that's interesting. Why is that interesting?
Because that might show that, Hey, people are still searching. People are still clicking, but when they get to the page, now they're having fun playing with Rufus, getting the price history, getting the reviews, et cetera, et cetera.
But the point again is that That's not search and there's not much you can control about that. But what happens when somebody interacts with that is now those conversions are no longer counted.
They might end up still buying the product, but now you're not going to see it in search grade performance. And remember that was from like June of 2024 to July of 2024 when Rufus came on. We have data from this year.
June to July, and it wasn't like Rufus went away or came back or anything. And look what happened from June to July this year. It was almost steady. So again, another kind of proof that, hey, you know what,
people are playing around with Rufus on the product pages. So again, to button this up. Rufus is being used by customers. We don't know exactly what it's being used for,
but we have data that shows it's not being used too much to replace search. It's not being used too much in search results, but probably it's being used substantially on product pages itself,
which means you probably don't need to change how you're trying to show up in Amazon search results. Now, more proof that traditional keyword research is still king.
Here's an example from search query performance in an actual account we did. I saw this keyword CBD roll on. This is for a hemp pain cream. It had 3 purchases and I had a better conversion rate on this keyword than the market.
So I'm like alright what were my impressions like? My impressions were 1,414 out of 3,700 search volume meaning less than half of the time I was showing up at the top. So what strategy I used is just one keyword I'm talking about.
What I did was I was like, let me increase my sponsored brand or my sponsored product bid on this so I can show up at the top of the page. Okay. And now my impressions went to 4,800 out of 3,800 search volume.
The search volume stayed identical almost compared to this other time period. But now I was showing up more than once at the top of the page in the search results. And my purchases increased 300%.
It went from three to 10. All right, that's just one keyword doing traditional keyword research, looking at the keyword data from search performance that I wasn't paying too much attention to.
And by optimizing my ads for increased my purchases 300%. Does that sound like something that's worth your while to do one keyword? Can you do that to 10 keywords, 30 keywords?
Guys, every keyword is not going to bring you a million dollars worth of sales. This 300%, it's still only represented seven extra sales in a two-week period. But guys, these things add up. Two sales here, five sales here.
If you are missing keywords and not doing all of the keyword research that you can, and I'll be blunt, like if you're not using Helium 10, You are leaving hundreds if not thousands of dollars on the table.
You might think whatever tool you're using, oh, this is so good and I'm getting all the best keywords. You're not because it doesn't have, they don't have the kind of data that Helium 10 has, all right?
And that's why this is so important, keyword research, that you're not just like forgetting about it for Rufus and you're not using other inferior data points. That's not going to get you all the keywords.
Now something at the time I'm recording this was not ready yet, but a lot of this stuff that I'm going to be showing you in all these slides is going to be done in one tool, which is Listing Builder.
By the time you're watching this or by the end of September, Listing Builder is going to have all of these keyword research strategies built into it. So you just click one button, it's all there,
and it's going to show you the source of brand analytics and search career performance and historical keywords, and it's going to help you understand like how many times a keyword came up on one of these data sources.
So you're like, Oh shoot, it came up in all seven of these situations. This is obviously a very important keyword. So it gives you a level of understanding on these keywords that nothing else out there has.
And so Be looking forward to that, that you're not going to have to do it one by one like I'm about to show you. But if those of you have the diamond plan and listing builder, you're going to be able to do this in one fell swoop.
But in the meantime, and for those of you who just like to do it and have a little bit more control over it, here is a list in no particular order of all the ways to do keyword research. Identify the niche's top keywords.
You use Cerebro for this. Super easy. There's a button on the top of the screen that says top keywords. Hit that button. If you put in a seed ASIN plus at least like 5 to 10 other ASINs of the top ones, Hit one button, boom goes the dynamite.
You have got tens or even a hundred of the top keywords because it's showing where most of those competitors that you put in are all ranking for. So that's the easiest one. Hit one button. Another one is a one-button filter.
If you have a seed ASIN plus like five to ten other ASINs, hit the button that says Opportunity Keywords. These are keywords where only one or two of the products are ranking in the top ten and the others aren't even ranking at all.
Or at least not ranking on page one. This we call opportunity because it means that probably you're going to have a little bit easier track to page one because you're not going against all of your competitors. Step number three.
This is something you can only do in Helium 10. Do the brand analytics keywords, guys. This is like search query performance, except for your competitors. So put your ASIN, if you have an ASIN that's similar to the one you're doing,
or if you're just optimizing your own ASIN, plus like five, 10 of your top competitors, run it and run it through multiple weeks. Don't do the months, do weeks, put like 10 weeks, 12 weeks, whatever, so that we are checking,
number one, anywhere or any of these products were one of the top three clicked. That might give you a list that's a little bit too big. If you're looking for something super actionable, there is a advanced filter in the brand analytics.
This is again in black box where it says conversion share, select inputted ASINs, and then greater than 1%. What does that mean? This is Amazon telling you, hey, these products actually got sales from these keywords in this week.
That's what that is. People don't realize that. They're like, oh, search query performance, I can only see what I'm doing. In brand analytics, you can see what any competitor has done. If they were one of the top three clicked,
and now the reason why this is important is half the keywords that a product is one of the top three clicked for, it might have not even gotten a sale that whole week. So is it really that valuable?
You know, it's kind of debatable, but if they got a sale for the keyword, that means their conversion share is at least 1%. That's a pretty good keyword if they got a sale from it.
Helium 10 is the only tool that can do this black box brand analytics. This is going to get you a gold mine of keywords. Next, let's just completely switch gears. Check off Amazon keywords, especially when there's not much Amazon history.
Like if nobody has this product on Amazon or like only one seller who kind of sucks and you're like, I don't even know where I can find keywords. Check if the listing is on Etsy.
If the product is on Etsy, find a good seller and then go to the bottom and look at the explore related searches bar. That's actually like the back end search terms of an Etsy listing.
That is an Etsy seller and that is a prompt like where they get those keywords. They are putting what their top keywords are and Etsy is exposing that to the public.
So whatever the seller thinks is the top keywords based on their own research or their own advertising data or whatever. They're actually showing you what that is so you can just get some good keyword ideas on there.
Step number five, find the historical keywords. You can only do this with Helium 10 guys. What I like to do is, hey, let me find a couple of months where there was a big increase in sales and then let me go to that month in history.
This is important especially for seasonal products or any other product. Christmas products or Valentine's Day products. Right now that I'm recording this, it's September. Am I going to be able to use a reverse ASIN tool,
Cerebro or any other tool out there that is going to be able to tell me what are the best converting keywords for Valentine's Day for a Valentine's Day product? Probably not.
But I just look what was a top selling Valentine's Day product in February of 2025,
February of 2024 and I take a time machine using Cerebro by hitting the historical trends button and now I'm going to go and see what all the keywords they were ranking for and advertising for in whatever month I am looking at.
You're only going to get this in Helium 10.
There are keywords that can get you sales that maybe you would never even put in your listing because you are doing your keyword research using other tools or even Helium 10 because you don't know how to use this historical trends feature where you're using these functions that are only looking at where the product is ranking at now.
But where the product is ranking in September, guys, it's not the same exact keywords of where they're getting sales from in March or in April or in June of 2023. But guess what? You can do that research in Helium 10.
Number six, use the best search query performance keywords. So the way to do that, go to Helium 10 search query analyzer tool. Again, use the month one, not the week one, but check multiple months.
Don't just look at one month, look at 12 months, look at 15 months, look at multiple products. Now this is if you have a product that you're launching that's very similar to another one,
or if you're just like doing research on your own product, you're trying to reoptimize your listing. This is, you know, if you've never sold a coffin shelf, you're not going to be able to use search query performance with this. All right.
Hope that makes sense. But anyways, select like 10, 12, 15 months in a row, right there in search query performance. And then what you can do is the advanced filter. There's one for my purchases, put minimum one.
And now instantly, like, I can't believe this. Here's a bat shaped bath mat that I've been selling. There's 94 different keywords that I have gotten sales from and I barely got sales on this product at all.
And some of these keywords are kind of like off the wall, like gothic shower curtain. What in the actual heck? How in the world am I getting sales on a bath mat with gothic shower curtain? Well, guess what?
People are searching gothic shower curtain. They're like, hey, this back shaped bath mat will look good next to my gothic shower curtain. Let me go ahead and purchase this. And so now I know that that's relevant, right?
Search, create performance, a great way to get keywords. Make sure you are doing it. Step number seven, you can reverse engineer your competitor PPC or ad strategy. One way you can do that is by running Cerebro on their listing.
First of all, if they show that there's only maybe 10 or 15 keywords that they have been detected in sponsored ads,
you know their entire PPC strategy because it means they're only doing an exact manual campaign and those are the keywords they're targeting. They're obviously not running an auto broader phrase.
Otherwise, there'd be hundreds of keywords that should be showing up. But even if they do have hundreds of keywords showing up in their advertising,
use the Helium 10 filter to say, hey, show me where they're showing up in the top five or top 10 results. So now I know, hey, they're bidding high on top of search. They're bidding to be on page one.
If they're consistently showing up on page one in sponsored ads, they got to be keeping that bid pretty high. And if they're keeping that bid high, what? They must be getting some data that says, hey,
I'm getting sales from these keywords at good A costs and profitable, so I'm going to keep them. So again, use Helium 10 to look at where they're advertising for and sometimes another filter I like to use is,
hey, show me where at least five of my competitors are all advertising for it. Now, here's the thing. If you're using other tools out there, they're only checking two pages of search results.
You're not going to see what is going to happen on page 3, 4, 5, 6 or 7. But what if like all six of your competitors are all advertising? If you're on a certain, they're all showing up,
but maybe they're all on page three or most of them are on page three. You're not even going to know that if you're using, if you're not using Helium 10 because only Helium 10 is checking all the pages of the search results.
So you know what is happening in advertising. So again, look at your competitor PPC strategy, get those keywords that they're bidding top of search, and then find other keywords that everybody seems to be showing up for in advertising.
Find where they're sending traffic with us. Find where they're using sponsored video ads too. You can do that in Helium 10. Next thing, let's go off of Helium 10. Number eight, find the keywords in Product Opportunity Explorer.
A lot of products out there have a niche in it. And in that niche, in Product Opportunity Explorer in Amazon, you're going to be able to see all the keywords that go to that niche.
98% of them you would have already found in Helium 10, but for those who don't have Helium 10,
this is a great way to get started and to maybe find one or two keywords that you might not have found in the other traditional ways that you are looking, and it kind of shows you what keywords make up a niche.
So again, Product Opportunity Explorer, that is free for all Amazon sellers to have. Number nine, expand out your cerebral search to see, hey, where is any competitor in the top two, three, or four pages?
Once again, if you're not using Helium 10, you're only going to see two pages of search results, only up to like rank 100. Helium 10 will show you all pages of search results.
So whether you want to say, hey, show me where they're in the top 150, they're in the top 200, they're in the top 250, that is what's going to help you round out your keyword research. Are these going to be your top keywords?
If a whole bunch of competitors are on page three, probably not. But do you want to look into it so you can see like, what are people indexed for? What are people searchable for? I should at least be searchable for it. Why not?
It's a good thing to do. So make sure to expand out your search in Cerebro as well. Another exclusive thing in Helium 10, Amazon recommended.
This is Helium 10's exclusive connection to Amazon's relevancy engine where Amazon is saying what keywords it thinks is most relevant to a product. What I like to do is I like to run my competitors there and say, hey,
Are there any commonalities where Amazon thinks X keyword is like in the top 30 or in the top 40 for most relevant keywords but across multiple products? That's probably a good sign. It's an important keyword for me. Why?
Number one, it's what Amazon thinks, but two, we're talking the Amazon algorithm here. If you can have some of those keywords in phrase form that Amazon thinks your other products are,
now For a new listing, if you set up your product with some of those keywords, now Amazon, without much data, it's going to relate your product a little bit more to those existing products. And it helps you with your advertising.
It helps you with your searchability and your eventual ranking. So do a little bit of research in Cerebro by playing with the filters of Amazon recommended rank.
Number 11, use Helium 10 Magnet to get long tail keywords of the top 10 phrase roots. That's a mouthful. But let's say I'm doing a coffin letter board, right?
And I've got a lot of keywords that start with coffin letter, like coffin letter board, coffin letter sign, you know, coffin letter numbers or whatever. So, what I can do is I can put coffin letter or even just coffin and magnet,
and then I'm going to filter out smart complete. So, I can see the long tail versions of other keywords, whether they're related or unrelated, that have that root keyword coffin letter somewhere in it,
because that's going to help me round out My keyword research, I might want to throw some of those individual keywords in there, right? I don't have to put all those phrases in. I've got coffin letter board.
That means I have coffin and letter. So if all of a sudden coffin letter neon shows up, all I have to do is put neon to be indexable for coffin letter neon. So again, this is something that helps me round out my keyword research.
It's not something that's going to get me hundreds of sales, but it helps me to be indexable or searchable for more variations of some of my main parts of my main keywords.
Number 12, get the top keywords from the top frequently bought together products. I like doing this. I've been talking about frequently bought together for seven years now. It's not just for bundling.
It's not just for looking at potential product targeting ASIN, but it also helps you To be related to these products that Amazon is telling you, people are buying in the same purchase.
I ran a coffin letter board and I saw people are buying these bat shaped stickers at the same time as a coffin letter board, like literally in the same shopping cart. They could be from two different sellers.
But now what I want to do is I want to be searchable for like the top two or three keywords that people are using for the bat shaped stickers because first of all, if I start targeting that in PPC, I'm going to start showing up right away.
Amazon is going to relate my product and then who knows,
like I'm going to have a little bit more synergy with some of these listings for when people see different ads on product targeting or when they get suggested from Amazon different products.
I'm going to start showing up in these scenarios because Amazon is going to relate my product a little bit more to the others because I'm going to be searchable for its main keywords where probably my competitors are not putting the keyword bat-shaped sticker in their coffin letter board listing because they're like,
well, what does my product have to do with a bat-shaped sticker? No. So I'm going to be the only one with that keyword in my listing. It's going to make it a lot easier for me to get some complimentary sales from that product.
Last one for keyword research, and I know I'm probably missing a couple things here, but this covers like 95% of the important stuff.
Last thing is if you've got more than 10 relevant Spanish keywords, Cerebro is going to find you those Spanish keywords. Check the translation to see if they're in phrase form. So change the Amazon to like Spanish if you're in the USA,
and then look at those keywords that Cerebro came up with. That are Spanish that seem to be good and make sure it was translated correctly. If not, you can open up a case to Amazon and say, Hey, can you change my translation?
Because this keyword that is what most Spanish speaking people use as the data shows. It is not showing up in my listing when the auto-translate is selected. The other thing you can do is try and put it into one of the back-end search terms,
which is called generic keywords, but eight times out of ten nowadays, generic keyword section is not even indexing if it's nowhere else in your listing.
So your best bet for the Spanish keywords is to make sure that it's in the auto-translation and trying to get Amazon to change it, if not. Now, after you do that,
I can probably spend a whole other episode talking about writing your listing with Listing Builder because it's a matter of SEO, which Helium 10 is going to help you with that. We have a scoring system.
We have AI that can write the listing for you to optimize your keywords. It's about making sure your most important keywords, the ones that hit multiple ones for multiple competitors and multiple data points,
like, hey, this keyword was in brand analytics and was in search query performance. It was in top keywords. It was in advertising. That's like a, probably an important keyword.
Those important ones you got to get in phrase form and then individual keywords round out. So you can be searchable.
Remember you have to be, have the individual keywords in your listing to have the best chance at being searchable from day one. I showed you that example about the winter coat, but then it can not be just some keyword stuff listing.
That's not good. If you're trying to optimize for Rufus, it's not good. If you're trying to optimize for a customer, no, You have to speak to your customers wants and needs and pain points and questions.
You've got to be optimized for Amazon's AI systems. All right. Don't just think SEO. Think about your customer. How are they going to use your product? What are the use cases? What fears does it solve? What problems does it solve? All right?
Make sure that's how you write your listing. That's a very over-generalized statement, but at the end of the day, the key point is while keywords are important, that's only 50% of your listing.
The other 50% is you have to be speaking to your consumer's emotions to get them to purchase your product. All right, guys, there you have it. We just did a deep dive into how Rufus has changed very slightly,
the search experience and what people are using for it. Why keywords are still important in 2025. And we talked about a 14 step way that you can get keywords for your listing,
like five or six of those steps you can only do in Helium 10, guys. And remember, each keyword you do not have is money off of the table. So don't think, hey, I'm not going to use a keyword research tool anymore.
I'm only going to use Product Opportunity Be fine with my 20 keywords that it finds. Nope, that's not gonna win it for you. Hey, I'm gonna use this other tool instead of Helium 10. They've got good keywords.
I'm sure they do, but do they have all the good keywords? Do they have brand analytics? Do they have historical Cerebro? They don't, all right? So this is super important, guys.
Make sure you are using Helium 10 to get all these keywords and to write a great listing. I wish you the best, and if you don't have Helium 10, Use the discount code SSP20. Save 20% for the next six months. Try this guys.
You're going to see the sales start pouring in. If you've never done the proper keyword research for your listing, get indexed, start advertising for those keywords at top of search, get visibility, get those sales up.
We'll see you next time on the Bali Blast.
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