EP #282] [ENG] - Factors to consider when ranking products on Amazon - Hymie Zebedez

EP #282] [ENG] - Factors to consider when ranking products on Amazon - Hymie Zebedez Unknown Speaker: Welcome to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. This is the place for everything related to Amazon private label and e-commerce. Learn exactly what you need to start or scale your business. Get insights from the top industry experts who will discuss the latest trends and best practices in the world of Amazon. From choosing products and sourcing from a supplier to setting up your Amazon account and marketing your business, you will hear it here. Let's get started. Here is your host, Vincenzo Toscano. Speaker 2: Hello, guys. Welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy, the place of air related to Amazon FBA, private label, and e-commerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, founder and CEO of Ecomcy, and today we bring another special guest. His name is Hymie Zebede, and he's an expert when it comes to organic ranking. That's why I wanted to bring Hymie today because we know organic ranking is something that we all, Amazon sellers, struggle every single day. At the end of the day, that's why it's put so much money on things such as external traffic, such as PPC, because we know that the only way to build a profitable brand on Amazon is by having a strong organic ranking. And that's going to be all about today's conversation. So, Hymie, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today. How are you doing, my friend? Speaker 1: Thank you for having me, Vincenzo. Doing great. Thank you. How are you? Speaker 2: Pleasure, pleasure to have you here. I'm very excited about today's conversation as I just briefly mentioned. I feel organic ranking is something that is on everybody's mind when it comes to the struggle that I'm experiencing on Amazon and I'm very keen to hear some of your takes and maybe things that you're experiencing that you see are working right now because I feel at the end of the day, if you don't figure out organic ranking, it's going to be very tough to scale your company on Amazon. So I guess before we dive into that, it would be great if you give us a background because We actually just had a conversation before going live. You launched your own brand as well. You have a lot of experience in this space. Tell us how, you know, you became so obsessed, I guess, with organic drinking. Speaker 1: So I'm a seller on Amazon private label for 12 years and I sold my first business maybe about nine years ago, but that was before there was, you know, all the aggregators are buying up businesses left and right. So could have made more, but I'm happy with what it was. And, um, I've been managing since I built my own listings successfully, but there were a lot of things like I didn't have inventory, I didn't know how to deal with the factories and negotiating the rates. I went up to people that are experts with that, but they don't know about Amazon. And I showed them my listings and how much I was making and I said, let me do it for you. So I started managing brands for people and getting them on Amazon, building up their sales and word spread. Hymie did this for me and I started doing it for more and more people. And I've been doing it for years. And about a year ago, a little over a year ago, I went back into becoming a seller myself again. I started my own brand on Amazon Clothing. And we had a very, very good Q4. And, you know, I've always been a seller. But it's also great to, you know, back, be back selling myself again, you know what I mean? And the listing is doing great. And we got it ranked organically. Speaker 2: I think what I like about your story as well, which is similar to mine, is that you went through, you know, to the hustle of having to figure out things on your own. And that's also what built the foundation and expertise. And now we're able to provide to so many sellers because sometimes it's tough to really be able to provide, you know, consultation to others if you didn't actually went through the mistakes and the learnings yourself, which I'm sure is at the same time what has allowed you to, you know, figure out to some extent What is the key elements? What are the key elements when it comes to mastering organic ranking? Because at the end of the day, I'm sure after doing it so many times, you have identified patterns, right? The things that are clear indicators and things that you must do to actually consolidate your ranking on Amazon. So I guess we can start with a brief, you know, maybe introduction about that. Like, I'm keen to know, like in 2024, like, what are some of the things you have been seeing that have been huge lifters of ranking based on your experience? Speaker 1: It sounds crazy, but not so much has changed from 12 years ago. Obviously, the strategies are different, but the fundamentals are really the same. You need to have something that's going to convert well. To convert well, you need to have a great image. Obviously, a great image is much more important than it was in the past. My first listing, the image was like horrible, but there just wasn't so much good competition out there. But now you need a great main image. Your listing needs to be optimized with, you know, long tail, short tail keywords. But that's all like the stuff that, that's like the basic stuff that like everybody knows. Oh, you need an optimized title, bullets, everything like that. Everyone knows that. But then there's like all these like very important things that a lot of people, they neglect. When they first launched a product, what price are they putting it at? Are they putting it at a competitive price that they know is gonna convert well? Or are they putting it at their target price? How many reviews do they have in the beginning? Did they enroll it in Vine? I can go step by step with so many different things. The way that I started, usually I'll put things at a very low price. I'll put things below my target price. For two reasons. First of all, When I enroll in Vine, I like to make sure that I give no opportunity to leave a bad review. The Vine reviewers, they're getting it for free, but they're still leaving reviews. Speaker 2: They're getting harsh, actually. Lately, they're getting harsh. Speaker 1: They're very picky people, but I'm saying if you're giving them something like, wow, this is a crazy price for this item, this quality, they're going to leave you better reviews. I want to make sure that nobody's pissed off about the product. Only five-star reviews and you add a low price, you're getting five-star reviews and you're going to start advertising on a listing in the beginning with a small amount of reviews. You don't want to be at a high price. You want to be at a lower price to make sure that whoever sees it is going to buy and like just showing Amazon all those little All those little, you know, triggers, all those things like, hey, like they're buying this person because Amazon's looking at everything. They're looking at, you know, who did you click? Who did the customer click before you? Did they add two people to the card and they only purchased one? Like they're comparing so many different things and like you really need to be crazy, like zoned in on it. Speaker 2: I agree. I agree. Actually, something I wanted to touch on that is going back. I mean, you mentioned, you know, of course, images, optimization, everything. And I think that's going to be the first one I wanted to bring to the conversation, which is conversion. I feel conversion has been one of the biggest KPI is Amazon instructing to position your pro organically because at the end of the day it makes sense. They want to make sure that they put a pro organically high that is going to maximize the traffic that comes to the platform. So tell us from a conversion point of view, do you see when it comes to keeping the consistency of conversion, do you have to do it to a long period of time? Because we know how The honeymoon period is an important thing. And now on top of that, you have X amount of days that you have to maximize that period. So with conversion, do you feel it's the same? Do you need to convert for at least a week consistently, two weeks, one month? What is some of the time that you have to show good performance to Amazon to start seeing results on an organic level? Speaker 1: I'm saying the way that I launch a listing is I'm extremely OCD about the image. Let me see the image before we launch it. Speaker 2: Okay. Speaker 1: Look at the competitors. How is ours going to be compared to them? And then I'll look at it and I'll like write down my, like what I think is better. And then I'll show it to people. I'll say like, which ones do you think is better and why? Like, like I'll ask so many different people. I'll use different, you know, softwares to A, B test things like, and just like, what would people prefer? And like, there's so many like little things like, Oh, maybe if we cut off a little bit of the white space, You know, in the corners, it'll be bigger and it'll show more or maybe like you have to put some wording, you know, you know what I mean? Like let's say there's a box in the background, you put some wording there or like something like, like every little thing or and that's just like the main image, even all the secondary images, like I've made small changes. That have made huge impacts on sales. Like if there was a product that like not everybody knew it had, like it could take care of this issue, but now we made an infographic showing like it also works for this or it helps with this. Like we saw sales go up and then like we've seen returns go down by just changing like a size chart. Like they had a size chart, but it was just complicated. Like you look at it and there was so many things you don't really know how to read it, but it's like, Yeah, you understand this, you know, so like really thinking like from the customer's point of view. I love it. Speaker 2: Yeah, you mentioned something very interesting, split testing, which I feel is something not a lot of people does and you were giving some quick examples of how you make sure that you have the most optimal image and so on. So walk me a little bit to the strategy that you do for split testing. What I mean by that is what is usually the things that you like to test for how long you do split testing? How does it work for you? Speaker 1: I usually use like a, like a soft, like a website, like pick foo and I'll run it through different, you know, like which ones you like better, this or this and why. And then I'll even make like, then I'll pick the better one and I'll even make more and more changes to it. And I'll compare, like, I'll do like three or four versions of like testing, which, which is better. And then sometimes I'll use Amazon's, um, the Amazon's AB testing, but it takes a little bit long to, to get like all the results, like, you know what I mean? Especially if you're not making a lot, if you're not spending a lot of sales, yeah, you need to have that data. So it's a little bit, I like to do it more off of Amazon and like, okay, I'm looking at it like crazy. I'm asking a lot of other people that I know, you know, please analyze it, take a minute. Like, what do you think and why? And then I'm also using like people that I don't know, like people and just, you know, everything, whatever I can. Speaker 2: Cool. And now from the perspective of split testing, of course, we are mainly talking about images now, but let's be honest, a copy is also going to be an important thing because throughout the journey of ranking organically, What happens multiple times is that if you're not on top of making sure you're indexing for the keywords, the rankings moving in the right direction, all of that, you could easily be moving in the wrong direction. So how does it work that in your structure as well? Like how you do, for example, keyword tracking, how you make sure you're always indexing, what is some of the methodology as well? Speaker 1: I'll use like a tool, like let's say Helium 10, and I'll look at the top three or four guys That are very similar to my product. And I'll see like, what are they ranking for in the top 10 spots? And then I'll start tracking their keywords. And then I'll make sure that whatever has the highest search volume, and also the best organic ranking, I'll make sure that those words are, you know, in my title. And, you know, the weaker ones go into my bullet and my search terms, and then like all the leftovers go into like my description. And then my alt text also in the back, you can put like a hundred characters and I'll just, I'll make sure that, cause I don't, there could be a lot of keywords that are good, but I don't want to put them all in my title and it sounds like unreadable and spammy and you know what I mean? Like people don't like that. And Amazon doesn't like that either. But also you want to make sure you have the main couple of keywords in your, In your title at least, you know. Speaker 2: Yeah, super important. In fact, something that I wanted to bring to the conversation, again, that we're talking about keywords. It's also the importance of PPC, right? I'm curious to hear also your take on that because on PPC, there's many things that people recommend. Some people say go very aggressive only with certain keywords and focus only on ranking those keywords. Some people say go more broad. What is usually also the structure you feel on the PPC level is being more effective? Do you feel certain kind of campaigns or targeting have been bigger in terms of contributing ranking for your products as well? Speaker 1: So I think they all are going to contribute. So if I'm doing like a broad or phrase or just auto, and if I'm at an aggressive price and I know that, or forget the prices, if I know that I'm going to convert from showing on a lot of those terms, I know it's going to start improving my ranking. But then when I see like a strong search volume keyword, something like that, I need to make sure that I'm doing an exact match. I'm the top of search that I'm showing all the time, especially if I'm getting a lot of sales, because I want to make sure that I'm going to get enough sales to build up the rank. On my clothing brand, the main search term was 190,000 search volume. I was always in the 30th spot. And I wanted to get up high. So like I started spending like a lot of money. I don't know how much money I was spending on that exact keyword. But I was spending about and it's on one product about $3,000 a day in ad spend. And I did it for maybe two weeks straight. And I got ranked to, you know, the top 10 spots, I was maybe in like the sixth or seventh spot. And and it was right before Black Friday, Cyber Monday also. So then I had the PED running. So that was like a 12-day PED deal and I was getting crazy conversions and I was ranking for everything. The organic rank was insane because also the organic ranking, the search volume was going up to like 300,000, 400,000 search volume and I was on the top and I actually had to It was selling too quickly because, you know, every SKU is ranked individually. Like if I have a very good selling SKU and I run out of it, it kills my listing. So I actually had to stop all my ads and start raising my price. But I started, I started, I kept holding the organic rank for like two weeks afterwards, like holding in the top 10 spots with zero ad spend, like on On Cyber Monday, like the one listing, it did about like $40,000 in sales. Zero ads, like not $1 spent on ads. But then I saw that the ranking started to drop, the organic ranking. But I don't think it's because of the ads. I think it was because we were extremely low on stock and the lead time was just showing that it was like you receive it in like two weeks. So that's when I really started, yeah, that started killing the conversion. But it was great to see that, you know, if you go full force aggressive with it, You can build up a strong organic rank, and if you're converting very, very well, there's no reason you shouldn't stay there. Speaker 2: Love it. Now, let's talk very briefly about the timelines, because, I mean, you briefly touched on that, but I'm sure a lot of people listening to this conversation, they might say, okay, I'm doing all of this, but how much do I have to wait? How long do I have to wait? Two weeks? A month? How do I know I'm moving in the right direction? Like, what is your answer usually to that, like, people when they ask you that? Speaker 1: I'm saying like my listing is a year old and there were months where like my whole goal was I want to build this into something that's doing crazy, crazy numbers. And I wasn't worried about like the profit. Like I had months where we sold, you know, $50,000 for the month. And we lost $200 and then we lost $70,000 and it was like a break even. And like I wasn't concerned about, I was concerned more about building up the organic, building up the momentum. And you know, now like the listing, like the past 30 days, it sold almost half a million dollars. It sold almost $500,000 with very little ad spend. But I spent over $100,000 on it in a year on one product. You know what I mean? Speaker 2: It took you one year. Yeah, yeah. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. So I'm saying, like, people expect overnight success. Like, yeah, you could get lucky, but I'm saying it depends on also how strong do you want to build something. Like, any of the very, very big companies, like, they're focused on building and scaling, not like, oh, I need profit right away. Why are we here? Speaker 2: Which most people do on Amazon, which is why they get burned, you know? Speaker 1: Yeah, most people, 100%. Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, When it comes to this strategy of organic ranking, have you implemented something with external traffic as well? Like, have you tried maybe with bringing traffic with influencer, with newsletter, things along those lines? What is your opinion on that? Because I know a lot of people lately have also been doing that. Like, have you tried? Do you think it's effective? Yeah. Speaker 1: So I've done things with like Google Ads, with email blasts. It's effective. I think the Google Ads I didn't have such great results from. The email blasts, things like that, you know, driving the traffic I had very good results from. And, you know, influencers, I haven't really, the only influencers I've been using are on creator connections. So like on Amazon, I'll use, and I love those, you know, just try to get the word. Right now, I told you, like, I'm having also like a stock issue. So like, I'm trying to slow down sales. I had no ads in Q4. So it's like, great. But it's like, imagine what we could have done if we did have the proper inventory. Speaker 2: Very good. Very good. And now in terms of these, like when it comes to. Also, everything that you're doing with organic ranking, another conversation people also bring to the table is that they feel this is an exercise they have to do only once. And what I mean by this is they feel all this effort that we're talking about focusing on conversion, on being very aggressive on keywords and everything, you only do it throughout the launch and then you forget. But I know for a fact, because I talk to a lot of sellers, a lot of them have maintenance strategies to keep their organic healthy. You also have to keep nurturing that because otherwise competition is going to come and it's going to take it from you. So in terms of nurturing and keeping organic ranking, is there some like a routine that you like to do or kind of thing to keep things healthy all the time when it comes to ranking? Speaker 1: So first of all, I like deals like you get like the best deals, seven day deals, something like that, especially if you're already ranked well for things. I think having those days of extra traffic, yeah, you get the badge, it'll help you maintain the rank. But like, if you see something dropping, if you see something dropping in organic rank, you got to see like, why? Like, who's taking your spot? Like, if you're going down, that means somebody else took your spot. So like, what are they doing differently? Did their price change? Are they being more aggressive on ads? Maybe we need to be more aggressive on ads. Maybe we need to put a coupon. You know, maybe you have to see like, what's going on. Like now, Because we're waiting on getting more stock in before we could push. And now, like we're still selling but like not nearly as strong as we were originally because of the, you know, the lead time. But I know that we're going to have to spend money, at least in the beginning, to get it back to those positions of organic rank. I don't think it's just going to come there. I hope it's going to come there. And I have deals set up right now. I have deals set up for every week. I had one yesterday. I just had to cancel it. You know what I mean? I have them pre-set up. But when the inventory comes in, I'm going to start running deals. Hopefully, I'll get a big boost. But yeah, if something comes down, you've got to push it back up. You can't just leave it. Speaker 2: Love it. Cool, cool. Now, in terms of Also, when it comes to organic ranking, another thing that I see is becoming a trend in terms of conversation is how AI is going to affect this. We see how Rufus is becoming more and more a bigger thing in the US and some people might say, oh, organic ranking eventually is going to become less and less important because it's going to come down to how AI recommends your products and things like that. Out of curiosity, do you see or have seen AI affecting the exposure of your product or your clients when it comes to that? What is also some of the predictions when it comes to that? Speaker 1: I don't think it's going to hurt your organic ranking if you're prepared. Basically, you need to make sure that your listing isn't just keyword stuffed and that it's actually explaining the benefits of the product and how it could be used and answering questions. You know what I mean? Yeah, you want to put your keywords everywhere. You want the keywords to be visible and to be readable to Amazon, but you don't want it to just be mumbo-jumbo. You want it to be something that, okay, if somebody has a question and they ask Rufus, would this work with this? It has to know everything about your product. I'm saying people don't even do that with Like forget the AI, people don't even do that with like the basic things from like the attributes, you know what I mean? Like there's a lot of optional attributes that people, they don't fill out in the back end and they don't realize like if somebody's searching something and you know, they click one of the filters on the left side of the screen, they click it and you didn't fill yours out, you're not popping up. So like, I think it's kind of related to that a little bit also, you know what I mean? Speaker 2: It's like a similar idea, like you need to optimize your listing as much as possible. The thing that you leave empty is basically a less attribution you can be found with, you know? Exactly. Yeah. Awesome. So I think, I mean, this conversation has been awesome. I love it. I think to conclude, is there any last tip or maybe, you know, a strategy you want to share in terms of organic or it could be Amazon in general, because I mean, of course, things go beyond organic. So anything you want to share? Speaker 1: I'll just share one quick thing that I think is very important that a lot of people don't realize is that you can't just send in the minimum amount of stock to Amazon. You can't just send in a 30-day supply and think, okay, I have 30 days worth. I'm expecting to grow my business. If you have 30 days worth, what do you want to do? You want to double your sales? Now you have two weeks worth? Because also, I built a thing on a Google Sheet where there's You go to your inventory ledger, and you can download where your inventory is in all the FBA centers, and you put all the zip codes in and you can see like on a map like where is your inventory and like, if you're not sending out enough inventory. Amazon's not going to spread it out equally, and if they start spreading it out, which it probably won't be so great of a spread out, but your stuff's going to be an FC transfer, it's not going to be readily available, and you're not able to push it. And then a guy in California is going to see two-day shipping, and a guy in New York is going to see four-day shipping, and all those little things affect it. Speaker 2: Which is what we call, I believe you're talking about geo-ranking, right? Speaker 1: Geo-ranking and just basic planning. You want to increase your sales, so why are you sending in a month's worth of what you're selling now? If you want to increase your sales, You're gonna have to spend and you're gonna have to build it up and like you can't spend and build it up if you only have X amount of inventory. Speaker 2: Yeah, and it makes sense because the other day why would Amazon show number one on page one on Amazon a product that inventory is in California when the seller is in Florida and you have no inventory in Florida. Speaker 1: They do, yeah, it's crazy. It's really crazy how, yeah. Speaker 2: Yeah, so anyway, Hymie, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much for sharing, you know, all this wisdom. I'm sure a lot of people might want to reach out or work with you, you know, to receive your expertise on this. So happy people can find you. Speaker 1: Connect with me on LinkedIn. You could also go to my website and search my name on Google or YouTube, but connect with me on LinkedIn. Speaker 2: Awesome. I love it. Speaker 1: You'll be able to message me from there. Speaker 2: Thank you so much. I'm going to put all the information down below for people to find it. Yeah, it's been a pleasure and see you in the next one. Yeah. Thank you so much. Speaker 1: Same. Thank you so much. Speaker 2: Thank you. Speaker 1: Great. Thank you. Unknown Speaker: Thanks for listening to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. Be sure to subscribe so you don't miss an episode. While you are at it, we would appreciate it if you could leave an honest rating and review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. That will make it easier for others to find out about the show and benefit from it. Want more? Visit our website at www.ecomcy.com where you can get your first consultation for free or find us on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn at Ecomcy.