E195 – Maximizing Amazon SEO With Robyn Johnson

For a quick primer on some Amazon marketing (SEO and PPC) you can go check out the episode What is Amazon SEO and Amazon Advertising? which we did with Ginny Marvin in the past.

There is also a video primer from Robyn that she did for SEMRush that can give you some quick bits too.

Still with us? On to the show!

Ways to Sell on Amazon

Amazon Merch SellerAmazon Seller CentralAmazon Vendor CentralKindle Platform

Amazon & Rules

One of the big points that Robyn talks about is how you really need to follow the rules. Whether you intend to have your mom or family review your products, that can get your product removed. If you "optimize" your backend to target some copyrighted terms can also get you in trouble.

In short, you need to keep a positive experience for users and Amazon or they will kick you off the platform.

Additional Resources

If after this you still have questions you can visit Robyn's profile or go join her FB group.

AZListingSupport

Full Transcript:

Matt Siltala: [00:00:00] Welcome to another exciting episode of the business of digital podcast, featuring your host, Matt  and Dave roar. Hey guys, excited. You'd have everybody join us on another one of these business of digital podcast episodes, and we're just going to jump right into it today, Dave. We have special guest Robin Johnson with us, um, founder, CEO of marketplace blueprint, and besides being an Amazon expert and a listing optimization expert.

Central and all that good stuff. If I missed anything, uh, Robin, please feel free to jump in and correct me, but, uh, welcome, uh, to the, to the show. And thank you so much for joining

Robyn Johnson: [00:00:42] us today. Well, thank you for having me. I always love getting to like nerd out about marketing stuff and sharing a little bit about Amazon because it's this backwards, upside down crazy place, but it's a fun place to play

Matt Siltala: [00:00:54] indeed.

And, and yes, and I I'm actually, you know, I'm looking forward to hearing what you have to say. Um, you know, this is, this is stuff, obviously that's super interesting. So I'm glad that our listeners are going to get a chance to, uh, to listen. And so again, thank you for joining us now, Dave, I'm just going to go ahead and let you, uh, uh, kick it off with, uh, where you want this to start and we'll just, uh, we'll go from there.

So

Dave Rohrer: [00:01:17] gracias. I think we decided we actually planned this time, which is. Um, shocking for us way to organize today. The, I think Robin, just the, what did you see in the last year, year and a half from just before COVID we were just talking about it to today. Like has Amazon and just what you've been seeing, gone crazy.

Is it finally settling down? Is it dealing even crazier now? Like what have you kind of seen from the number of people coming on? Yeah. You know, in general on Amazon.

Robyn Johnson: [00:01:51] Well, you know, COVID was a really good time to be an Amazon seller to be having your products on Amazon. We, of course, you know, as an agency that specializes in that we got really busy.

Uh, you know, there was a definite increase in the amount of people who were on Amazon, just because people were trying to get products. People were, you know, locked down for awhile. Uh, but we also saw. Team the way that brands were looking at Amazon. Um, before in fact there were several brands that we had talked to before and they said, uh, before COVID, they said, it's just not a priority for us.

Amazon is not where we're really focused. It's not really important to us. We don't really care what happens on there. And then just a couple months later, Amazon was for some company. Only real distribution channel, depending on what kinds of stores. So especially products that were made primarily in like specialty gift stores or, you know, me stores that weren't deemed essential.

Uh, we kind of became their only a distribution point for a