Does Alexa for Shopping care about organic search rankings?
A recent report found that Alexa for Shopping—Amazon’s AI shopping assistant—mostly recommends products from outside of the top 10 organic search results on Amazon.
Fully 63.9% of the products that Alexa for Shopping recommended didn’t appear in the top 10 in organic results on Amazon.
In fact, 40.9% never appeared in visible search results at all.
These findings suggest that, when it comes to Alexa for Shopping, your organic rankings won’t help you. On the flip side, if your rankings are low, they won’t be used against you.
Because Alexa crawls the full catalog of products on Amazon to answer buyer questions, it is seeking out products that closely match what the shopper is looking for.
It is also analyzing whether that specific shopper seems to be the target audience for your product.
Rankings don’t matter in the same way. You can be low in the organic ranking, but if you have a thoughtful PDP and strong reviews, you could index well in Alexa for Shopping anyway.
What’s the point of organic search rankings on Amazon now?
Alexa for Shopping not factoring rankings into its recommendations is further evidence that traditional keyword optimizations are fast becoming outdated.
Of course, that doesn’t mean you should totally give up on keyword optimizations yet.
For now, Alexa for Shopping represents a tiny sliver of overall discovery on Amazon. The vast majority of shoppers on Amazon are still discovering products through external ads or through search results.
Until Alexa becomes the majority of product discovery, you still need to be paying close attention to your Share of Voice metrics and your keyword performance.
But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t also start thinking of a long-term discovery strategy that goes beyond traditional keyword stuffing.
What should your listings prioritize in Alexa for Shopping?
How do you ensure your products surface in recommendations from Alexa for Shopping?
As Jon Tilley of ZonGuru discussed in our recent webinar, Amazon’s AI asks the following questions about every product it tracks:
- Who is it for?
- When is it used?
- What problem does it solve?
- What does it compare to?
That’s why it’s so important, in your product page, to lay out really clearly who your product is for.
Across your product title, bullet points, A+ content, Q&A section, and branding aesthetic, zero in on your target audience and use cases.
If your kitchenware product is designed for amateur chefs who want to upgrade their cookware but can’t afford Le Creuset, for instance, say that in your content.
Make clear your kitchenware products are high-quality and durable, an upgrade above the cheapest sets, but that they also won’t break the bank.
Or let’s say you sell picture frame hooks. Say very clearly that they are designed especially for renters who don’t want to create wall damage and don’t want to use a drill.
People ask highly specific questions of Alexa for Shopping. Make sure your PDP reflects that.
Consider running a demographic analysis
When it makes recommendations, Alexa for Shopping factors in past reviews and shopping behavior of each shopper, so it has a strong sense of who the person is asking Alexa for a recommendation.
If you’re struggling in particular to answer questions about who your products are intended for, there’s an easy way to figure out who is really buying from you.
The solution is to run a basic demographic analysis in Amazon Marketing Cloud.
With AMC, you can identify your core audience based on demographic, location, and more. Intentwise Explore, our solution for AMC, lets you pull an AMC report that tracks your sales performance and market penetration rate against every audience Amazon offers.
These include both demographic characteristics (age, income, homeowner status) as well as general interest audiences (football fans, etc).
With this report, you can see exactly which groups of people are most and least likely to buy from you.
If you find that your snack brand significantly overperforms with soccer fans, for instance, maybe that’s a sign that it’s time to mention soccer across your content.
You might tout your product as a great snack for soccer fans—so if someone asks Alexa for Shopping to recommend snacks for a soccer watch party, your product will come up.
