As a seller, you might have heard of keywords infused in SEO for product ranking, but have you ever heard of negative keywords on Amazon? Negative keywords are the words that prevent your listing from popping up on the search results page. On the other hand, positive keywords help you to show your listing on the search results page. Both are equally important in order to make your Amazon sales and campaigns much more effective.
Amazon negative keywords are more relevant to sponsored ads than to search engine optimization (SEO). Amazon allows you to add negative keywords to your PPC campaigns in order to restrict your product advertisement visible on irrelevant search result pages.
Amazon negative keywords help in making your ad campaign more effective:
- Reduces total ad spend or cost per click (CPC)
- The target audience is specific and has a higher chance of buying the product.
- Limits visibility but eventually benefits by increasing sales percentage with respect to the number of clicks and views.
Amazon Search Engine
Apart from being one of the biggest online marketplaces, Amazon is also a popular search engine. Amazon search engine works on the A9 algorithm, and it is important for Amazon sellers to learn and execute their keywords strategy based on A9 best practices.
Unlike Google, Bing, and other search engines, Amazon is quite different because it is an e-commerce platform. It is useful in improving Amazon’s SEO strategies.
Negative keywords are fed in to tell the Amazon search engine that these keywords are not relevant to your product, and thus A9 algorithm restricts your product from getting displayed on the search results page when someone searches by that keyword.
Positive Keywords V/S Negative Keywords
| Amazon Positive Keywords | Amazon Negative Keywords |
| ● Used by customers to tell the Amazon search engine to display your product listing in searches. | ● Signal to the search engine not to display your products when it matches search terms used by shoppers. |
| ● Available in all types, such as broad match, phrase match, and exact match. | ● It can only be used as phrase match and exact match keywords. |
| ● Used in ad campaigns to make the product appear on search result pages. | ● Used to prevent your ads from appearing on search result pages. |
Amazon Negative Keywords Research
Steps to be followed for searching negative keywords for Amazon ad campaigns:
Step 1: Launch an ad campaign to generate data such as sales, click-through rate (CTR), number of impressions, conversion rates, and search terms used. This will give you a basic idea for future campaigns.
Step 2: Run the campaign for at least 2 to 4 weeks until you gather enough data to analyze and compare.
Step 3: Analyse keywords used and find irrelevant keywords. Follow the below-mentioned criteria to cut down your negative keywords.
- Keywords that get more clicks but produce a lesser number of sales
- Keywords that which has low conversion rates but a high cost per conversion
- Keywords with low click-through rate and low conversion rates
- Keywords that have a higher impression but fewer clicks
Benefits of using Negative Keywords in the Campaign
- Poor CTR is because of more views than clicks, but adding negative keywords to your campaign can help improve CTR as it narrows irrelevant views.
- Negative keywords enable ads to be visible to the most appropriate target audience; there are high chances of clicks and improved conversion.
- Feeding negative keywords in all product ad campaigns prevents internal ad campaign competition amongst your products.
- Negative keywords limit your visibility to relevant target audiences only, reducing cost and unnecessary ad spending.
Adding Negative Keywords on Amazon
- Ad Group Level: Selected negative keywords only apply to specific ads. Exact match keywords must be used at this level.
- Campaign Level: Add negative keywords in all campaigns. Phrase match keywords must be used at this level.
Steps to add negative keywords:
Step 1: Log in to your Amazon Seller Central account.
Step 2: Select an ad campaign/ad group (depending upon the level) where you want to add negative keywords.
Step 3: Click on the negative keywords tab and select phrase / exact match type (depending upon the level) from the drop-down menu.
Step 4: Enter negative keywords in the given text box.
Points to Remember for Amazon Keywords
- Do not use too many broad search terms
- Use synonyms and spelling variations
- Write keywords in product description
- Place them in the technical details box
Achieve Better Ranking on Amazon
Next step after adding negative keywords is to improve Amazon rankings. Analyzing the performance and preparing in-depth audits about the campaigns can guide you to improve Amazon rankings.
Sipransh Ecommgrowth can help you with a professional approach that covers negative keywords, Amazon SEO and product listing optimization, product images, product description, and many more services.
