Limited Time Start Your Amazon Journey With $175+ in Holiday Savings! Unwrap Savings

Get Started

#507 – 2024 Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass: Part 2

Video of the episode at the bottom

Ever wondered how to turn strategic insights into a goldmine? This episode brings the secrets of Amazon analytics to your ears, highlighting the pivotal role of keywords in boosting your revenues and leaving your competitors behind. We’ve got a masterclass in the works that will open your eyes to the capabilities of organic and sponsored ranks, the art of tracking Amazon keyword ranks, and decoding the difference between ranks in Cerebro, keyword tracker, and a browser search.

Fasten your seatbelts, as we explore deeper into the labyrinth of Amazon Brand Analytics and trends. We will guide you on how to use data inside Helium 10 from Amazon’s brand analytics data to unveil what’s happening with specific keywords and how to turn this knowledge into strategic decisions. Plus, watch out for our segment on the “time machine method” in Helium 10, a secret weapon to fuel your Amazon business’ growth.

Finally, we’ll share some hard-hitting strategies for uncovering the top Amazon keywords for your market niche and revealing hidden opportunities in keyword research. We’ll discuss how to use Amazon Brand Analytics to see the history of Cerebro keyword searches, identify sales spikes, and compare organic and sponsored ranks. By the end of the episode, you’ll be armed with the knowledge needed to dominate your market and boost your Amazon business to new heights. So, are you ready to elevate your selling game?

 episode 507 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley discusses:

  • 01:27 – Advanced Amazon Keyword Tracking Strategies
  • 08:11 – Amazon Brand Analytics for Keyword Strategies
  • 13:54 – Comparing Amazon and Helium 10’s Data 
  • 16:53 – Analyzing Historical Trends in Keyword Distribution 
  • 19:56 – Keyword Analysis for Amazon Sales Increase 
  • 25:52 – Top Amazon Keywords for Multiple Products
  • 32:58 – Optimizing PPC Strategy With Competitor Analysis 
  • 37:19 – Opportunity Keywords and Competitor Analysis

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today is part two of our seller strategy masterclass, where we do a deep dive into keyword research using Cerebro, and the strategies we’re going to go over today, if implemented by you and your team, could potentially mean thousands of dollars of extra revenue for you. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think. Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s completely BS, free, unscripted and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And this is now part two for a series that we’ve been doing that we call seller strategy masterclass, where we do a deep dive into Amazon keyword research. Now, if you haven’t seen part one, you should go back and, you know, hop on that video, because a lot of what we’re going to talk today is based on some of the things that hopefully you’ve mastered already in part one. So, for any reason you just happen to find this episode randomly, go back to episode 506. You can do that h10.me/506 and make sure to listen to that one. Take a lot of notes. Make sure you’ve mastered that before getting into this one. All right, for the rest of you who already watched that, let’s go ahead and hop into it.

Bradley Sutton:

Last episode, we went through about 12 different strategies that can definitely help you, mainly looking at like individual products, using Cerebro and how to like reverse engineer, organic ranks and sponsored ranks, and how to use some of the advanced features of Helium 10. Today, we’re going to look at even more advanced features. A lot of these are or most of these, all of these are available to anybody with a diamond and above, a lot of these are still available to anybody with a platinum Helium 10 account as well. But again, even if you don’t even have Helium 10, let alone one of those plans, still pay attention to this, because these are strategies that you should be using, regardless of what software you’re using. It’s literally stuff, some of this that I would say 95 to 98% of Amazon sellers even if they have Helium 10, they’re not using it, so it really can give you a competitive advantage over others. Again, the way that we do this in case you forgot it from the last episode instead of just making this some step by step guide, we’ll show some step by step, but the main focus of this is to give you goals. All right, all right, all right.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is like a how to guide. We’re going to say stuff like how to compare organic and sponsored rank to the being the top clicked in brand analytics. All right, so we’re going to start off with a how to and then, as soon as we do that, we’re going to talk about well, why is this beneficial? Why do you even want to achieve this goal? What can it mean to your bottom line? And then we’re going to get into the strategy. Ready to go? All right, strategy 12. How to start tracking Amazon keyword rank up to 24 times a day. Now, why would you even want to do this? How is this beneficial to you? How could this make you money?

Bradley Sutton:

Well, as we have talked about in previous videos, the ranks organic and sponsored that you might see inside of Helium 10, Cerebro are either from, could be from today, could have been from five days ago, could have been from 29 days ago. It’s anywhere between one and 30 days old. We’re not checking it completely actively. It gives you just a holistic look at ranking. Now there might be something that you really want to focus on, like your top keywords. You might not want to see something where it could have been taken last week. It could have been taken a couple of weeks ago. You really want to focus on that keyword? Well, in that case, you’re going to want to be looking at your rank a lot more frequently than just looking at it, you know, once a day or even once a week. So one of the ways that you can do that, if you really found some good, most important keywords for your listing, is by exporting to a different tool keyword tracker.

Bradley Sutton:

And again, just to kind of set the scene here, what is the difference between a rank in Cerebro, a rank in keyword tracker and a rank you might see on your browser right now? You know, some people say wait a minute, how come my rank is different from what I see in Cerebro, to what I see in my browser? Remember, these are not estimates that are taking us to Cerebro. This is an exact rank taken from an exact browsing scenario. You could have 10 people at the very same time in different parts of the country. You could have three people in the same house at the same exact time search for something on Amazon, and it could be different ranks. All right, whether somebody’s on a mobile browser, somebody’s on Safari, somebody’s on Chrome. Somebody signed in, somebody signed off. Somebody signed in in Los Angeles, California, somebody signed in in Brooklyn, New York. It could have different ranks. It usually doesn’t fluctuate that much, but that’s why you might see something different. It doesn’t mean that one is wrong and one is right. They’re all actual ranks but, you know, based on the browsing scenario, amazon might show something different.

Bradley Sutton:

Anyways, how can you track up to 12 or 24 times a day? Let me show you how. You’re going to want to take your keywords that you want to go ahead and export let’s just say, coffin letterboard, halloween DVD collection and coffin bookshelf. So you go ahead and click this button, add to keyword tracker, find the product that you’re wanting to add this to, and you can add track a new product if you haven’t added this to your keyword tracker before, and then, basically, you are going to automatically have these products in keyword tracker. Now, once you go over to keyword tracker, you should see those new keywords that you had added in here. Now I mentioned at the top of this section is how to do it 24 times a day. Well, by default, keyword tracker, unlike Cerebro, it’s checking once a day. If you wanted to check up to 24 times a day. You’re just going to hit this little rocket chip that is next to each keyword and then now you are going to get ranks 24 times a day for this keyword. So that’s just a great way. Again, if you want to get more into detail on keyword tracker, there are other videos that kind of help you with that.

Bradley Sutton:

So that’s just one of the ways to export keywords out of Cerebro. There’s actually a couple more ways that you can do that. One of the ways is a lot of people like to manipulate the data, maybe in an Excel spreadsheet All right. So if you want to do that, all you have to do is hit the export data button directly from Cerebro and then you could say, hey, download to a XLSX file or a CSV file, and then what that does is it downloads all of the raw data, keywords and all the search volume and everything into an Excel spreadsheet, and then you might be able to do a little bit more filtering or something like that that you might not have been able to do inside of the Helium 10 dashboard.

Bradley Sutton:

A third way that you can export the data from Cerebro is to our word processor tool, which is called Frankenstein. All right, so if you export, if you hit export and then you hit it to Frankenstein, what it’s going to do is it’s gonna open up a new window and it’s gonna open up Frankenstein. So what this allows you to do is it allows you to take away duplicates and maybe filter out certain words, allows you to do word counts. You wanna see. Hey, show me all of the keywords that have at least four words. Show me all the keywords that have coffin. Take out any keyword phrase that has Halloween. Whatever you wanna do in Frankenstein, you can manipulate the keywords in that way. If you wanna have a better instructions on how to work with Frankenstein, there’s a video that’s in the Frankenstein tool that helps you with that. So there’s three different ways to export. Number one go to Keyword Tracker. Learn how to track these keywords 24 times a day in rotating browsing scenarios. Number two export your keyword list to Excel and then manipulate the data that way. And then, number three export it to our keyword processing tool, Frankenstein. That gives you even more options.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, let’s get into the next strategy how to see the top clicked and top purchased products for a keyword using Amazon brand analytics data. So Amazon brand analytics is something that Amazon released about two, three years ago, really helpful. It is a data point that tells you, for any keyword, what were the top three products that were clicked and then, from those top three click products, what was the percentage of their click share and what was their percentage of their conversion or purchase share. For any keyword that comes up in Cerebro, you can actually see that number. Now, why is this important? How can this metric help you make money? Well, all keywords are not created equal. All right, there are some keywords that result in a lot of clicks and a lot of purchases. There are some keywords that don’t have a lot of purchases. There are some keywords where maybe the top three products that are clicked, they’re dominating the clicks, they’re dominating the purchases. There are other keywords, when you add up the top three products that are clicked, that they might not have a big percentage of the overall clicks and conversions for a keyword, and that could give you information to let you know, hey, that market might be a little bit more wide open. There’s a lot of ways to look into this data and get ahead of the game. Like you might wanna focus on a keyword where you see a couple of really bad listings that are just dominating the sales, and you know that you can take over. That might be a more attractive keyword to focus on as opposed to something else. So how do you do that? Let’s go ahead and hop into it In your Cerebro results.

Bradley Sutton:

You’ll notice one of the columns. There’s two columns. It’ll say ABA, which stands for Amazon Brand Analytics Total Click Share and ABA Conversion Share. Now, right next to that, you’re gonna see a little graph button, so like, for example, I can see Coffin Shelf and it says ABA Total Click Share 30.5%. What that means is the top three click products over the last month or over the last week for that keyword resulted in 30.5% of the overall clicks. It says ABA Total Conversion Share 15% for that same thing. Now, that right there just tells you something that you know, because, theoretically speaking, if the conversion rates were all created equal, if three products got 30% of the clicks, they should get 30% of the sales. Right, if all things were created equal. But this means that of the top three click products, a lot of people are clicking out of it and that means 85% of the sales that come from these keywords are not even from the top three clicks. So that right there might give you some strategy that you can look at. You can actually filter in the Cerebro results for this top three total click share and top three total conversion share.

Bradley Sutton:

Another thing you can do is click on the graph. Like, if I click on this graph that is right next to ABA Total Click Share, another graph comes up and you’re gonna wanna put your mouse over the different months or the different weeks. I can actually change the date settings to say, hey, I wanna look at this data on a weekly basis and maybe I’m just gonna look from October 1st all the way to October 28th and now, week by week, I put my mouse over this graph and then here at the bottom I can see which ones are the top three click Like. For example, for this week, October 22nd to October 28th, I can see that my product had 9% of the clicks. It was number three and it had 11% of the conversions. So that’s pretty good. Look at this. There was one other product on here that had 13% of the clicks but only 3% of the conversions, so their conversion rate was not very good. So again, a lot of great data that you can see in here. This comes directly from Amazon. This is not some estimate from Helium 10 or some algorithm. This is directly from Amazon. So use this data in order to get some additional insights into what’s going on on certain keywords. All right.

Bradley Sutton:

Next strategy how to compare the organic and sponsored rank and see how it relates to being one of the top three click products. Now, why is this beneficial? How can this make you money? When you talk about spending money on Amazon, as an Amazon seller, what do you think? You spend a lot of money on Sponsored ads? You’re probably right, right. Apart from inventory, of course, and shipping and things like that, what do you pay Amazon the most for? It might be PPC, and so you wanna know hey, am I getting the best bang for my buck with my PPC? Do I even need to invest heavily in staying at the top of search for PPC? Do I need to, like, stay top of search and do some kind of campaign to bring my organic rank up? There’s a lot of these questions that you might have, and without looking at this next measure, I’m gonna tell you you might not be able to see the answer. So let’s go ahead and hop into this. How you can see this If you click on the graph inside of Helium-Tensoribro, on one of the ABA total click share figures here and, by the way, if you see an NA, that means it wasn’t available inside of Amazon brand analytics, so let’s go ahead and click on one that has the graph.

Bradley Sutton:

I’m gonna focus here on the right side of this graph, and this is giving me the last three months of what was the top three click products and these first columns that I’m looking at. It’ll say click share and conversion share. Again, this is directly from Amazon telling me who were the top three clicked and purchased products. And the thing that is interesting is the next two columns are the organic rank average and the sponsored rank average. So we’re now comparing Amazon data to Helium 10’s data. All right, take a look at this. I’m looking at my product here. For the month of October, I was a number three clicked product okay, but look at my organic rank average 21. So you might think that you probably would get zero sales being page one position 20, right, but I am one of the top three clicked and I was even converting at a higher clip than the number one clicked product. Why I could see here from the Helium-Tens data that my sponsored rank average was number two.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so how does this knowledge help me? Well, now I know I don’t necessarily have to do some crazy campaign to get ranked organically. As long as I can stay ahead of the game on my sponsored rank, it is going to keep me to be one of the top three click Other keywords. You might see different data where the sponsored rank might not even be that important, but the organic rank seems to drive all of the sales. You might see another keyword where it’s unless you are at the top of the page in organic and sponsored, you might not be one of the top three clicked or purchased products. So again, this is a super, super valuable data point that only Helium 10 has, where it compares Amazon brand analytics data with our keyword tracking data so you can find out which keywords to focus on and which keywords to focus on organic versus sponsored, how to view the history of how many keywords a product has ranked for organically or in sponsored ads. This is one of my favorite ones, something I’ve been asking for for years before the team finally put it in.

Bradley Sutton:

I like to call this tool the time machine method, but actually it’s called historical trends inside of Helium 10. Now, why would you want to know this? How can this make you money? Well, you might see what a product is doing right now on Amazon. That’s what Cerebro is for right, and it’s always been for that. Hey, where are they ranking for now? But what if you’re in a seasonal niche? Or what if you’re curious about what happens during November of each year, because that’s when sales spike? Or what happens when it’s a beach ball and it’s in the summer? You know, like, if I’m in December and I’m looking at Cerebro for a beach ball item, the keywords that people are finding this product now it’s probably very different than the keywords in June and July.

Bradley Sutton:

Another way that I’m looking at this data is that you know what if there are trends in how a competitor is doing sponsored ads, or maybe trends in how their organic reach flows, like maybe they do outside campaigns that give them temporary spikes at different times of the year, let’s hop in to see how you can see all of this data, and even more so whenever you are in Cerebro. There is a button in the middle under keyword distribution that is called show historical trend. You are going to want to go ahead and click that and it’s going to open up the historical trends for up to two years if the product has been active, for where their organic and sponsored keywords have been showing up, and you’ll see it in different colors. So like, for example, you could see that in October of this year they were ranking for 698 different keywords and also they were ranking sponsored 281. Now here’s something that is cool. If I’m going to go back in history and I could see, wow, look, in November and December of last year, these guys were going hard and heavy. They really upped their PPC spend. This is not my coffin shelf here, I’m looking at somebody else’s coffin shelf. So now I know, going into November of this year, hey, I got to be on guard because it looks like this competitor really ups their spend on PPC during November and December. But take a look at this If I look in January, it looks like they pretty much turn off their PPC ads.

Bradley Sutton:

They were only showing up for 84 different keywords in sponsored ads during January of 2023. So now, all of a sudden, I’ve got some data that shows, hey, they didn’t really do any sponsored ads in January. January might be the time where I can kind of overtake them with my reach if I go opposite of them and go a little bit hard and heavy, maybe in November and December I’m like man it might be too hard to compete with them. Maybe I’ll dial back my spend and let them go ahead and go crazy with their spend. I mean, there’s different ways to interpret this data. There’s no right or wrong way.

Bradley Sutton:

But for the first time, you can have visibility into the reach of your competitors. Maybe you see a competitor sales going up and up and up, right. Well, I would go ahead and look at this historical trend and see why are they ranking for more keywords? Are they advertising for more keywords? Same thing Maybe their sales are going down. Well, I’m going to check Are they ranking for more keywords? Are they advertising for more, more keywords? If not, that means they just got more efficient, right. If their sales were going up and the keywords were actually going down, it means that they were just laser focused on certain keywords. Which keywords were they focused on? I’m going to show you in the next strategy exactly how to find that. But, guys, take a look at this on your listing and your competitors listing, so you can see the history of all of the number of keywords that they’re organically and sponsored ranked for All right. Now the next strategy is how to check an Amazon products organic and sponsored rank history. All right. So in the previous strategy we talked about how to just see the total number. But how do you actually see what they were ranking for and when? Why do you want to see this? Why is this important? How can it make you money?

Bradley Sutton:

Again, the example I gave earlier of a beach ball. You know if I’m going to launch a beach ball in July of next year, or maybe I’ll launch it in spring, but you know the main focus is gonna be in June, july, august. In December I can’t really Do keyword research on this product and know what are the best keywords. Right, I need to go find who was One of the top selling beach balls in June, july or August of last year and then I want to Analyze them. Not in December of this year, what, when nobody is searching for beach balls and they might even have their listing active.

Bradley Sutton:

But I want to see what were the keywords driving the sales of that product during that time of year. Maybe there’s other products where I could see that they had a certain spike in a certain month. Regardless of see. Maybe it’s not a seasonal product at all. It’s a product like a power bank or something that people buy throughout the year. But I noticed in a certain month they had a lot of sales. Well, you know what I’m gonna do I want to compare what keywords and where they were ranking for in the month before their sales went up and then compare it to the month where their sales went up and which keywords increased in rank organic or sponsored. Guess what? That is the reason of why their sales went up. I can literally tie a sales increase at least part of their sales increase to Exact keywords, so that now I know for my product which keywords I want to focus on Of which potentially could increase my sales.

Bradley Sutton:

So how can we do that? Let’s go ahead and hop into it. So again, if I see a, let’s pretend that this coffin shelf here had a spike in sales on a certain year, like November of 2022 what I’m gonna do is I’m going to go in click historical trend and then I’m going to find the month when they had the the big sales. Now, before I even do that, I might go into the previous month and have that cerebral open in another window so I can see where they were ranked on a quote-unquote neural month. But let me show you. I just click on this exact date here of November 2022 and then I’m gonna hit apply filters. And now this is like taking a time machine, because it is now going to show me the cerebral, as if I was doing this in November of 2022.

Bradley Sutton:

That’s what it is showing now, and then now I can go ahead and use Helium 10 filters and say, hey, show me of the keywords that had at least 300 search volume during, you know, october of 2022, where were they ranked? Between positions 1 and 20. And then now, all of a sudden, I can see the exact keywords that they were probably getting a lot of their sales from. And then again, what I’m going to do is, if I was trying to see a Spike in sales, like where the keywords coming from, I’m gonna take one of the months where their sales were down and then compare, keyword by keyword, which one they had a big increase or which one they hopped to the top of page one. And now I know Exactly why they had a spike in sales.

Bradley Sutton:

That customer. If they’re not even using Helium 10 or they’re not looking this data, they probably don’t even know themselves. Uh, I say that customer, that competitor, they probably don’t even know themselves why they have the spike in sales, but I can actually see that now and now I’m gonna use that data to make sure that I get ahead. So, guys, this I Cannot emphasize how valuable this feature is. Nobody has ever had anything like this super, super important that can really get you ahead looking at either spikes in sales, valleys in sales. You know it’s the opposite. I didn’t really mention that. But let’s say you notice a competitor a certain month had a terrible month, even though they were in stock. Obviously, if they’re out of stock, well, they would have a bad month, but they were in stock. They had a terrible month of sales. Well, I’m going to look at when they had a great month right before and I’m gonna look at what keywords they went down in rank, what keywords did they take the pedal off the metal for their sponsored ranks? And then, now I know the keywords, I need to make sure that I don’t fall off, because now I know that, hey, if I fall off on these keywords, it could result in another sales. You know, sales lull, like it did for my competitor. So, guys, this is probably top one, top two around their favorite features in all of Helium 10, out of the 75 million things that Helium 10 can do, this right here is one of my favorites and this is what could really really give you a leg up on the competition Historical Cerebro. So make sure to use it.

Bradley Sutton:

Next strategy how to view the history of your Cerebro keyword searches. All right, why is this beneficial? Can this make you money? Well, a lot of this data changes over time and maybe you are like always checking somebody’s Cerebro and you or somebody’s product in Cerebro and you want to see the history of something like Amazon recommended and how it changed over time, or some of the graphs you know over time. Maybe you don’t have access to the historical Cerebro? Well, what you can do is you can actually go in and see your history so that you know what was going on and when. All right, so how you can do that is by at the very top of the screen. Even before you get into any search, you’re gonna see a very button at the top right called history. If you click on that, it is gonna show you all of the history of every single product you have ever searched in Cerebro and it gives you the date of when you looked at it and you can even search. Like you can see, I’ve used Cerebro here 1,500 times. I could search hey, where’s all the coffin shelves that I searched for? And if I hit open, what it’s going to open up in is the Cerebro as I looked at it as of that day. So this is a great thing to look at if you want to look at how things have progressed since the first time you looked at a product or a group of products really important to check your history in Cerebro.

Bradley Sutton:

Next strategy how to find the top Amazon keywords for a niche or a market, or multiple Asins, a group of products. Why is this important? How can it benefit you? We’ve been talking until now about looking up individual products in Cerebro, which is absolutely a great method and a lot of tools can do that, but now we’re taking it to another level, where you are analyzing multiple products. Well, how this can help you is you know you might if you just look at one product like the top seller in a niche and understand their keywords, their top keywords. That’s valuable information, right, but do you think that that one product is the only one making sales on keywords. No, another product might have discovered a different keyword that this first product doesn’t know about, and so if you analyze that product, you know you might want to know what keywords they’re ranking for. Maybe you want to know what’s the most important keywords overall in the niche. Where are most of the top competitors all getting their sales from, because they’re all ranked high? What are the keywords where maybe only a couple competitors really know about it? So these are kind of under the radar keywords that might have less competition. All of these are reasons on why you should analyze multiple products at the same time.

Bradley Sutton:

So let’s just again talk about how you can find the top keywords, the top keywords for a group of products, or the most relevant keywords. Well, I actually like to start this outside of Cerebro. I mean, you could just go ahead and copy Aysons one by one directly in this Cerebro. I actually like going to Amazon itself and then looking at the products that way. So here I just searched for coffin shelf here in Amazon and what I’m going to do is I’m going to run Helium 10 X-Ray on this page Now. Once I do that, the top products are going to come up.

Bradley Sutton:

Now here is something very important. I’m going to select from X-Ray right on Amazon the keywords that I want to look at in Cerebro. But what’s important to do is Cerebro Multi-Aysons search is built on comparing your product to your competitors. So if you have a product right here on this page, you want to make sure to select it first. All right, so I’m going to select my product, my coffin shelf, first. Now, if you don’t have a product, maybe you’re just doing keyword research in a brand new niche. I like choosing a product way from the bottom of the page. That’s not one of the top sellers as my baseline product, and the reason is is because I don’t want to exclude it from the search results. All right, so the way that Cerebro is built is to compare your product to competitor products. But you can kind of use this mini hack if you don’t have your own product, just by selecting a random product here from the bottom of the page and then selecting your coffin shelf, so I can choose up to like maybe 10 or even 20 of the top coffin shelves.

Bradley Sutton:

Let me go ahead and choose, you know, some of the top ones that I see here on this page, and then, once I’ve selected them. I’m going to go ahead and hit the button Run Cerebro and it’s going to open up Cerebro in another tab and it’s now going to show me my rank versus all of the other competitor ranks in Cerebro. Or, if I didn’t have my product as the first product, it’s actually going to show me just the baseline product versus all of the competitor products. But it’s really the competitor products that I’m going to be focused on. So now, if I just want to find out what the top keywords are, as you can see here, it found over 3,000 keywords that any one of those competitors that I looked at are ranking for. All right, that’s valuable, but you know I really want to focus on the top keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s one button you can do right here at the very top of the page. If I just hit the button Top Keywords, it actually goes in and does some filters for me so that I can see what some of the top keywords are, and you could see it filtered that you know 3,000 keywords all the way down to five keywords. What is this based on? It just threw in some filters that make sure to show me what are the keywords that more than a few of, more than just one or two of these products that I chose are ranking for, and they’re all kind of ranking high. The competitor rank average is between one and 40. That’s what it did. So maybe this five keywords is not enough. So what I’m going to do is I’m going to say, hey, you know, show me the 300 and up search volume. Maybe the competitor rank average is between one and 50, and at least three ranking competitors are all ranking for it, and then, if I go ahead and apply those filters, more keywords might show up. Now, as you can see, 22 filtered keywords show up.

Bradley Sutton:

The column that I like to look at here is the competitor performance score. This can be viewed. As you know, some people call this relevancy. I don’t like calling it relevancy because it could just be a fluke. But if you see a 10 out of 10 competitor performance score, that means that a lot of these products you know I think I had five or six products that I entered in here a lot, if not all of them are all ranking for it and they are all ranking relatively high. That’s what this competitor rank average is.

Bradley Sutton:

Look at this this keyword has competitor rank average of 7.6. That means the five products that we’re ranking for this keyword. If I average where they’re showing up for it’s page one position seven, right. So that’s pretty crazy. If I wanted to know exactly where they were ranking for, I just put my mouse over relative rank and then it shows why that competitor rank average is so high. Look at this. It says one is number one, one is number three, one is number five, number 13, 15 and 16. You take that on average and it goes to a 7.6. All right, so this is a great way to see what are the top keywords in a niche. That means all the top sellers, if that’s what I chose when I was looking in Amazon. If they’re all ranking highly for a certain keyword, it’s gonna show up here on this top keyword list. This is a great way to get your best keywords for your Amazon listing.

Bradley Sutton:

How to find the top sponsored keywords for a niche or a groove of products. Why is this important? How can this help you? If you are trying to enter a niche where you haven’t run PPC ads before, you might not have the best idea about what are the most important keywords to advertise for. But if you’re going into a niche where there’s competitors who have been on there a few months or a few years, theoretically speaking, maybe they have already gone through a lot of auto campaigns and they know what the best converting keywords are. So if you look at where they are focusing their spend, where they are focusing on top of search, where they’re showing up on page one in the sponsored results, it can actually help you go ahead and start from date one to be focusing on the right keywords in sponsored ads.

Bradley Sutton:

So how can you do that? Well, let’s just say you did a multi-acent search, like I showed you in the last strategy, and you are looking at about four, five, six, seven or however many acents. What you’re gonna want to do is you might want to look at sponsored rank count, and I like putting a minimum of two there. That means, hey, show me the keywords where at least two out of these competitors are advertising for you might wanna go three out of five instead of just two. Let’s just start with two. And then sponsored rank average. You might want to choose between, let’s just say one and 20, kind of like saying, hey, these are the keywords that if I take the average rank, they’re on page one or two of sponsored ads, and then maybe I’ll go ahead and do a search volume minimum of 300.

Bradley Sutton:

There’s no magic numbers here, guys. You guys can play with these filters. That’s why we have so many of them and, as you can see here, eight keywords came up for this coffin shelf niche and so I can see here coffin shelf, coffin shelves, mini coffin. If I look at the sponsored rank count, I could see how many people are advertising from the top players and then what the sponsored rank average is, and I could see some of these. Look at this one Cough and shelf. We’ve got somebody page one, position one, somebody page one position nine, eight and 10 in sponsored rank, and then one is 65. That brought down the average a little bit. This gives me a really quick way, within 30 seconds or less, to see who the top players are all kind of focused on in order to focus their PPC spend, and then you can definitely use that for your own PPC strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, last strategy of the day how to find the keywords that most of the top competitors are sleeping on. Why is this important? How can it make you money? We talked earlier about how to find the top keywords for a niche, and that is just period. End of story. The top keywords just because a lot of the competitors are ranking for it doesn’t make it a bad keyword. That actually makes it a good keyword. But, that being said, it’s understandable to know that, hey, if all of the top competitors, all the top sellers in a certain niche, are all getting sales from this keyword because they’re all ranked high, it’s a very competitive keyword. Again, I reiterate, that doesn’t mean it’s a bad keyword or something you shouldn’t have in your listing. You absolutely have to have the top keywords. But what about the keywords that maybe only one competitor or two competitors are getting sales from? This could be a potentially non-competitive keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, sometimes these keywords are a little bit less relevant to your product. An example might be like Gothic decor. Right, maybe only one or two competitors of coffin shelf are ranking for Gothic decor, but all the other products that you see when you search for Gothic decor? There are things like maybe like a spooky skull holder or some Gothic bed frame or some Gothic looking wall ornament or what have you. But here’s the thing, the reason why sometimes certain keywords work for products you might not think are relevant.

Bradley Sutton:

Like maybe you didn’t think that a coffin shelf is Gothic decor is that there are people out there who search for a keyword with different buyer intent. Right, there is maybe somebody who, in the back of their mind, they really do want a coffin shelf, but they don’t call it a coffin shelf, they call it Gothic decor. So what they’re looking for is a coffin shelf. So they type in Gothic decor. They see a whole bunch of random products. But if they’re looking for a coffin shelf and only one or two products are coffin shelves on page one, guess what? Those one or two products have a 50-50 chance or a 100% chance if only one of them is ranking for it to get the sale, because all those other products on page one is kind of meaningless to that customer who went there with an intent to buy a coffin shelf. They just use a different keyword than most people. So this is why looking for these keywords while they might not be the top keywords that can get you sales, they’re a great way to kind of like take advantage of special keywords that certain competitors out there have found that’s relevant to their product and they’re getting sales.

Bradley Sutton:

And now, instead of having to fight seven, eight, nine of your competitors for a sale, you’re only fighting one or two competitors. How can you do that? Let’s go ahead and hop into Cerebro. So if I did my multi-acent search that I’ve showed you guys how to do in the other strategies, all I have to do is hit one button for this, and it’s the button at the top left that’s called opportunity keywords. This puts in a kind of like preset filters that you can play around with later and it’s telling me a competitor performance max five, and then only one competitor is ranking between one and 15.

Bradley Sutton:

All right, so, as I can see, as you can see here, there are 12 keywords that came up. For example, one of them is Gothic shelf. Now, why did this keyword come up on this search but not the top keywords search? Well, if you look here, there are only. There is only one competitor here who is ranked between one and 15, and it’s somebody rank 13. The rest of them were ranked on. You know, here’s one that’s 16, here’s one at 76, one at 77, one at 96. So, only if I get on the top page of Gothic shelf, guess what? I am only fighting one competitor for that sale, for somebody who might buy a coffin shelf.

Bradley Sutton:

You see how valuable this keyword list can go. If you want to, you know, fool around with some of these filters to narrow it in other ways. You can absolutely do that. But this is just a great way to see what we call opportunity keywords. Or maybe only one or two competitors getting only you know, maybe a couple sales here or there from this keyword because it might not be fully, fully relevant to the niche as a whole. But you’re only gonna be fighting one or two people for sales for this keyword and usually you know all the top 10, 15, they all have a few of these keywords that they might be getting sales from. And now you can combine all of those top keywords into your listing and be one of the only ones that has all of those keywords in there and getting sales from them.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, as kind of an addendum to this strategy, some of these filters they’re really great to use, just like get some insights right. So forget about that preset opportunity keywords filter, if I clear this, I really want you guys to play along, or play around with these filters here, which are number of competitors and competitor rank. All right, basically, the number of competitors filter means of how many ASINs do you want to hit a certain criteria that you are about to specify. So, as you can see, here I had put five ASINs. So maybe I say, hey, I just want to see the keywords where a minimum of one competitor any one of these, or all five of them, it doesn’t matter is ranked between one and 10. So what I’m doing is I put number of competitors minimum one I don’t put a maximum and then under the competitor rank filter, I put one and 10. Now this is going to show me all of the keywords where just any one, any two, any three, any four, any five of these ASINs are ranked between one and 10, and I came up with 83 keywords. So, as you see, guys, the possibilities are endless here.

Bradley Sutton:

With all of these filters, there is no one magic way that’s going to get you the best keywords. Everybody has their own strategies. That’s why we have these filters. But even that one could get you sales trying to look for keywords that at least just one of your competitors is getting sales from. All right, guys, that ends part two of our keyword research masterclass. We’re going to have an unprecedented part three coming up soon, where we’re going to show you the rest of the Cerebro strategies and we’re even going to get into our other tool, magnet, to get you strategies that are going to give you sales that can help your business. So I hope you enjoyed this episode. We’ll see you in the next one.


Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunesSpotify, or wherever you listen to our podcast. 

Get snippets from all episodes by following us on Instagram at @SeriousSellersPodcast 

Want to absolutely start crushing it on Amazon? Here are few carefully curated resources to get you started: 

  • Freedom Ticket: Taught by Amazon thought leader Kevin King, get A-Z Amazon strategies and techniques for establishing and solidifying your business. 
  • Helium 10: 30+ software tools to boost your entire sales pipeline from product research to customer communication and Amazon refund automation. Make running a successful Amazon or Walmart business easier with better data and insights. See what our customers have to say.
  • Helium 10 Chrome Extension: Verify your Amazon product idea and validate how lucrative it can be with over a dozen data metrics and profitability estimation. 
  • SellerTrademarks.com: Trademarks are vital for protecting your Amazon brand from hijackers, and sellertrademarks.com provides a streamlined process for helping you get one.
Published in:
Published in: Serious Sellers Podcast

Achieve More Results in Less Time

Accelerate the Growth of Your Business, Brand or Agency

Maximize your results and drive success faster with Helium 10’s full suite of Amazon and Walmart solutions.