Jackanapes: optimising our copy for Amazon

Amazon SEO copy is an incredibly important factor when launching a business on the platform. 87% of customers believe product descriptions are very important when buying something on Amazon. Luckily, creating informative and memorable copy is something Brand Monkey has always excelled at.

Jackanapes Amazon copy

Having decided on a quirky, comedic tone of voice, our copywriter got to work on creating some product copy. This included the title, bullet points and product description Amazon offers as a basic package. These are the first pieces of SEO visible when clicking on a product, making it a crucial piece of real estate on a listing. Whilst we knew we wanted to take advantage of Amazon’s Premium A+ Content, as the conversion rate can be 5% higher, this would take further graphic design input to really maximise its offering. We would inevitably need to start with high-quality copy anyway which is the foundation of a high-converting listing.

As we already had a very clear tone of voice in our imagery, we really wanted to expand on that within the writing. On top of embellishing our personality as a brand, the copy also needed to be full of searchable keywords in order to boost our SEO ranking within the chilli sauce category.

Title

This may seem like the easiest bit to write because it’s so short! However, as the title is the first thing the customer sees in their search, along with your main image, it stands out as one of the most important parts. It needs to be clear, concise and state exactly what your product is. Waffling and keyword stuffing in the title is asking for trouble. You should include:

• The name of your product
• Your brand name
• Quantities, measurements or weights
• Any important or standout features that may help towards SEO

It seems a lot to fit into a title that’s no more than 150 characters long! But it’s doable for any product. The first 80 characters are the most important as that’s what is seen on mobile view. Make sure to put the most relevant information at the start.

Future Top Tip: With the recent introduction of extended search term characters, Amazon may opt for shorter titles in future. This will create more space within the search domain, we think most likely for more sponsored ad placements!

For example, in our title above, the first piece of information is the product name, brand name and weight. It’s short and to the point. Our next section includes a few important features and keywords that describe exactly what the product is; ‘Caribbean Inspired Vegan Cooling Fruit Jam‘. When you look at the titles of other products, you’ll notice a lot of them tend to list a bunch of keywords one after the other rather than creating sentences. They’re trying to hit as many consumer search results as possible – who can blame them? Personally, we feel this looks a bit messy. We prefer to find ways of including keywords in a more constructed way. In this case, using a simple sentence.

The second half of the title bleeds into the 80+ characters, so mobile users wouldn’t technically get to see it. However, that doesn’t mean it can’t contribute to your SEO. We decided to include a couple of highlighted features in the last section; ‘Palette Cleansing‘, ‘Sweet Condiment‘ and ‘Touch of Lime‘. These little elements are not only great for SEO but also for explaining exactly what our product is. Customers only spend a few seconds looking at a product before moving on, so immediate clarity is the way to go.

The Amazon guidelines

Another thing to bear in mind with product titles is that there are Amazon guidelines that must be adhered to. For titles, these are:

• Don’t include promotional phrases and misleading promises such as “100% satisfaction guaranteed”, “Best Seller,” or “Free shipping worldwide.”
• Don’t include special characters such as {~ ! * $ ? _ ~ { } # < > | * ; ^ ¬ ¦
• Never use ALL CAPS in your product titles.
• The first letter of each word must be capitalized, except for prepositions (with, in, on), articles (a, an), and conjunctions (or, for, and).
• Use numerals instead of words (e.g., 5 instead of Five)
• Refrain from using ASCII characters such as © or ®
• Use hyphens (-) and slashes (/) when separating information.
• Use measurement abbreviations such as KG (kilogram), MM (millimetres), etc. when needed.
• Include the size and colour variations of your product in the product titles for your Child ASIN, not the main ASIN.

A well-constructed title can improve click-through rates. If you’re unsure if something will work, Amazon also offers A/B testing of titles so you can try out different things.

Bullet points

Once you’ve managed to tempt in your consumer with your product title and images, their focus turns to the bullet points. These should have all the relevant information from your product description condensed into 5 short paragraphs. A lot of brands tend to fill these in with very brief information – and we mean brief! How much can you really write about plain white envelopes anyway?

Surprisingly, quite a lot if you know how to fluff things up! You’re still selling your product. It’s still a place where you can let your personality shine and establish a connection with the potential customer. Plus why give up the opportunity of including more keywords to really boost that SEO.

We found creating a simple sub-heading within the bullet point was a great way of breaking up the wall of text. It meant we could grab a readers attention as they were scanning the page by having some sections that stood out. We chose to include some of our character catchphrases and leading questions that would set their mind whirring.

The 5 topics for your bullet points

For each bullet point we use no more than 300 characters, including spaces, with a specific topic or question that we cover in each one.

1. Answering the question, ‘what have they searched for?’ We’re specifically highlighting their pain point, need or want and introducing them to our product as the solution.
2. What are the advantages of our product? Here we like to give a few more details on the product itself. In this case we could focus on the ingredients so the customer knows exactly what they’re getting. Building trust is important as a brand.
3. What are the benefits of using our product? We want to help consumers visualise how they could use the products. A hot sauce is not just for sprinkling as a dip – there’s so much it can be used for! This is a great place to highlight things your customer may not have thought of and shed light on how it can improve their experiences. For Jackanapes, it’s a chance for us to try and get their mouths watering.
4. Sustainability is an important point to include. Not only is nutritional information important to make clear, like vegan, vegetarian or gluten free products, but nowadays people are choosing to shop in a more eco-friendly fashion. If you can show your products are widely recyclable or ethically sourced, definitely put this up here. This bullet point is also handy if you have a lot of other features or strong selling points. Show off all the great things about your product in the first section the customer will see. A customer will rarely scroll down unless you’ve hooked them in from the start.
5. Don’t forget to mention your business. You don’t have to go into huge detail, but people appreciate knowing where the products have come from and who they’re investing in. A little introduction does wonders for making you more personable and approachable, potentially influencing repeat business.

As you can see from our bullet points above, we’ve managed to include keywords without overstuffing or sounding unnatural. ‘Carolina Reaper‘, ‘hot sauce‘ and ‘chilli‘ are mentioned numerous times, really elevating our SEO in the search results. Some brands like to pack their bullet points with keywords to the point where it’s almost unreadable. Others will just write a very simple list. Writing good copy is an art. You’re trying to sell your product without sounding like you’re forcing it down their throats. You’re also trying to sound like a human being. Buying online has taken away the personal element that so many customers love, so if you can bring that back in with personable copy, it may just elevate your brand above the competition.

Product description

Once the bullet points are written, the product description is actually fairly easy to complete as you can use the information you’ve already written. However, websites always know when you’ve just copied and pasted, so you have to remember to make a few slight edits.

Because this section allows up to 2000 characters, it’s a chance for us to be a little more elaborate with our copy. We’re storytellers after all!

Again, we like to start in a similar way to the bullet points – focusing on the customer’s pain point, want or need. Why would they be looking at your Amazon listing? For Jackanapes Hot Sauces, it’s almost certainly because they’re looking for something to spice up their food. By starting with a question posed directly to them, we’re immediately getting to the point. We’re showing them we know what they’re looking for. That they can trust in us to deliver the goods.

As you can see, the description uses a lot of the bullet point information. It’s just been slightly reorganised or rephrased so it’s different enough to avoid the dreaded judgement of the copy and paste.

The end of the product description is the perfect place to include additional storage or usage info that you feel isn’t really interesting enough to include in your bullet points. It’s important to have it there just to cover all bases should anyone question or offer feedback in future.

For those without access to A+ Content, it’s important to make use of the product description. We decided to go ahead with the basic product description so we could start getting our products out there whilst we worked behind the scenes on some premium A+ Content.

Once our products went live on Amazon, we could really see the results of the combination of copy, images and SEO. But what we really needed were honest reviews from customers to start boosting our presence online. Find out how we managed to get them in the next blog…