The Importance of your Amazon Product Title

One of the first things shoppers see is your Amazon product title. We don’t have to tell you how important it is – that’s obvious – but why is it important? And what can you do to make the most out of those 150 characters?

Why is the product title important?

In January, Amazon made some policy changes to product titles. You can see all the policy changes here, but in a nutshell:

• The maximum characters you can have is now 200 instead of 150, including spaces
• Special characters  !, $, ?, _, {, }, ^, ¬, and ¦ cannot be used unless it’s part of the brand name
• Titles cannot include the same word more than twice

It’s important to create the best possible title for CTR to help your listing rank organically. At Brand Monkey, we use customer search term data for listings to optimise our product titles, so we’ve got a few tips to share.

The Visuals

Aside from your main image, the Amazon product title is pretty much all shoppers see of your product in a search. You have up to 200 characters to create your title, but there’s a catch. Not all 200 characters can be seen. Approximately the first 100 characters can be seen on desktop, and only 80 characters on mobile view. The rest will be hidden by ellipses as seen below. Only clicking on your product will show the whole title.

So, to catch your reader’s eye, you need to put the most important information at the beginning. Think about what they’re searching for and put that information at the start of your Amazon product title. Hand their answer to them on a plate.

Here’s the desktop view of product listings in the search results.

And here’s the mobile view.

In the above products, you can see the information at the start tells the customer exactly what the product is, who it’s from and what it can be used for. Customers can see all the main information straight away, which helps brands stand out in the scrolling culture. We have to make it as easy as possible for them to find what they want.

SEO

We always talk about how important SEO is and finding those perfect keywords. If it’s the bane of your life, check out our blog on easy ways to find keywords. We promise it’s not as painful as you think!

Now, the Amazon product title is the perfect place to put your keywords. You don’t have to overstuff your title with keywords as it can come across as a pushy sales tactic. Not only that, but it can also become difficult to read. It’s more pleasing and inviting for a shopper when your title is properly structured and has a natural flow. Take a look below at this Scottish Salmon Oil product from Pawbits.

We can presume the SEO terms in the Amazon product title include ‘Scottish Salmon Oil’, ‘Cats & Dogs’ and ‘Fish Oil’ for definite. They could also be ‘Omega 3+6+9’, ‘Healthy Coat’ and ‘Immune System’. However, how it’s been written has a natural flow to it so it doesn’t feel like we’re having SEO rammed in our face! They’ve told the customers what they’re getting and some benefits of the product without them having to search very far. They’ve also included their brand name as the first word, which is a great way for building brand awareness should customers start looking for other pet-based products.

One important note: even though your whole title may not be seen in the listing search, remember you still have 150 characters to use. All of them go towards the search algorithms, even if they can’t be seen until they click on your product listing. Don’t waste them – make each character count!

Optimising your listing

At the end of the day, it’s all about optimising your listing. It can feel time-consuming, but the more effort you put into it, the more likely you’ll appear near the top of the listing search.

Below is a way we track the performance of a product from launch, or changes made, to assess the product’s optimisation.

Not only is it important to spend time optimising your products, you should also analyse the results so you know where and when to make improvements. For example, you can see the Organic Rank Averages increased over time, but the search term volume decreased. This could mean it’s time to refresh your keywords.

Check out this blog for more ideas on how to make the most out of your Amazon listing. Don’t forget to optimise for mobile as well! 53% of Amazon’s traffic comes from mobile devices nowadays.

If you’d like more tips and tricks for selling on Amazon, head to our blog.