Amazon Backend Keywords for Listing Optimization

Estimated reading: 3 minutes

Backend Keywords are quite far from people’s mind while they start selling on Amazon. Most people assume for successful listings on Amazon, they’ll only need to focus on the visible sections of the product listing. However, backend search terms play a big role in keyword search optimization and therefore play a big role in improving the listing quality of your product.

Amazon also has a character limit on the number of backend terms that can be used in your product listing. In the most recent update, on 18th August 2017, Amazon announced that it will only be indexing 250 characters from the backend search terms.

How do the search terms matter at all?

Amazon understands the keywords for which your product should be indexed based on the backend keywords. If you were to remove all the keywords from the backend search terms, and then try checking the indexing of the product for any keyword, you’ll find that none of the keywords have your product indexed.

The search terms are therefore a very important factor to help you increase the visibility of the product at the same time optimize your product listing.

How to identify backend search terms for my Amazon product?

Identifying the right set of Amazon Backend Keywords for your Amazon product is not a very difficult task but it can be a little tricky.

Go to Keyword Research enter your product category. Find keywords that can go into your backend search terms.
Go to My products > Tracked Products > Product Keywords. Identify keywords that are most relevant to your product but not yet used in your product listing, add them to your backend.

Best practices for providing backend search terms

Don’t include product identifiers such as brand names, product names, compatible product names, ASINs, UPC codes, etc.
Don’t provide inaccurate, misleading, or irrelevant information such as the wrong product category, the wrong gender, out-of-context words, etc.
Don’t provide redundant information that is already captured in other fields such as title, author, product description, bullet points, brand, etc. It won’t improve your product placement in search results.
When entering several words as a search term, put them in the most logical order. A customer is more likely to search for big stuffed teddy bears than for teddy stuffed bears.
Use a single space to separate keywords. No commas, semicolons, carets are required.
Don’t include statements that are only temporarily true, e.g., “new,” “on sale,”, etc.
Don’t provide variants of spacing, punctuation, capitalization, and pluralization (“80GB” and “80 GB,” “computer” and “computers,” etc.).
Amazon search engine automatically includes different case forms, word forms, and spelling variants for searching.
Abbreviations, alternate names, topic (for books, etc.), and key character (for books, movies, etc.) could be included.

SellerPrime also has an Index Checker that enables you to check whether the search terms or the backend keywords are indexed for your product.