In this Throwback episode, host Josh interviews Steven Pope from My Amazon Guy about advanced strategies for Amazon sellers, especially those with mature or seven-figure brands. Steven details the importance of focusing on SEO, PPC, merchandising, and design, and explains why SEO should be continuously optimized. He shares a case study on using Amazon’s search query performance report to find untapped keywords, and discusses practical tactics like updating product images and A/B testing. The episode wraps up with Steven’s favorite business resources and advice to take action and keep improving your Amazon business.
Chapters:
Introduction & Episode Overview (00:00:00)
Josh introduces Steven Pope and sets up the discussion on advanced Amazon content strategies for mature brands.
The Four Pillars of Amazon Success (00:00:40)
Steven outlines the four key areas: SEO, PPC, merchandising, and design, emphasizing their importance for traffic and conversion.
Challenges Facing Amazon Sellers (00:02:10)
Discussion of increased competition, shrinking margins, and the need to focus on fundamentals instead of hacks or blackhat tactics.
Deep Dive: SEO is Not Set-and-Forget (00:03:51)
Steven explains his multi-phase SEO approach and stresses the importance of continuous optimization.
Case Study: Using Search Query Performance Report (00:04:12)
Steven introduces the ICAP marketing funnel and demonstrates how to use Amazon’s search query performance report to find valuable keywords.
Market Share Growth Example (00:06:18)
Steven shares a real-world example of tripling market share for a previously overlooked keyword using data-driven SEO.
Image Optimization & A/B Testing (00:08:15)
Discussion on improving product images (e.g., adding age ranges) and the impact on click-through rates, with a live example.
Implementing Data-Driven Content Changes (00:09:59)
How to use search data to inform content updates, including A/B testing and targeting specific demographics.
Three Actionable Takeaways (00:11:30)
Josh summarizes key steps: analyze search query data, implement keyword-driven content changes, and A/B test main images and A+ content.
Favorite Business Book (00:13:17)
Steven shares his most influential book, “The Road Less Stupid,” and its impact on his decision-making.
Favorite Productivity Tool (00:13:48)
Steven discusses his upcoming productivity tool, Hybrid, and mentions the value of tools like Calendly.
Recommended Ecommerce Influencer (00:14:33)
Steven recommends following Harry Joiner for unique ecommerce insights and strategy frameworks.
Final Words of Wisdom (00:15:18)
Steven encourages listeners to take action and shares his contact info for feedback and stories.
Podcast Closing (00:15:41)
Josh thanks Steven for joining the podcast and wraps up the episode.
Links and Mentions:
Tools and Resources
Seller Central
Pickfu
Calendly
Books
The Road Less Stupid
Traction
Scaling Up
People to Follow
Harry Joiner on LinkedIn
Transcript:
Josh 00:00:00 Today I’m speaking with Steven Pope of my Amazon guy, and we will be talking a lot about content, strategies and how to uplevel your game on Amazon to capture more traffic and drive more revenue. We talked about this prior to recording Hitting the record button on this podcast, but I want to learn from you. And our audience is going to be interested, Steven, to learn. What would you recommend? Seven figure sellers and those that are maybe experienced on Amazon? They have a mature brand, so to speak. What should they be focusing on? Amazon, especially knowing where, you know, kind of the puck is going in the future with Amazon where things are going. What strategies would you recommend sellers be implementing right now?
Steven 00:00:40 Anything that generates traffic and improves conversion rates. Full stop. That’s it. That’s all you got to focus on those two basic parameters. Now I can break those two down one layer deeper. Yep. Under traffic there’s PPC and SEO and under conversion there’s merchandising and design. So those four pillars make up E-commerce on Amazon.
Steven 00:01:01 And so as we continue to go down even a layer further. Content production is the most underrated, easiest thing to do. As an Amazon seller that is being abandoned. Now, obviously there’s a lot of cardinal rules of Amazon. Like never go out of stock. That’s cardinal rule number one. And cardinal rule number two is kind of like cardinal rule number one. Don’t go out of stock. Right. And so like those are important concepts. But when we look down to the very basics of how to sell more products to more people, more often for more money, it comes back to those four pillars SEO, PPC, design and merchandising. And if you were ignoring 1 or 2, maybe even three of those protocols, you’re in a world of hurt right now. You are losing to the Chinese who are hacking your accounts and your listings. You are losing to Amazon’s policies, who are clamping down and making it harder to be on the platform. You are losing to your Are competitors who are in a death spiral with margin problems, but are still lowering their prices because consumer demand is down and inflation is like 27%, despite what the government claims.
Steven 00:02:10 Whatever the government says, triple it. That’s the true inflation rate. And so people’s margins are shrinking. Policies are harder. Competition is steeper. Let’s throw aggregators into the mix too. They’re buying up all the brands and then, you know, really messing with the marketplace. And and so like all of these things make it so that Amazon is entering the maturity phase. So it was a seven figure Amazon seller. You need to get back down to the basics. Ignore all of the hacks. Do this two step URL. Everything will be fine. Yeah. Then your next hey do rebates and then all of a sudden you’re you’re banned right. Or or incentivized reviews. And then what happens. Right. All of these things are against policy and they are blackhat tactics. Stick to the basics SEO, PPC, design, merchandising. If you’re trying to violate the basics by overcoming them with alternative options, you’re going to reap alternative benefits. And those are not good benefits.
Josh 00:03:11 That’s a fantastic breakdown. I love that you, you know, gave us a layer deeper there.
Josh 00:03:15 You know, you have the traffic and then the conversion. Then you gave us basically four kind of areas that seven figure sellers or anybody in general on Amazon should be focused on. So, Steven, I would love for us to dive in to each of these, you know, individually. Let’s talk about SEO. What are some quick wins that we could do with SEO, PPC, you know, and then we can really dive into the merchandising and the design, because that’s where I think a lot of that content strategy that you talked about is going to make a big impact. But let’s start at SEO. What are some quick wins and things that we should be focused on?
Steven 00:03:51 SEO has, in my opinion, a multiple phase approach. It’s not SEO is not set it and forget it. SEO is not set it and forget it. SEO is in fact the opposite of that. SEO is. Let me optimize it continuously. Therefore, if you buy that paradigm, it’ll shift how you make content.
Steven 00:04:12 For example, if we went through my four phases of SEO, I would tell you you need to index the product. You need to incrementally index the product. You then need to rank the product and then you need to gain market share. Those are my four SEO phases. And and so today I’d love to talk about how we go about gaining market share with SEO. And I’ve got a case study and some stuff I can show. so so we could talk about the Icap marketing funnel. This is what I call it. And it stands for Icap impressions. Clicks Add to Carts and purchases Icap Marketing Funnel. This data that we’re about to show you is available for free inside a seller central in the Search query performance report. And we’re going to live demo it today and go through it. So here’s a case study. This is a keyword called sage candles for cleansing House. And just for some basically to understand what product we’re looking at here is my product. It is a sage, bundle. It’s dried sage sticks and and leaves, and you burn it to clean a house, cleanse it rather.
Steven 00:05:21 And so I have 1166 reviews on this listing. It’s it’s coming up on its one year anniversary today. It’s got Amazon’s choice for incense. and when I first launched this product, it became the number one seller in all of incense, for the new release. So it got the new release batch. So it’s a very successful product. So the reason I showcased this is because when you look at the keyword that we’re going to talk about today, Sage Candles for cleansing House and I go over to Amazon right now and I type that keyword in. And you look at the search results, well you see my ad come up number one with the sage bundle and all that good stuff, right? Looking good there. But everywhere else you see is a candle. Candle, candle candle candle candle, candle. You just go down the list and it’s nothing but candles, essentially. So when this showed up on my my brand search query Analytics performance report, where I call the Icap Marketing funnel, and it was showing up number one on my list, I was really surprised.
Steven 00:06:18 And so I was like, well, why is this? Well, when I was looking at this keyword, I saw that my impressions share my market share. This is of all impressions available on Amazon for this keyword, and this keyword range is about 3000 weekly searches, so about 12,000 monthly. And it dips up and down depending on the season. and, and this, this query, I own 2.75% of impressions. Now, mind you, I’ve never focused on this keyword. Prior to starting work here. I had no idea this keyword existed, but it showed up on my search query performance report and I was like, interesting. It was it number one. It was the number one keyword that Amazon said I should focus on was not even on my radar. So my click my click share was at 7.58%. I had to cart. So was that 8.9. My purchases at 6.6. And I said to myself, oh, this is interesting. So it was a marketing funnel. Normally it’s a tornado where you lose people as they go farther down in the funnel.
Steven 00:07:12 And I had a pyramid. Not a tornado. I had the inverse of a classic marketing funnel. I had more market share under clicks than I had under impressions. And I said, interesting, why is that? And I studied it, and I concluded that this keyword was not only relevant to my listing, that I was going to go out and generate additional traffic on this keyword. I said to myself, the search performance report tells me this is important, so I’m going to use the Icap marketing funnel methodology that I teach, and we’re going to go out and we’re going to gain some market share. And within seven weeks, I basically tripled my market share from 3% impressions to 7% from 8% clicks to 20% from 9% ad to cars to 21%, and basically one out of five people now purchase my product off of this keyword. One out of five. And this is for a keyword I didn’t even know was important. Now remember I told you there’s 3000 weekly impressions, 12,000 monthly? Run the math on that one out of five people who searches for that keyword buys my product.
Steven 00:08:15 This is one single keyword. So if you if you go to Amazon right now and type in the word journal, okay, people that have the word journal as a text on the main image are going to get a higher CTR. you could layer this down even further. So I have a friend who I’m helping right now with their with their journal. So this is the new image. Nice. And by showcasing the fact that this is for ages 6 to 12, it made a massive difference. How big of a difference? Well, 45 to 5 people like this image better. Right. That is a 90% mandate. Anything about 60%? I like to call it a mandate. So here is the original image. What’s wrong with this original image? Well, first of all, if you shrunk that down to 100 pixels, which is the size of an image on side of Amazon search, you can’t read it. You can’t read any of it because it’s embossed. It’s not it’s not written. So what we did is we photoshopped, a new little white banner there and made the kids journal words gigantic.
Josh 00:09:22 So this is not. Then you didn’t have to repackage this product, right?
Steven 00:09:26 We did it. Not yet. He’s going to after he sees his sales triple, but like, but right now, just to get on base, we just photoshopped the new main image. We took a picture of one of his best pages inside of the journal, and we opened it up so you could tell, hey, there’s weird drawings of creatures. It looks like a kid’s journal just based on seeing that. And then just to add to this, we added we slapped on age 6 to 12. Right on top. Yep. So that way when somebody’s looking for a journal for their six year old kid, whose product are they more likely to click on now? Well, the new Photoshop job or the old one.
Josh 00:09:59 And I’m assuming obviously they’re going to click on the button that says 6 to 12. But I’m assuming you also did this because there’s some search query performance data backing up the fact that there are people searching for journals for six year olds or journals for, you know, elementary age.
Josh 00:10:18 You know.
Steven 00:10:19 That’s exactly what we did. We looked at the search query performance report. We figured out what the highest search volume keyword that was already performing well on this product. And we said, cool, now let’s go triple our traffic by adding age 6 to 12 right there, kids Journal right there. And and then if you go look at the content that they they left. And by the way, when I ran this AB test pick, Foo had the ability to switch my demographics between age 5 to 10 or 5 to 12 or something like that. And so I chose the specific demographic to prove a point. People who have kids in this age range are going to click on this product more. This product is meant for kids aged 6 to 12. Therefore, let’s chase that demographic. Let’s put let’s put it right on the content. Let’s put it right on the main image and let’s help them out. And and if you read through some of these comments, I like the fact that it shows the appropriate age group for the journal.
Steven 00:11:08 Right. That’s a great comment. Yep. you know, and she sees an age label, they, you know, age label because it makes it clear that a kid’s journal is more animated and fun looking like on and on and on. All of these content say the same thing over and over again. And so convincing my friend that he needed to change his Amazon listing. Not hard. Not hard at all.
Josh 00:11:30 Sure. I’m gonna break down. I think for our audience, three main takeaways. Actionable steps that you can make to your business today. To increase sales. Take your brand to the next level. Number one, dive into your search query performance. Because like Steven mentioned, there was a keyword that he was getting traffic from, but it did not register initially on his keyword. You know, his keyword list when he was initially creating that listing. And like Steven mentioned as well. Keywords and SEO should not be a set and forget it strategy. This should be something that you’re paying attention to seeing what’s working now.
Josh 00:12:09 And obviously seasonal traffic can bring different keywords at different times of the year. So I think that’s so important, like pay attention to what’s going on in that search query performance. That’s action item number one. Number two is actually taking step or action on step number one. So identify those keywords. But then start implementing those changes into your content and your merchandising. So a perfect example is you know adding in the age range if that’s a big keyword for your particular product, adding that to your main image, could be adding those simple keywords into your A+ content or your title like we showed on that live demo. And then last but not least is a B testing your product images and even A+ content, right? Especially that main image. That’s where you’re going to get the most clicks to even open up and go check out your detail page. So one of the most important images that everybody should be a B testing is their main image. Steven, a couple last questions that I’d like to to ask all of the the guests that come on the podcast.
Josh 00:13:17 Number one is what has been your most influential book in your life and why?
Steven 00:13:21 The Road less stupid, without a doubt. I like traction. I like scaling up. I like a bunch of other business books, but scaling up has a special place in my heart. His main thesis is take time to think. If you don’t have scheduled thinking time on your calendar, you are going to make piss poor decisions.
Josh 00:13:40 I agree with that. That’s a great recommendation. Next question I have for you. What’s your favorite productivity tool or resource that you’ve been using?
Steven 00:13:48 Well, we are making one right now. We’re going to release this to our own company. It’s called hybrid, and it’s going to be a tool that will combine all of the great elements to run an entire agency in one spot. Tools like Asana and Time Doctor and invoicing and a bunch of other cool things all in one spot. but if you asked me this question three years ago, I would have told you calendly because nobody was using it back then.
Steven 00:14:13 What? You know, basically somebody can see my availability and hire me for a coaching call. Same day appointments available because of a productivity tool like that?
Josh 00:14:22 Yeah, I love that, I love that. And last thing here, Steven, who is somebody that you like to follow in the ecommerce space that you feel is somebody that people should be paying attention to?
Steven 00:14:33 I like Harry Joyner. he’s an e-commerce recruiter who has the ability to do two by two on any subject. So when I mean by two by two is he can break any issue down to a quadrant and figure out where to focus. So for example, new to old, old and new. So that means new customers, old customers, new product. Old product. Who to sell, what to? Who and selling new to new has always been my quadrant. And so Harry Joyner can just explain, how to articulate a marketing strategy. And he’s just got a lot of great, unique content you won’t see anywhere else. So you can find him on LinkedIn.
Steven 00:15:09 He owns e-commerce jobs. Com as well.
Josh 00:15:11 Awesome. Brilliant. Well, Steven, is there any last parting words of wisdom you’d like to share with our audience before we sign off today?
Steven 00:15:18 Just do it. Just take one thing and go do it, guys. You know, E-4 and most important move in business is E4, which is literally take that pawn and move it forward two spaces on the chessboard and just go get it done. I’d love to hear how things work for you guys. If anybody listened to this entire podcast and takes action and has success or maybe failure, tell me about your failures too. I would love to hear from you guys. Send me an email to podcast at Miami. Com.
Josh 00:15:41 Awesome. Steven, it’s been a pleasure having you on the podcast. Thanks for joining us.
Steven 00:15:46 All right. Thanks, Josh.
