Amazon Keyword Research with Helium 10 for SEO Listing Optimization

Amazon keyword research is one of the first essentials for sellers to help rank their products organically and support their advertising efforts. 

At Better World Products, we use Helium 10’s powerful suite of tools throughout the listing optimization process and beyond, to find keywords, opportunities and optimize ad sets and listings. 

In this post, we’ll introduce and explain what keyword research entails and offer a step-by-step process for finding the perfect balance of keywords for your listings. 

Why do keywords matter?

Keywords are what connect your customer’s search to your product listing! Amazon is basically a search engine like Google, connecting the customer to the final product. The nice thing about Amazon is that the customers have much higher search intent – they’re usually there to buy. 

Just like Google, Amazon relies on keywords to determine which products appear when customers search for items. 

Amazon’s A9 algorithm and how it uses keywords

Amazon’s search engine (known as the A9 algorithm) figures out which products appear in search results based on relevance, performance and customer behavior.  

Keywords play a vital role here, signaling to Amazon which listings are the best match for a given query. 

If your listing doesn’t contain the right keywords, your product won’t be visible to shoppers, no matter how great it is. 

We go into more detail about the A9 algorithm and the Amazon sales flywheel here, but to keep it short, this is how keywords are used to rank products: 

Relevance

Amazon checks to see if the listing contains keywords that match the words the customer used in the search bar. 

Conversion Rate

Listings that convert better (customers buy) for a certain keyword will rank higher. More info here on conversion rate optimization. 

Sales velocity

Amazon loves products that sell fast. Listings that create steady sales signal to Amazon that customers want it, so it will push those listings to the top. 

Click-through rate (CTR)

A well-optimized title and main image attract more clicks, indicating that the listing is relevant. 

As you can see, all of the pieces influence each other, so it’s important to hit all the points you can.

Short tail vs long tail vs backend keywords

Not all keywords are created equal. The secret is to find the perfect balance between high search volume and competition.  

High volume (short tail) keywords

Short tail keywords are the more general keyword phrases. Think dog food. As of this writing, the search volume on this keyword is 284,557 per month. High volume keywords are great, but there is a LOT of competition for these and they’re often dominated by the more well-established brands. 

Example: “dog food” 

Low volume, long tail keywords

You can think of long tail keywords as more specialized or specific. Long tail keywords have lower search volume, but higher conversion rates because they focus on a smaller, more specific number of shoppers. 

Examples: “dog food for small dogs”, “dog food for sensitive stomachs”, “dog food for picky eaters”. 

Backend keywords

These are the keywords that are invisible to shoppers but help with indexing your product. You can add hidden keywords (also sometimes known as search terms) to the backend to improve your discoverability. 

Example: “dgo” (misspelling of dog), “comida para perros” (keyword in another language that cannot appear on live listing) 

As famous marketer Seth Godin said, “when you speak to everyone you speak to no one”. The best products are the ones that speak to a very specific target or niche. 

By using Helium 10’s tools, sellers can find hidden gem keywords (those with moderate search volume but low competition) to help rank higher and attract more targeted buyers. 

Keyword impact on PPC Advertising

Keywords don’t just affect organic rankings. They’re also important in Amazon PPC (pay-per-click) campaigns. Sellers on Amazon bid on keywords when running ads, so the better the keyword strategy, the lower your ad costs and ROI (return on investment) will be!  

Where do keywords appear?

Well ideally, keywords should appear everywhere throughout your listing copy – in the title, description and bullet points. 

Keep in mind that the placement of keywords is also important, with the title (closer to the beginning the better_ and search terms holding the most weight for keyword appearance, followed by bullets and description. 

Check out this post on how to write the perfect product title. 

If structured correctly, Amazon will automatically create a canonical URL from the first 5 words of your product title so think carefully about the keywords you use there. You can learn more about Amazon’s canonical URL and how you can edit it in this post. 

Helium 10’s keyword research tools

For Amazon keyword research, we use these main Helium 10 tools in combination: 

• Helium 10 browser extension (overview of product performance on Amazon search results page) 
• Cerebro (reverse ASIN lookup) 
• Magnet (broad keyword discovery) 
• Frankenstein (keyword processing and optimization) 
• Misspellinator (finds common misspellings) 
• Scribbles (to write and optimize the listing with keywords)

A step-by-step guide to doing Amazon keyword research using Helium 10

We’ll focus this post on an imaginary product we’re doing the Amazon keyword research for. An organic matcha green tea powder. 

Let’s go!  

Step 1. Identify main competitors with the Helium 10 browser extension

We use the Chrome browser extension because it allows you to easily see product rankings and categories in search results. This gives you an at-a-glance view so you don’t have to go digging through each listing to find all the correct links and information. 

1. Adjust the delivery address to the country of the marketplace you’ll be researching. 

2. Think of your “seed keyword” – the short tail keyword with the highest volume and competition. Basically, what is the product? In our case, let’s try “organic matcha powder”. Enter that into the search bar and hit search. (You’ll most likely do multiple searches for multiple seed keywords). It’ll look something like this:  

3. Identify the top 3-4 competitors to your products.  

Make sure to scroll past any “sponsored” products (they’re paying to appear up there). 

Note: Each category is different, but you’re looking for a BSR (sales rank) in the low thousands or hundreds.  This means that it’s selling and you want to analyze the product for the keywords it’s getting sales from. The higher the sales and longer the history the more keywords you will get. 

Below you’ll see some contenders. Pick your primary competitor. This is the most relevant high-ranking competitor. We’ll choose the Jade Leaf brand as it’s rated #1 in the Matcha Tea category. Copy the ASIN, and paste it into the spreadsheet you’ll be using for your keyword research. This will be the first ASIN we put into Helium 10’s Cerebro (order matters). 

Add the next most relevant ASINs to your keyword research spreadsheet. 

Step 2: Run a reverse ASIN lookup with Cerebro

Now that we have our top 3-4 competitors, let’s open up Helium 10’s Cerebro.  

1. Paste the ASINs from your spreadsheet into the search bar (make sure you’re searching in the right marketplace or you won’t find anything) and hit the “Get Keywords” button: 

As you can see from the results from our 3 ASINs, Cerebro found 7,158 keywords: 

2. Now it’s time to start filtering them to get between 20-100 highly relevant keywords. There are a myriad of ways to do this. 

How to filter the keywords: 

Helium 10’s Cebrero and other tools offer a variety of filters to help reduce the number of keywords. We’ll show you a few options you can try below this image:

1. Set a minimum search volume (this filters out keywords that no one is searching for or low-volume searches that aren’t worth your time). This can depend on the category. 

2. Set a minimum word count to at least 2. 

3. Set the competitor performance to a minimum of 6 and see what shows up (this can be fiddled around with depending on results). 

4. Enter some words to exclude. For example, if your matcha powder is Japanese and you see enough words that feature Chinese, you can exclude that. You can put brand names in here since Amazon doesn’t allow these anyway. 

1. As you refine the list you’ll likely keep adding to this list. 

5. Sort the results by search volume to see the highest volume keywords.  

6. Go through and delete any irrelevant keywords. For example, we noticed some keywords that contained “tea bags”, or “protein”, “sweet” or “sweetened”, “decaf”, so we removed those. Took note of any Spanish keywords and added them the list for the backend: 

7. Once you have enough, you can export the CSV or XLSX file: 

8. Save this list to your Amazon keyword research list. This will be important for importing later into listings and/or a keyword tracker.

Step 3: Organize your keywords with Frankenstein 

Now that we have our list of keyword phrases, we can clean, de-duplicate and optimize them using Helium 10’s Frankenstein tool.  

In the end, we harvested 49 keyword phrases. Let’s copy and paste them all into Frankenstein. Some of the settings will be automatically checked off like “remove duplicates”, “convert to lowercase” and “one wordphrase per line”. We can keep those as is. 

Next, tick the boxes as indicated in the screenshot below: include frequency word count, remove common words, and remove single letters. Next, you can sort the words from most frequent to least. 

We usually copy and paste these top words and frequency into our keyword research sheet. 

You might notice that a misspelling shows up here: the word “macha”. We can add this term to our backend keywords in the next part of the process. 

Step 4. Leverage Misspellinator for extra traffic

Even if a customer knows what they want, sometimes they can spell it incorrectly. By collecting some of these misspellings (for example macha) and adding them to your back end keywords, you might be able to attract these customers without affecting the readability of your product listing.  

Let’s take that condensed list of our top keywords, paste them into Misspellinator and hit the “Prepare” button. 

Hit “Select All” to check all the keywords. Start unchecking the irrelevant words like measurements, locations, brand names, or words that have already been misspelled (like macha). Click “Find misspellings” and let it process a moment. 

You’ll see the list of common misspellings. Helium 10 automatically selects terms that Amazon doesn’t autocorrect. We will keep both: 

Click “Copy Selected” and add those words to your keywords research spreadsheet. 

Key Takeaways

We hope our Amazon keyword research guide has been helpful! By leveraging Helium 10’s Cerebro, Magnet, Frankenstein, and Misspellinator, you can: 

• Identify popular keywords used by top competitors 

• Expand to discover additional, high-intent search terms 

• Organize your findings into a clear, refined keyword list 

• Integrate those keywords naturally into your listing and backend 

• Track your progress and adapt to marketplace changes with Keyword Tracker. 

Taking advantage of misspelled keywords and other advanced strategies will further set you apart from sellers who rely only on the most obvious search terms. Implement these steps consistently, and watch your sales grow as you climb Amazon’s search rankings. 

Ready to optimize your niche product listing? 

Sign up for Helium 10 today and tap into the full power of their keyword research suite.