Introduction

In episode #450 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley invites the “Professor of Amazon” Howard Thai back on the show to discuss all things Amazon Algorithm Related.
 
One misconception that’s cleared up is that there is no such thing as the Amazon “A10” algorithm. We go into where this terminology came from and, more importantly, what are the top things to keep in mind for optimization your listing for the Amazon Algorithm in 2023.

Signalytics has been at the forefront of using AI since before it became “stylish” to do so, and Howard talks about interesting things they have been using it for such as doing heatmaps on listing pages to see what buyers do after getting on a product page.

In episode 450 of the Serious Sellers Podcast, Bradley and Howard discuss:

• 02:56 – Is there a Such Thing as the A10 Amazon Algorithm?
• 04:50 – What are Differences of the Amazon Algorithm in 2023?
• 07:10 – Absorbing Keyword Ranking Juice of Competitors
• 08:40 – The Importance of Adds-To-Cart and Off-Amazon Traffic
• 12:10 – What Parts of Listings are Most Important
• 15:20 – Howard’s Launch Strategy
• 19:20 – How to Get Amazon’s Choice Badges
• 22:00 – How Howard is using A.I.
• 25:10 – More A.I. Use Cases for Amazon Sellers
• 26:00 – What are Black Hat Sellers doing in 2023?
• 28:00 – Can You Protect Against Fake Reviews?
• 28:45 – Howard’s Hobbies and Health Routine
• 30:53– Howard’s Sixty Second Tips

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Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

Today we’ve got the professor of Amazon back on the show, and he’s gonna drop a lot of knowledge bombs about how the Amazon algorithm is working in 2023 and PPPC Tips, launch tips, and even AI tips. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

Do you have writer’s block with creating or editing your listing? Would you like to get some help from ChatGPT? Well, make sure to use Listing Builder with AI inside of Helium 10. And with a click of a button, have sections or even your entire listing created by AI using the keywords that you say are the most important. If you have Helium 10, you have access to this already. Go to Listen Builder in Helium 10 and give it a try. Or for more information, visit h10.me/listenbuilder. Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of the Serious Sellers Podcast by Helium 10. I am your host, Bradley Sutton, and this is the show that’s a completely BS free, unscripted, and unrehearsed organic conversation about serious strategies for serious sellers of any level in the e-commerce world. And we’ve got a serious seller here back on the show for the first time in a while. Howard, how’s it going?

Howard:

I’m good. How are you doing?

Bradley Sutton:

Pretty good. Pretty good. Now this is you don’t know this person, but if my calculations are correct, this is actually a momentous time because this is episode four 50, and this is the first time in two years since episode 200, or actually since episode one 50, when I have not done every 50 episodes in the Maldives. So like, this is very momentous, I’m here in San Diego at my house and, or I was like, you know what? I can’t keep affording to go to the Maldives every six months. So I’m gonna save that for episode 500. But Howard, we picked a special number for you to be on here, so no pressure.

Howard:

Thank you. I try.

Bradley Sutton:

Now part of that, I’m like, all right, well I gotta do something special, so I’m just gonna I keep telling people that I’m trying to get more healthy and things like that. So I’m on my usually don’t do this, but I’m on my treadmill, my standing desk treadmill here, so I’m gonna try and lose some weight while we listen to and learn from Howard. So Howard, actually before the pandemic, didn’t you most of the time live in China?

Howard:

Yeah, before the pandemic. I moved to China in 2009. So I stayed there like until like 2020, 2020, I believe it was February 2020. And then I kind of had to evacuate China so that I can do a mastermind in Kabul San Lucas.

Bradley Sutton:

I wanted to have you on here cuz you know, you’ve always had like special insights into Amazon algorithm and things that go into ranking and things. And one thing that was really upsetting me lately, cuz it hasn’t happened for a few years, but then all of a sudden you would see all of these kinds of posts out there whether it’s LinkedIn or whether it’s blogs and people talking about, oh yeah, Amazon has released the A10 algorithm and it’s changed and, and this is what you need to do. I would think that a lot of people follow, like are putting out wrong information because you tell me, is there such thing as the A10 algorithm?

Howard:

I don’t there’s nothing n no such thing as an A10 algorithm because the algorithm is actually nine characters, so it’s A9, right?

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. So talk about how the A9 algorithm, like how that got kind of like-named because it, it’s not like Amazon in their documentation says, oh, there’s such thing as the A9 algorithm, but how did sellers come to call it like the A9 algorithm?

Howard:

I don’t think it’s sellers. It’s actually from Amazon itself. If you go on to a9.com, you’ll see that it should be Let me try it right now again, just I’ll kick myself in the face. But, if you go to a9.com, it should go directly to Amazon itself. And then amazon.com. So that’s what it is. A9.com is actually Amazon.com when it is forwarded.

Bradley Sutton:

Because it was the name of the company that they bought who like made the algorithm, I believe it was called A9 and it actually had its own website before, but now yeah, you’re right, like it forwards to Amazon. Now, now Amazon, throughout the years, of course, just like any software company, of course, updates this algorithm here and there. But have you heard of anything like major in the last, few months at all about the algorithm?

Howard:

Oh well, A9, well, the algorithm, right? For Amazon, it’s always changing here and there left and right because they are maybe testing things or they’re actually putting more weights on special signals we call it here. So there’s a lot of things that they try to kind of adjust to get down to a better customer experience.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Now before I remember, you would speak at different events and you had some special insight into some of the things because I think the most common thing that everybody knows, and it’s just like a no-brainer that has to do with that how Amazon search algorithm works is, hey, if somebody searches for a product and then they buy it that’s gonna help the algorithm. Like because Amazon is in the business of trying to make money, so obviously they want to prioritize in the search results, the products that make the most sales, but it would be erroneous to think that it’s only sales that influence the algorithm. What are some of the things that, you know with your knowledge and your experience and your context, you can tell us that are other factors that go into how Amazon ranks products and search results?

Howard:

So Amazon does a lot of you know, they look at a lot of different signals on how to rank keywords and well in the very beginning, right? When you have a honeymoon period and they will actually go in and look at your keyword sets and what people are actually buying from that keyword to your listing. That’s one of the basic things. But in reality, like people, they’re also looking at things like if they landed it on, someone searched a keyword, right? Let’s say keto or something like that, and then they land in on your competitor’s listing, right? And from that competitor listing, they actually go in and buy your products under the related stuff or the sponsored stuff there. You’re actually your keywords juice, ranking juice, you actually absorb the keyword ranking juice from that competitor, we call it relevancy, right? From that particular competitor. So it’s like, kind of like you’re, you’re like absorbing their powers, absorbing their keywords into your listing.

Bradley Sutton:

Sounds like something out of like Marvel or DC Universe movie or something. Alright, well, what else is like one thing that I never could understand I would hear it talked about by you and others is like, oh yeah, add to carts is so important. And to me that just seemed ridiculous because I’m like, me, I guess I’m the weird one, but like me as a buyer, when I search for something on Amazon and I add it to my cart, I check out like I buy it. But when Amazon started releasing more data like Search Query Performance and different data points, you could actually see that the majority of people aren’t like me. They like add things to their cart and then maybe they don’t buy it for a few days, or they add like 10 things to their cart and then they choose like one of them that they’re actually gonna buy. And so, like, that’s why I could never understand like why people would focus on add to cart or why Amazon focuses on it. But, but Amazon is looking at that, right? And then that also would go into their algorithm.

Howard:

Yeah. add to cart is very important. They consider it as two things, right? One of ’em is in order to get your Amazon choice batch. The other one is, it’s called an expected conversion. They expect a certain amount of add-to-cart will lead to a certain amount of conversion. So the more add to cart, the more possibility or expected conversion they expect. So they, so with that said, they would have a collection of data points that will tell you, Hey, these people add to cart, let’s go and retarget them through email marketing through when you get those emails, you say, Hey, why is, why am I getting these emails that I was looking at? And it looks like it’s, I haven’t been looking at this. I haven’t been actually buying this, but then they’re actually giving a discount, a 20% discount or whatnot just so that I can come back and buy it. You know, like things like that you could see like it’s kind of how Amazon targets retargets them through that cart.

Bradley Sutton:

Yep. And then also what have you found in your experiments and like maybe research just from what you’ve heard about, about offsite traffic as far as for the search algorithm like there, there, there’s been debate out there, like if somebody makes a keyword search in Google, clicks on an Amazon product and the search results, can Amazon actually see what they search for on Google and thus helps their rank juice a little bit for that keyword? Or is it only looking at the canonical URL that somebody has clicked on? But what’s your best advice as far as like, like Google and other search engine traffic, how that can help if it can help your Amazon ranking?

Howard:

So from what we’ve been seeing throughout a lot of data points that we have, Google is the most relevant for the keywords, right? Amazon can actually track those keywords that are coming from Google. Other platforms like TikTok and others, aren’t able to track those keywords as much. So it’s really relevant that if you’re coming from Google, then you would be actually getting more priority on those keyword ranking juices because Amazon wants people to come from Google because they want to make sure that they’re the first choice in product search engines.

Bradley Sutton:

So interesting.

Howard:

So they give you the best customer experience for those people and they wanna make sure that the ones that people who actually come from Google will actually find the products that they really want. It’s just like how like you go on Google and you found, there’s a news right article that just came out as not, not saying something bad, but like there’s some like in Los Angeles, there’s a shooting this and that. So when you type in Los Angeles shooting the things like most currently will be actually coming up on the search warrant results. So if that, if those products that are the most that go from, comes from Google to Amazon and they actually create a purchase, those are like the most relevant relevance for those keywords. So like at Nike had just had a new shoe how would Amazon know which shoe to present is? Yes, it’s new, but this current event kind of thing will, will kind of push over to Amazon based on Google.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Interesting. Now, I don’t know if you’ve seen this, but like, I’ve seen like a devaluation of the search terms like back or backend search term back in the day, it’s always title number one was the most important to Amazon algorithm, and then it would be like the backend search terms, and then maybe subject matter is kind of tied. And then after that, maybe bullet points and last would be description. But I’ve noticed in a lot of listings in some categories where not only is it not prioritized what’s in the search terms, but like 30% to 50% of the keywords that you only have in the search terms are not even index anymore. And ever since they made that change from like backend search terms and now they call it generic keywords what kind of things are you seeing as far as what parts of the listing that Amazon is prioritizing as far as the algorithm goes? Or what are you guys focusing on when you do optimize listings for keywords as opposed to what you were just talking about, like the images and things.

Howard:

So we, try to do the following, right? It is very important to have the f the initial keyword sets in there, right? So you don’t actually need to change the listing anymore. That often meaning like putting title, different text in there, different keywords into the title and stuff like that. Cuz it doesn’t really hope a lot. You guys can test it yourself. If you guys been like putting a product up for a while and then just change the title, put the most important keyword in the title in the very beginning, you’ll see that it doesn’t matter if you put whatever you put on the, on the title it’s not gonna help too much anymore because like we said before, it’s all about relevance, right? What actually get purchased and from what keyword plus the what when you search for something and like we talked about like they go to a competitor’s landing page and they eventually buy yours.

Howard:

It’s all about what the AI thinks, meaning what the AI thinks is relevant because like what you, you said we’re superpower, right? Using that particular AB testing and height mapping. How do we make it someone buy our product over someone else’s, if they land on their page, then on a competitor, and then you go in and get purchased at add a cart and purchased, you’re gonna absorb their keyword juice. That’s how they’re actually finding more new keywords. So you don’t have to change your listings that often anymore if you’re doing it correctly.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. How are you how are you launching these days for like your customers products? Like wha are you mainly just using PPC or every launch? Are you trying to incorporate outside traffic or what’s your go-to launch strategy these days?

Howard:

Okay, so first, a normal way to find the keywords we go in and we look at the top competitors. We grab all the keywords that they’re ranking on the top competitors. For the top competitors, there’s just say 10 of ’em. And we would actually find all the keywords and find which one is actually getting the most sales. And then we just put those on the title. A normal way where we do the listing optimization, right? Then we go in and we go do PPC, right? PPC, we do it in two ways, as we talked about, right? One is the normal product sponsored products. We go do exact search keywords with the rest of the, like like using our ai, it goes in and does the keyword to actually rank the product. That’s one.

Howard:

But then we go in and do product targeting. Remember I told you like whoever, whatever we’re landed on and then we actually like the top ASINs or something that we go in and purchase and they purchase our product. We actually get more keyword ranking juice from all their keywords. So when I’m targeting a keyword, first thing I do is I go in and I do the normal, exact, broad phrase, all those and autos and stuff like that to get the particular ranking for those keywords. You know, the, we called it query groups, right? So the query groups are there already. So now then we go to Helium 10 we search on Amazon, right? We search on Amazon and we say, let’s say coffin shelf, right?

Howard:

Coffin shelf, and then you get all these different ASINs in there. So we go into the and get the first two page of ASINs within that keyword, and we stuff it into the product targeting side. When you stuff into the product targeting side, that means when you have a higher chance to get sales related to that keyword, because eventually a lot of people are going to be looking at the first two pages for that keyword. And we’re gonna actually be under their product display page like the, the related, the sponsor, the highly ranked or what, whatever it is all those we will be in there. So the probability of us looking into getting ranked will be higher for that keyword from going from the regular search results or all the way to someone else’s product as a page. Then it comes to us. So we’re trying to be all over the place and absorbing as much of keyword juice coming from those.

Bradley Sutton:

I like that because I never thought about it that way. Like, like I do something similar, but I guess for a different reason. But like, let’s say f you’re targeting all of them, that means if they type in coffin shelf, even if they pick somebody at the bottom of the page, they click on it your ad comes up, but now my ad is gonna follow them around Amazon in the future because I was targeting their ASIN. And so like if I’m only targeting like two or three or four of the top sellers, that means I’m only gonna get, I’m only gonna get to follow that customer around Amazon for if they click on those three. But this gives me a little, a bit of wider reach and sure, maybe they don’t purchase it right away, like just because they saw my ad on the page, but now there’s gonna be more chances for, for them to click on my product because we’re gonna follow them. That’s a cool strategy.

Howard:

Yeah, that also helps with the add-to carts, the clicks, and also the Amazon Choice badge.

Bradley Sutton:

Speaking of Amazon’s choice badge what are you, I mean, what else are you doing to, to kind of help with that and or make sure that you, as I say this my device is gonna turn on, but, but, but trying to get Alexa to like make, make sure your products maybe show up in Alexa’s voice searches.

Howard:

Well, for Alexa, voice searches is mainly Amazon’s choice, right? So to get the Amazon choice, you will need to make sure that the customer that buys your product is actually doing a lot of research about this. Remember how you said in the very beginning, like when people are like adding to cart a product after a certain time, they actually go back and buy it, right? They have this intent to buy it, but maybe they go in and add your product to the cart and then they go, Hmm, I need to do more research. I need to find out if this part product is actually what I want and it has the specs that I want. So it goes back and looks at all the competitor’s reviews, all the competitor’s specs, and there’s page nation coming on. There are people clicking on these pages’ reviews that Amazon’s tracking.

Howard:

On the competitors where that actually has a good ranking for that particular keyword. They actually, you could see that they’re doing a lot of research. They’re outsourcing, Amazon’s outsourcing the work to these customers to help us, help them find out what is actually a good Amazon choice for this keyword. Because they’re actually going through the page Na page Nation and going through all the keywords within the exact reviews for that particular product. And then they might go hop back out and go look at another product and then look at more reviews and then, and eventually, they say, actually, I think I did a correct choice. The first product that I did put into my cart, it’s actually really important. It is really a good product and I’m gonna buy it. So they calculate this based on a lot of different ASINs or a buyer sessions, and they calculate and they do some and the average of which one is actually a really good fit for the Amazon choice. And then they calculate from there on. So every three days they switch out, they recalculate the Amazon choice, and that’s how you see Amazon Choice comes in and out on things.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright, so now I read your blog sometimes and I know you’ve got a lot of experts on your staff about AI and that seems to be all the rage. So what are you guys doing with AI? I mean, you, you guys have been working with AI for even longer before became trending, but like for ranking with AI or listing optimization or just business? Talk AI with me for a little bit.

Howard:

A lot of things that we do in the very beginning, ever since we created this company is 2019 or it’s Signalytics AI, right? So we, we actually did AI before AI was cool so what we were working on, which we already have something already is you guys have it too, the AI listing builder, right? From the AI listing Builder, it goes in and creates a listing to and it goes through the process of like heat mapping and, and so on from building it after it builds the listing and looks at it, then it will go in and say, How is AI ranking products compared to before? So we, we found out that you know, like there’s scores on Amazon when you’re like on a product on honeymoon, you can kind of tell that it’s very sensitive on ranking, right?

Howard:

So if your product is going in and you can and you’re ranking, if for some reason you get attacked right? By negative reviews so when you get attacked by negative reviews, you can see automatically at that particular couple hours, you’ll see that your ranking drops like crazy. It might not be because of your ranking your score or whatnot. It’s because Amazon has a positive and negative signal to it. If you know that they, they see that, hey I’m giving you all this trust, I’m giving you all these impressions, but all of a sudden you’re giving me, you’re telling me that your product is not good because you’re getting, start starting getting a lot of negative reviews, you know? And then of course it looks at the percentage of negative reviews with your ratings and ranking and review ranking rating.

Howard:

But then all of a sudden, the most recent ones is always going to be the one that’s gonna decrease your rank or your ERPs on organic. So that’s what we see negative, a lot of negative effects. And they give you scores. They have like scores, like on the first page, how many reviews that you actually have on there, that’s not, not so good. You know, like threes, twos, ones, and then they kind of calculate a score and that’s how they kind of help using AI to de-rank you. And that’s why you’re getting attacked all the time on refuse.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. Okay. What else? How else are you guys using AI or how do you think sellers should be using AI? Oh

Howard:

Well, we use AI to actually look at what Amazon’s looking at in their AI, it’s like an AI against ai, right? We feed ’em the dataset and then we see what results come out of it. Like, so regarding another thing is like deals like you, you, you can see that from all the data sets that deals is actually really important for the algorithm to learn to see if you’re actually a good fit for these keywords. So the more deals you have, the more impressions you will get, and the more of course chances that you are showing Amazon that your product disaster is doing well. Yeah. So that’s something that we use.

Bradley Sutton:

Okay. Now you mentioned like just all of a sudden getting attacked with bad reviews. You know, Amazon in the last two, or three years I’d say has definitely cracked down more than in previous years on Black Hattery. You know, like they shut down so many accounts what was it, like a year or two ago, and cracking down on review groups and making it harder for people to potentially sabotage listings and hijack and different things. But here in 2023, what are some of the common things that you’re still seeing that sellers need to be on the lookout for as far as what Black Hat sellers are doing to attack their competition?

Howard:

It’s still the same thing. It’s all about the reviews there are people still out there doing reviews that are going to be hurting the, the com the sellers, right? So yes, maybe before it was a hundred percent of the people who are doing reviews, let’s say 2019 let’s say, or 18 whatever, there’s no like checking on the algorithm what actually is working or not. They’re not suppressing any reviews or anything like that, but the more you’re getting closer and closer, the review rate is getting less and less based on like, maybe bots leaving reviews or sock puppets leaving reviews. So it’s getting less. Right now it’s probably like 20-30% of the people out there that are trying to leave your review is actually sticking, there’s still a percentage of that. But getting it off is another thing. So getting off, we have in the back end, what we have for our clients is we actually can detect which reviews are fake and which one is real with an algorithm that we have. So then we can actually help submit tickets to see which ones are actually fake to Amazon.

Bradley Sutton:

Interesting. All right. So, but, and so there’s no real way to protect yourself against that? You just gotta kind of be on the lookout. Or what would you suggest to sellers to maybe mitigate some of the effects of that kind of stuff?

Howard:

I talk to Amazon often and they say that it’s hard for them to co-relate which one’s real and which one’s fake unless you have some kind of proof. If you have some kind of proof, submit it and they’ll see what they can do with it. But this is the hardest part of doing Amazon is getting those fake reviews.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. All right. We’re gonna ask you in a little bit what’s your 60-second strategy or 60-second tip of the day, but before we get to there like me, I’m right here on my treadmill and you know, as you know, I love traveling. So like I’ve always tried to ask guests in 2023, Hey, what are you doing for hobbies? For me is traveling. What are you doing to keep your mental, physical health good as an entrepreneur? Me, I try and get on my standing desk, treadmill, play basketball outside, and stuff. What about you? What are some of your hobbies and what are you doing to stay mentally and physically healthy in 2023?

Howard:

Me trying to stay mentally healthy is trying to learn new things. Like I’ve already probably done, since 2009, right? So that’s why like 13, 14 years now on Amazon, I’m trying to learn new things. Cause everything on Amazon is pretty much the same. There’s not much to learn. So I’m trying to learn new things like internet marketing affiliate marketing and other things to help our company to boost it up to another level. So I think learning is, is what’s kind of keeping me sane because, or else I would’ve been like doing something else already. Like everyone else right now, all you can see like all the top sellers are probably doing other things like Airbnb and other things like that. So I think learning is what I could say. It’s what causes me to still be sane.

Bradley Sutton:

Yeah. You still gotta do some stuff, though. That’s not work-related though. I think you gotta have some hobbies or fishing or golf or something.

Howard:

Well, I do. I love fishing. I love it, okay, there we go. I love fishing, I love eating, I love watching movies and traveling because there’s, there’s a lot of food and stuff involved in traveling. So that’s what I like to do. And I, I don’t, I like, I like working too. Actually. I work like maybe I would say like 14 to 16 hours a day. Just, just so that I’m out of the house sometimes.

Bradley Sutton:

Let’s go to our 60-second tip of the day or 30-second tip, whichever you want. What’s a strategy that you think sellers can utilize right now that will definitely help them?

Howard:

Well, I would really, really look into protecting your listing page. Like from what I just said before regarding your listing that people can actually absorb your keyword ranking juice. You wanna protect it as much as possible, right? So we call it CRO on your product listing page, conversion rate optimization on it. It’s making sure that you have all three or four tags you have, like the save tag, the green or the orange, and the red tags as well as try to make sure that you have the save or what do you call it? The strike-through price. It kind of helps, right? It is not just that one thing, but a combination of a lot of things to do it right. Also, I mean, you could get Amazon choices even better, the more Amazon choice you got, that you are actually the Amazon choice for that category, right?

Howard:

And also maybe like, have some kind of accessories bundles or optional items that you can have on the side. But you do need to get an account manager, but account manager, you can get it for free now. But if you guys need someone, contact me. But if you want and then all the bundles and all the things, so people and the new models, the new models are important because when people scroll, they’re gonna can’t find any of your competitors until they scroll two very, very on the bottom right. If you have any variations if you have other similar products, make sure that you include it on your product display page and make sure your EBC is good if you, oh, I’m sorry, A+, but premium A+ actually guys, premium A+, as long as you change it a certain amount of time.

Howard:

You don’t need to have that much A+ content out there. You just, as long as you modify it, edit it, and modify it and edit it within this how many times do you need? I think it was 15. I forget how many times do you need to edit. Do you get it? And then you automatically get the A+ premium. So you don’t need to do 15 ASINs, just the same listing. Edit it, update it, edit it, update it, and then you get your A+ premium.

Bradley Sutton:

Oh, I love that. That’s a good tip I didn’t even know about. All right. Well Howard it was great to have you on here. I’ve burned 300 calories and, and walked 1.5 miles on this treadmill during this. And, and I know you’re going back to China soon to visit. I’m gonna see if I’m not sure if I can make it, but this time I’ll take you to my treat in Macau. And for the rest of you guys, if you wanna reach out to Howard just go ahead and go to Signalytics.ai.