Amazon friendly product titles, just like meta-title optimisation for Google, can also be optimised to gain better visibility in the search results pages.
When a consumer searches for a general product term such as “shampoo for dry hair” Amazon wants to show the most relevant products to the consumer, to increase the chances of them converting. Therefore an effective and strategic product title should be your main focus when setting up a product listing.
The four criteria that could cause a product to be search-suppressed by Amazon are:
- Titles must follow the recommended length of your product category characters, including spaces.
- Titles must not contain promotional phrases, such as “free shipping”, “100% quality guaranteed”.
- Titles must not contain characters for decoration, such as ~ ! * $ ? _ ~ { } # < > | * ; ^ ¬ ¦
- Titles must contain product-identifying information, such as “hiking boots” or “umbrella”.
Tips to create Amazon friendly product titles:
Less IS more
Although Amazon gives you 200 characters for your product title, it is recommended that you actually keep the length to around 80 characters instead. This will ensure the title is easy to read, less likely to be truncated and more accessible to consumers.
Avoid using ANY special characters
As well as the decorative characters they state in their search suppression criteria, they also discourage the use of non-language ASCII characters such as Æ, ©, or ®. Not only do these symbols not add any value to the product title in the eyes of a consumer, they also take up valuable character space, which could be used more effectively to “sell” your product to Amazon users.
Caps lock OFF
You may think that caps lock will grab the attention of those viewing the product results, but in fact, full capitalisation is difficult to read. Although Amazon states that this is not one of the criteria for search suppression, they do strongly encourage adherence to their list of title standards which includes “Don’t use ALL CAPS.”
Stick to capitalising the 1st letter of every word except prepositions (in, on, over, with), conjunctions (and, or, for), or articles (the, a, an).
Keep numbers concise
As you want to keep your characters down in your title, it is important that you do what you can to make the most of the space available. One way to do this is to write numbers in their numeral form, such as 3 instead of three.
Include your best keywords
Amazon requires titles to include product-identifying information, such as shampoo, however you should still include keywords to make sure your product is being shown to the right searchers so by including “for dry, coloured hair”, for example, you are making your title relevant to those searching for both “shampoo for dry hair” and “shampoo for coloured hair”. It is rare that someone searching for a product won’t include some specifics in their search terms.
That being said, product variations such as size and colour should not be included into the parent ASIN and should be put into the child ASIN instead.
Other standards Amazon recommends sellers adhere to include:
- Don’t use subjective commentary, such as “Hot Item” or “Best Seller”.
- Don’t include your merchant’s name in titles, but product brand names should always go at the start of the title.
- Titles can include necessary punctuation, like hyphens (-), forward slashes (/), commas (,), ampersands (&), and periods (.) these are excluded from the decorative character criteria.
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