On Amazon, the key to owning a search term is to take up as much real estate on the SERP as possible. 64% of Amazon shoppers click on the first 3 products in a search result, and 70% won’t even go past the first page. If your brand can take up a sponsored headline and have a sponsored and organic ranking, you could take up 3 of the 14 results on the first page (depending on the category).
This strategy works best if you have a number of products that fit under one keyword—maybe just with differing flavors, scents, or styles.
It’s also important to understand that this strategy isn’t for every brand, and it shouldn’t be used year-round. However, for certain campaigns, it can be an incredibly valuable tactic to gain visibility and improve your organic ranking. When combined with your full-picture Search Term Isolation strategy, there is tremendous opportunity for growth!
In this article, we’ll break down how to take over a keyword SERP on Amazon, as well as why and why not you should do this strategy!
Why Would you Want to Own a Keyword?
Improve organic rankings
If you’ve spent any time selling products on Amazon, then you know that it’s a pay-to-play platform that requires advertising to boost your organic ranking. When you take over the top 3–5 search results, you’re increasing your visibility, which when done correctly, will increase your conversion rate, which improves your organic ranking!
Dominate a search term
Once you’ve achieved a solid organic ranking (ideally, the first organic result), you can dominate a specific search term by taking over all of the sponsored product slots, followed by your organically ranked products.
When this happens, the SERP for a specific keyword becomes synonymous with your brand name.
Increase reviews
Of course, the trend usually goes that the more people who buy your product will leave more reviews, and the more reviews you get improves your organic ranking, which continues the cycle. By taking over a specific SERP for a relevant keyword, you’ll increase your conversion rate and boost your reviews.
Boost Q4 Sales
As we’ll note later, this isn’t a long-term strategy. It can be expensive, but if you’re trying to acquire new customers and make a splash in a certain keyword SERP, it’s a great strategy.
Here at Blue Wheel, we typically enact this strategy during Q4 to boost sales and solidly end the year.
Why Not To Own a Keyword
Make money fast
Until you have established organic visibility, you won’t make money for at least 2–3 months with this strategy. As we mentioned earlier, this is more of a long-game strategy, where you’re trying to temporarily dominate a SERP in order to improve your organic ranking and boost sales.
Launch a product
When you’re launching a new product, your sponsored placements will cost more because you don’t have the sales or reviews to lower your cost yet. Therefore, you wouldn’t want to launch a new product with this strategy because it will be incredibly expensive, and you’ll want to allocate your budget towards more profitable efforts.
Branded campaign
This strategy is ideal for taking over a keyword SERP that is not tied to your brand name. Branded campaigns generally have a low ACOS because people have to be looking for your product by name.
Long-term strategy
Most brands don’t enact this strategy for a long period of time. They might dominate a search term for Q4, or a peak sales time for their brand, but this strategy is generally too expensive and time-consuming for everyday implementation.
The Beard Oil Example
We’ve enacted variations of this strategy for a number of brands. One brand in particular sells beard oils for those of us with bushy facial hair. They offer beard oil in a variety of scents, as well as kits with supplies to keep your beard in tip-top shape.
We started running a SERP takeover strategy for the keyword “beard oil” on August 1, 2019. From August to December 2019, sales grew by 114%!
We were able to take over all of the Sponsored Product Ads as well as the Sponsored Brand ad and the first organic slot. This takeover allowed their brand name to become synonymous with beard oil, as well as showcased the breadth of products they offered.
After Q4, we tampered down the strategy, but the visibility during all of Q4 allowed the brand’s sales to be as high as they were.
Think this strategy might work for your brand? Want to learn more? Sign up for a free Amazon Audit today!
