Platform SEO
Amazon and marketplace SEO
Marketplace SEO ranks your products inside Amazon, eBay, Etsy and similar platforms. We optimise listing keywords, content, images and review signals so your products get seen and bought.
Who it is for: Sellers whose products are good but buried in marketplace search results.
Everything in this service
- Marketplace keyword research per product
- Listing title, bullet and description optimisation
- Image and A+ content recommendations
- Review and rating strategy
- Category and attribute optimisation
What to expect
- Products ranking for buying-intent marketplace searches
- Listings that convert views into orders
- Less dependence on paid placement
How marketplace seo actually works
Marketplace search ranks by what sells
A web search engine is trying to answer a question. A marketplace search engine is trying to make a sale. That single difference explains almost everything about how the two behave, and it is why people arriving from web SEO get marketplace work wrong.
Keywords determine whether your product is eligible to appear for a search. After that, the ranking is driven largely by commercial performance: how often people who see your listing click it, how often people who click it buy, and how much you have been selling recently. A listing with perfect keyword coverage and a poor conversion rate slides down. A listing with adequate keywords and a strong conversion rate climbs.
This creates a feedback loop that works in both directions. Sales lift ranking, ranking produces sales. It also means that a new listing with no sales history starts at a genuine disadvantage that keyword work alone cannot fix, and that anything which interrupts sales, such as going out of stock, costs ranking that takes time to recover.
- Keywords determine eligibility, commercial performance determines position
- Click-through rate, conversion rate and recent sales velocity are the ranking drivers
- Stock outages cost ranking and the recovery is not immediate
- New listings need a launch plan, since they start with no performance history
Listing content that gets you found and gets you bought
The title carries the most ranking weight and it is also the first thing a buyer reads, which puts the two jobs in tension. The workable resolution is to lead with what the product actually is in the words a buyer would use, then the attributes that qualify a purchase decision: brand, size, quantity, material, compatibility, colour. Keyword strings that read as gibberish get indexed and lose the click, which then costs you the ranking anyway.
Bullet points do the persuasion. Each one should lead with the benefit and then the specification that supports it, because buyers scan the first few words and stop. The common failure is five bullets of specification with no reason to care, or five bullets of marketing language with nothing checkable.
On platforms where the long description is indexed, it carries the secondary and long-tail terms. On platforms where it is not, it exists purely to close the sale and should be written that way. Backend fields matter too, and are routinely left empty: search terms, subject matter, target audience and use case fields all feed indexing on Amazon without appearing to a buyer.
- Titles that lead with the product in buyer language, then qualifying attributes
- Bullets that lead with benefit and back it with specification
- Backend search term fields completed, without repeating title words
- No competitor brand names or unsupported claims, which risk suppression
Images do more selling than the copy
On a marketplace results page the image is most of the decision. Buyers compare a grid of thumbnails and click two or three. Once on the listing, most buyers swipe the gallery before reading anything. Image quality is therefore not a presentation detail, it is the main conversion lever available.
The gallery has a job per slot. The main image is the product on white, meeting the platform rules exactly, cropped to fill the frame so it is larger than the competing thumbnails. After that: the product in use so scale and context are obvious, a shot carrying the dimensions, close-ups on the details that justify the price, what is in the box, and an image answering the question your reviews and messages show buyers keep asking.
On Amazon, enhanced brand content gives registered sellers additional module space below the fold. It converts well and it also gives room for comparison tables between your own products, which reduces the chance a buyer leaves to check an alternative. Video, where available, tends to lift conversion on products where use or scale is hard to convey.
- Main image compliant and cropped to fill the frame for thumbnail dominance
- A defined job for each gallery slot, including scale, detail and contents
- One image answering the question buyers repeatedly ask in reviews
- Enhanced brand content used where eligible, including comparison modules
Categories, attributes and the structured data layer
Marketplaces run heavily on structured attributes, and buyers use the filters constantly. If your material, size, compatibility or colour field is blank or wrong, you are excluded from every filtered search that would otherwise have found you. That exclusion is invisible in your reporting, because you cannot see the searches you were never eligible for.
Category placement is the same problem at a larger scale. A product in the wrong category competes against the wrong products, ranks against the wrong benchmarks, and misses the browse traffic it should get. Category structures also change, and listings that were correctly placed three years ago quietly are not any more.
So attribute completeness is one of the first things we audit and one of the cheapest to fix. It is unglamorous work that frequently produces the fastest visible improvement, because it turns off an exclusion rather than trying to win a competition.
- Every applicable attribute field completed, not just the required ones
- Category placement reviewed against where comparable products sit
- Variation families structured correctly, so reviews and ranking consolidate
- Attribute accuracy checked after platform taxonomy changes
Reviews, within the rules
Review count and rating affect both ranking and conversion on every major marketplace, which is exactly why the space is full of schemes to manufacture them. We do not touch any of it. Buying reviews, incentivising positive ones, review gating that only invites happy buyers, and paid ranking manipulation all breach marketplace policy and breach the FTC rule on consumer reviews and testimonials. The penalties include listing suppression and account termination, and account termination is a business-ending event for a marketplace seller.
The legitimate levers are real and they work slowly. Platform-native review request features, used consistently on every order. Packaging inserts that ask for an honest review without conditioning it on a positive one. Product and listing quality high enough that the honest reviews are good. Fast, generous handling of problems, because a resolved complaint often becomes an updated review.
Responding to negative reviews matters more than most sellers think. The response is read by future buyers deciding whether a one-star review describes a defective product or an unreasonable customer. A calm, specific, helpful reply reduces the damage of a bad review substantially.
- Platform-native review requests, sent consistently on every order
- Honest requests that never condition on a positive rating
- Recurring complaints treated as product or listing fixes
- Every negative review answered, because future buyers read the answer
- No bought, incentivised or gated reviews, without exception
How we run it and what we measure
We start with an audit across the catalogue rather than a deep dive on one product, because marketplace problems are usually systemic. Missing attributes across a range. Titles built from an old template. Variations split into separate listings that fragment the review count. Fixing the systemic issues first tends to lift a lot of listings at once.
Then it becomes iterative per listing, ordered by opportunity. Products with high impressions and low click-through need image and title work. Products with high click-through and low conversion need content, price or review work. Products with low impressions need keyword and attribute work. The diagnosis comes from the funnel, not from opinion.
Reporting stays commercial. Impressions, click-through rate, conversion rate, units and revenue per listing, plus keyword rank for the terms we are targeting. We also report the share of your sales coming from organic placement versus advertising, because the point of this work is to reduce dependence on paid, and that ratio is the only honest way to show whether it is happening.
- Catalogue-wide audit before individual listing work
- Diagnosis from the funnel: impressions, click-through, conversion
- Keyword rank tracked per listing for target terms
- Organic versus advertised sales share reported as the headline outcome
A clear path, step by step
- 01
Audit and plan
We check the current state, find what is holding you back, and agree a prioritised plan.
- 02
Fix and build
We make the changes: technical fixes, content, structure and internal links.
- 03
Make it citable
We add the structure and signals that help search and AI engines trust and quote the page.
- 04
Track and improve
We measure rankings, visibility and enquiries each month, then refine.
Why choose us for this
We optimise for orders, not just impressions
Listing content written for buyers first
Works alongside marketplace ads for full shelf coverage
Common questions
How is Amazon SEO different from Google SEO?
Amazon ranks products by what sells: relevance, conversion rate and sales velocity. Keywords get you considered; a listing that converts keeps you ranked.
Do reviews affect marketplace rankings?
Yes. Rating quality and volume influence both ranking and conversion. We build honest review generation into the plan, never fake reviews.
Explore related work
Want this for your business?
Book a free visibility call and I will tell you honestly whether I can help.
How this is delivered
One person leads every project. Where a job genuinely needs a specialist, I bring in people I have worked with before and manage them, so you get one point of contact and one invoice rather than three suppliers blaming each other.
- You talk to the person responsible for the work, not an account manager
- Specialists are briefed and managed by me, and their work is checked before it reaches you
- One contract, one invoice, one place to chase