Amazon.com is the hands-down leader in the online bookselling marketplace. And—although it’s notoriously difficult to speak with a living, breathing human being—Amazon prides itself on meeting its customers’ needs. What’s the easiest way to drive sales for your book on Amazon? Easy: maximize the content on your product page and optimize your chances of coming up in search results via Amazon’s internal search engine.

You’ve heard of optimizing your website, optimizing your web presence, optimizing your blog, etc. The point of this optimization is to increase your visibility through various online search mechanisms. While self-contained, Amazon is a powerhouse search engine in its own right. Despite being a retail site, it should be treated as a search engine from an online marketing standpoint. Think about it: what’s the first site you go to when searching for information on a book? Amazon, of course. Remember that on top of its own strong brand, Amazon powers the virtual marketplace of Target.com, AOL’s Shop@AOL service, and, for a short while longer, Borders.com and Waldenbooks.com—just to name a few.

To leverage Amazon’s search power, a major component of your online marketing strategy should involve making your Amazon product page as informative, search-optimized, and consumer-friendly as possible. It has been our experience at Greenleaf Book Group in optimizing Amazon pages that the product’s rank improves as it collects additional content. Whether search suggestions, tags, inclusion in Listmania lists, and so on have a direct effect on the sales rank formula is unclear; it’s more likely that books with more detailed pages and links to the title information from outside pages simply attract more buyers. Regardless, ensure that your product page does a good job of representing your product with no detail spared.

Amazon offers many features to enhance your title listing that, when properly implemented, can increase page views and potential sales for your title. Understanding and executing these programs has been historically time-consuming work, but since Amazon is a content-driven site, the benefits are clear. The more visits you get to your book detail page, the more popular your book will become in the eyes of the Amazon internal search results algorithm. The Amazon algorithm favors the most popular items, so if two different products match a user’s criteria, the more user-popular item will show up first. Our Amazon optimization work has uncovered some powerful tools for influencing Amazon search results, as outlined in very basic terms below:

Tags

A tag is most easily described as a keyword or category label that a user places on a particular product. Tags appear on book detail pages and will help users find book on Amazon within a certain category or genre. Each link increases your exposure on Amazon.

Listmania! Lists

Listmania! lists are different groups of products that a person finds interesting. Each list can cover any type of category and helps other Amazon users discover your favorite products. These lists are rotated on various search result pages and on individual book pages. A popular list will appear on the product pages of all the books it mentions. The more popular the list is, the more exposure the products within your list will receive. Take the time to carefully research the other books on your list so you are more likely to appear before your target reader.

So You’d Like to . . . Guides

So You’d Like to . . . Guides are a way for you to help other customers find all the items and information they might need to discover something new about an interest or hobby. The guide includes a short, informative article targeting consumers interested in your genre and is connected to your book’s detail page and to other similar bestselling books. These guides are more detailed and informative than the Listmania! lists.

Reviews

Reach out to your friends and family to write reader reviews for your title. Reviews boost the exposure of your book detail page because the Amazon algorithm examines the number of reviews and the review ratings when determining exposure levels. Greenleaf Book Group makes a listing of the top-rated Amazon reviewers available to its clients. Reviews by this elite group are weighted more heavily in the system. Ask your distributor if such a list is available to you so that you can solicit these powerful tastemakers’ reviews for your title.

Search Suggestion

Amazon also has a way for users to help customers find items and to provide tailored information on product pages via Search Suggestions. Like tags, this tool requires some front-end thought and research on your part. Search Suggestions can:

• Associate an item with a search phrase so the item is more likely to be shown whenever anyone searches for that phrase. This is helpful for items that may be associated with a person, genre, or theme that may not appear on its product page
• Explain the relevance of your suggestion to searching customers and have your explanation and your name appear in search results
• Add information to the product page, which is tailored to the customer’s search

Amazon.com is constantly evolving. Take advantage of the features outlined above, and be on the watch for new offerings to increase your exposure (or hire an expert in the field to do this work for you). This will increase the number of eyeballs on your product’s page and result in additional sales. Amazon has millions of registered users and continues to lead the pack in online books sales. And in Amazon’s realm, there’s no such thing as too much information.