Sonar for Amazon is a keyword tool, and if you are a regular reader of this blog, you may be thinking, “Another one? How could you possibly need so many keyword tools?”
It is true. There are a lot of keyword research tools out there. It’s also fair to say that the Pearl Lemon team is always up to try a new one, as we often discover that one of them offers something another does not, or does something better, faster or more efficiently. TBH, with something as important to SEO as keyword research, not trying out new tools – and keeping the ones that work – would be a mistake.
Sonar for Amazon is the latest keyword tool we’ve been putting through its paces. This is an Amazon-specific keyword tool that has, if you go by the reviews, helped hundreds of marketplace sellers improve both their organic Amazon SEO and their paid advertising campaigns. Would it help our e-commerce marketplace clients? That’s what I set out to find out.
What is Amazon SEO?
Amazon SEO has a lot in common with the Google facing SEO you may be more familiar with, but it also has plenty of differences too. This is because Amazon has its own search engine – A9 – and its own unique ranking factors.
The Amazon A9 algorithm is a ranking method that affects where the items appear on the Amazon search engine results page for a specific keyword (SERP).
Based on how likely the searcher would be to buy the product, Amazon rates all the products offered for sale on the site and places them in their SERPs accordingly. But how is that worked out by the Amazon algorithm, especially as that’s an awful lot of products?
First, in the shopper’s search query, Amazon looks at the keywords. It probably won’t appear in the search results if your product page doesn’t include every keyword in the search question, which is why keyword optimization is such a major part of Amazon SEO.
Next, depending on how well the product has done in the past, Amazon attempts to calculate the purchase probability. The algorithm looks at these metrics at the keyword level in order to do this:
- Click-through-rate Search Result (CTR)
- The level of past conversion on the product page
- Total past revenue from the product page
There are other factors involved in Amazon SERPs. Reviews are hugely important, and images can have a big positive (or negative) influence on your SERPs placement. But the fact is that getting Amazon keywords right is one of the most important elements of Amazon SEO.
People search the platform using keywords, so you have to get them right. This is where an Amazon-specific keyword tool like Sonar for Amazon claims to be able to offer you an advantage over your competitors.
How Does Sonar Work?
Sonar is, in its most basic form, an online tool that you do not even need to create an account to use, let alone pay for. This is great if you want to quickly experiment with what it might be able to do for you or to check that the keywords you are already making use of are really the ones you should be using.
One of the things that complicate the Amazon A9 based keyword research is that unlike Google or Bing, Amazon does not share keyword search volume data, even with those who pay to advertise. This complicates things considerably, as you really do need to know this. Sonar for Amazon claims to help.
At its heart, Sonar – which is offered by the company Sellics – displays a collection of best-performing keywords of a certain product. Sonar uses real data from real consumer queries and is reasonably close – within a day or so at most – in real-time.
Basically, this tool is a massive database of product and keyword combinations that helps merchants to recognize high-competition products and find new keywords that successful sellers are using that they may not be. Using its own algorithm, the Sellics Sonar Tool for Amazon is currently regularly updated.
The easiest way to demonstrate this is to work with an example. Let’s imagine we are selling, for the sake of this test, a remote control car.
To get started, you can input that very basic term into the search bar and ‘ping’ the database. You can do this right from the Solar landing page, without the need, initially at least, to sign up for anything.
You quickly realize, however, that while the free option shows you some very useful information, and, for smaller sellers that may be more than enough to get you started, to get the most out of Sonar, you WILL have to sign up. Fortunately, a free 14-day trial is available, and you don’t have to share any payment info or too much store information to take advantage of it. Name and email is all they ask for.
When you do sign up, you will be presented with a dashboard view that looks like this—lots more to investigate here for sure. The free trial is for the Sellics product, which is a complete Amazon account management suite. What we are looking at here, however, is how well the keyword research options work, and you can sign up simply for this tool as a standalone feature without having to pay for all the other offerings.
Going back to our keyword research, now that we have an account set up, there is a lot more information available. Search volume, it should be noted, is a guesstimate since, as we mentioned, Amazon does not provide such things. According to user reviews, it seems to be a rather accurate guesstimate, though.
Right away, it’s easy to tell that for a remote control car, the competition for the basic keyword is high and that you will have to look to supplementing more specific keywords as well. You can collate those that interest you into a list within the dashboard so that you can review them later to find out which of them would best fit your specific product.
You can also search by specific ASIN, either yours or that of a direct competitor. This option is one that may be even more useful than the first one, right?
This feature, however, I found to be very hit or miss, with, out of ten similar products, none returning any results at all. Switching products, however, I got much better results:
There are some odd keywords on here, but these searches lead to the product being displayed in the Amazon SERPs results for those queries, which demonstrates how fickle both Amazon search algorithms and consumers can be. And how tough getting Amazon keywords right as a novice is.
You may have noticed to the right of the keyword research boxes, there is a listing builder. As useful as that sounds, however, it only works if you have a specific product ASIN.
If you do, and we did for the second example, you can pull the listing in and, we guess, use it as a guide to writing your own. DO NOT COPY THE LISTING as it will be rejected. However, as a guide, this would be pretty neat. Once you have completed your version of the listing, you can export it as a .txt or .DOC.
Sonar for Amazon Pricing
The pricing offered by Sellics is surprisingly flexible. To make use of just the Sonar for Amazon features we have shown you here currently costs $49 per month. You can upgrade to a full SEO option, with content management features, for $99. Or, you can make use of the full offering at prices that start at $299 per month. You can find full pricing details here.
What We Thought About Sonar for Amazon
Sonar for Amazon is one of a number of Amazon keyword tools, and it’s is offered by a company that offers a wide range of Amazon tools. Whether you opt for the paid version of Sonar for Amazon depends on how useful you find it, and we think that for those just starting out, the free version may give them lots to get started with.
However, given that you can try it out for free, it wouldn’t be a waste of your time. You can see some great insights, and the template listing feature alone may be very useful for you if you sell a product that is very similar to another.
Need help with Amazon keyword research to improve your current Amazon listings? Get in touch with our e-commerce SEO experts here to discuss just how they can help you.
