The end of Amazon SEO? Nothing but hot air

Where is the news coming from? An Agency called Revoic from Cologne suggested that the new layout in Seller Central signals the end of editing/writing rights for sellers. To say it directly: We do not agree with this conclusion.

It is correct that Seller Central has a new layout, the product listing processes are simplified and have a nicer design. It is also correct, that there are talks about “suggestions” and “recommendations”. But this does not change anything for the content creation process. Based on the latest news, an idea has come up that Amazon will extract the product content in the future from various external sources. However, Amazon is already creating content itself to improve the presentation of products on the marketplace.

The author of the published article concluded the following: Product detail page creation will be automated, which leads to the end of keywords. Last but not least, the new logo design of Seller Central was mentioned and that this might indicate further changes. Do these argumentations make any sense? Not really.

So therefore, here is our standpoint on the topic:

Amazon will limit the possibilities of free content creation

That will happen for sure and also makes sense for three reasons. Firstly, Amazon is all about delivering better customer experience. Greater consistency of product detail pages, among other things, makes it easier for customers to navigate and classify information. Additionally, the customer should find a white box, if he is looking for one and not a black box, even if this might be in the interest of the seller.

Secondly, from a legal perspective, Amazon wants to prevent misleading or incorrect product information being published on the platform.

Thirdly, it is not harmful for Amazon when advertising budgets increase due to limited options for organic ranking optimization. That is why we can expect stricter guidelines (compulsory fields, character limits, standardized structures) and should look out for their implementation in the future.

Keywords will remain an important part of Amazon

From a consumer perspective, the search function is the heart of Amazon. The desired product can be found quick as a lightning. Due to the tough competition, one can be sure that the best results will meet the price and quality requirements AND fit the search. The product search is so diverse that there are millions of different terms that are searched for on a daily basis on Amazon. Amazon’s vision is to be the ‘Everything store’ – to offer all the products in the world on one platform. These products differ as much from each other as the search terms used to search for them. What is the point of this gigantic number of products if they cannot be found at all? Amazon will ensure that keywords can be added also in the future.

The importance of individualized content and branding (within the guidelines) will increase

With millions of products, it will not be possible to create pre-defined drop-down fields for each product category to select specific item characteristics while continuing to ensure accurate listings in short or medium term. For some time now, we have been observing how other online marketplaces have not even been able to do this, even with a fraction of offered products compared to Amazon. The result of a strategy like this would be a reduction in product variety, which is clearly contrary to Amazon’s primary interests. Even if – contrary to expectations – it was possible to create fields and information faster (or even automatically), vendors and sellers would be able to spend more time on brand content options such as stores, A+ pages or Enhanced Brand Content. Also, images and videos would become even more important.

All in all, we can agree that exciting times are ahead of us. However, it has nothing to do with the new design of Amazon Seller Central.