Over the coming months we’ll be bringing you a series of feature reviews on the leading ecommerce solutions out there that cater to the very specific needs of Amazon sellers.
To kick us off, we’ll be looking at one of the most talked about solutions for Amazon sellers on the market today – MerchantWords.
What is MerchantWords?
MerchantWords is a keyword research tool designed specifically for Amazon.
For those sellers who have experience driving traffic to their online stores, you’ll be familiar with tools like Google AdWords Keyword Planner or SEM Rush and just how vital such a tool is to your business; the value of knowing what your customers are searching and how many of them are searching it cannot be understated when it comes to implementing effective SEO optimizations or paid search campaigns, and good keyword research and trend analysis can even help you stay on top of your product development and evaluate and anticipate customer demand.
Despite the importance of such tools, when jumping across to Amazon many sellers find that the availability of keyword data and search volumes are much harder to come by than in search engine land, which is surprising considering that Amazon now accounts for more than 50% of all ecommerce searches.
This is where MerchantWords pick up the slack, offering accurate keyword search volume estimates as well as keyword recommendations based off actual Amazon searches.
This data then becomes essential in optimizing your listing titles and backend search terms for SEO and in building out your Sponsored Products campaigns, not only helping you to prioritize your search terms but also helping you find new keywords that customers are searching to find products like yours.
How does it work?
Whilst under the hood MerchantWords relies on an intricate system of algorithmic analysis, machine learning and data science when it comes time to actual use the software it’s incredibly easy and intuitive.
You start off with a search term that you want to get a search volume estimate for, or that you think would be a good starting point to generate more ideas for new keywords.
Let’s say we’re selling silicone spatulas, we enter it in and run our search to find not just search volumes for the search term ‘silicone spatula’, but also values for similar terms and even some keyword ideas we might not of thought of.
In this example MerchantWords has returned over 1,500 results with plenty of data to fill out our search term fields, build our titles and build our Sponsored Products campaigns.
We can even pull keyword data from other global marketplaces, compare search volumes and make informed decisions about which markets will have the most demand for our product.
You can also filter your results by category or sort on volume or alphabetically. If you need to dive even deeper into the data or even combine multiple searches there is the option to export your results to CSV.
What’s it cost?
MerchantWords has 3 different pricing options. For USA Amazon data only the monthly subscription is $30 a month, which affords you unlimited searches and CSV exports. Individual subscriptions for any other country only costs $15 per month, but the best value by far is in the Global subscription package which offers all seven global Amazon marketplaces that MerchantWords support at only $60 a month.
They also offer a discount for their yearly plan which will see you get 12 months for the price of 10 on any subscription.
The verdict
We think MerchantWords is great. Having used it extensively in the past I would recommend it to anyone who is actively optimizing and marketing their Amazon listings and want to do so from a foundation of good, researched keyword strategy.
To really get the most out of the software though, you do need an intermediate to advanced level of ability with optimizing Amazon listings and marketing campaigns and an understanding of how to use the search volume estimates to product actionable insights so for those just starting out I would advise you to do your research and develop the knowledge required to make the most of the MerchantWords tool.
You can find out more about MerchantWords or sign up for their keyword research tool here.
Have you used MerchantWords before? What other Amazon tools have you used? We’d love to hear your thoughts over at our Facebook Mastermind Group.