Impact of Customer Reviews on Amazon SEO and Rankings
Keren Dinkin, Copywriter
10 min read -
Updated:Customer reviews on Amazon are the most legitimate social proof in the realm of e-commerce. Did you know that 99% of people who shop online read reviews? Nearly half of them trust online customer reviews as much as they trust recommendations from friends and family.
There’s no denying that reviews play a critical role in driving purchase decisions. Because customers rely on them so heavily, Amazon also prioritizes them in its algorithms. Customer reviews play a crucial role in Amazon SEO and, therefore, the ranking of your products on the platform.
In this article, we will discuss the importance of Amazon reviews in SEO, which ultimately affects your sales and profitability. We’ll also share two very useful tools that you can use to acquire more reviews and manage negative feedback so that it does not affect your sales.
What is Amazon SEO?
Before we talk about the role of customer reviews in product ranking, you must familiarize yourself with Amazon search engine optimization (SEO).
Yes, there’s a thing called Amazon SEO.
Amazon is the largest e-commerce platform in the US, commanding a 37.6% market share. Also known as “the everything store,” this international giant generates $1.6 billion in sales revenue daily, with third-party sellers accounting for roughly 60% of its sales. You can find more than 350 million products on Amazon!
To put it simply, Amazon is a macrocosm of e-selling in itself. You could call it Google for online buying and selling. Understandably, Amazon utilizes highly sophisticated search engine algorithms to display relevant results when customers look up products.
Amazon SEO is just that—a set of rules that the e-marketplace has standardized and uses to display product suggestions to customers when they look for things to buy. The platform ensures the results shown to its customers are relevant and match their search criteria, which will lead to more purchases.
Just like traditional SEO, Amazon SEO comprises a complex set of rules and algorithms that comb through its massive database of products to find the best results. If you want your products to sell, you must optimize your listings according to Amazon SEO best practices. It’s one of the primary ways your products can show up on the first page of the results.
Benefits of Amazon SEO
Optimizing your product listings for Amazon SEO has many advantages. We have listed the primary ones below:
- It improves the ranking of your products on the results page, boosting visibility
- It drives organic traffic to your products
- It improves your conversion rate and boosts sales in the long run
Even if you are a new seller, Amazon SEO can increase your chances of gaining visibility on the crowded platform. Your business can become profitable very quickly if you know the insider tricks of the trade and apply them to your product listings on Amazon.
Factors that affect Amazon SEO
Amazon uses its proprietary A9 algorithm to rank products and match them to customer queries. The algorithm takes the following factors into account when selecting products to display:
- Keywords: Customers use search terms to look up products they want to buy, which is why keyword relevance is a top priority for the A9 algorithm.
- Sales Record: The product’s conversion rate, order fulfillment, and customer engagement are key in algorithm rankings.
- Customer Feedback: The ratings and reviews your product receives impact its future saleability. So, Amazon’s algorithm considers it a primary metric, too.
In addition to these three factors, the A9 algorithm factors in product availability and seller performance.
As you can tell, customer reviews are critical elements for the A9 algorithm. However, customer reviews also indirectly contribute to other factors, like seller reputation, overall sales, etc. Acquiring quality reviews and managing negative ones can, therefore, help you win the favor of Amazon SEO and improve overall performance on the platform.
Even if Amazon updates its SEO in the future, customer reviews will still be important. So, anything you do today will have long-term benefits for your online storefront.
Why you should focus on customer reviews for your products
As stated at the beginning, reviews are the most readily available and trustworthy source of information for your customers. Online shopping doesn’t allow them to physically inspect the items they want to buy, so they have to rely on the next best resource: feedback from other buyers.
In addition, Amazon reviews are widely trusted because the platform has very strict policies that ensure customer feedback cannot be purchased or faked. This eliminates the possibility of duplicitous or misleading feedback, so millions of prospective buyers choose Amazon for product research.
Not only are Amazon customers reliant on reviews, but even those who purchase from other platforms or directly from a brand’s website use it to get an unbiased idea of the product’s quality. So, customer reviews have critical value in the grand scheme of things.
Unfortunately, most sellers face a common problem when it comes to getting customer reviews: it’s not easy. In fact, only 1% to 2% of Amazon buyers take the time to write reviews of their purchases. But you need at least a few good reviews and ratings to get more purchases and more reviews. So, it’s a catch-22 situation!
That’s why you need to focus on acquiring as many positive reviews as you can from your customers. This is where a holistic Amazon-focused solution like Sellerise can come to your rescue.
Simplify customer review request management with Sellerise Review Requester
Sellerise Review Requester is a dedicated tool that Amazon sellers use to automate their customer review request management. This tool sends review request emails to your customers as soon as they make a purchase. You can determine the most eligible category of customers to whom you would like to send a review request, increasing your chances of getting one.
Review Requester easily integrates with your seller account to automate the process. Once it’s set up, the process runs on autopilot, and you no longer have to do the job manually.
You can sign up for free to explore the basics of the tool.
What makes Review Requester a winning solution is its robust features that take the varying needs of Amazon sellers into account. You can use it for the following:
1. Create a customized review request strategy
You can create a customized customer review request campaign aligned to your goals.
In addition to selecting the products for which you want the reviews to be generated, you can also toggle the review requester feature on and off at will. This helps streamline the customer review request management process per your convenience and changing requirements.
That’s not all.
You increase your chances of getting positive feedback by taking a focused approach to acquiring reviews for specific products from specific customers. While not all customers are likely to respond to your review request, selecting the most probable candidates helps you operate efficiently. Instead of wasting your time with nonchalant buyers, you get to reach out to the ones that matter the most.
When using the Review Requester tool, you have the choice to:
- Send requests on orders with NO SELLER FEEDBACK and with SELLER FEEDBACK
- Send requests ONLY on orders with FEEDBACK
- Send requests ONLY on orders with NO FEEDBACK
- Choose when you would like the review request tool to send out requests, or select the AI feature to have it determine and send requests at the optimal time for the buyer.
You can cover more ground than what you can achieve if you do all of these things manually. The tool saves a lot of time, effort, and money you’d otherwise spend on hiring a dedicated review team.
Get started in 3 easy steps:
- Sign up for the Sellerise Review Requester tool.
- Integrate it with your seller account.
- Set the conditions for sending review requests and watch those reviews roll in.
The Sellerise Review Requester tool is a blessing for any Amazon seller. It is the key enabler you need to acquire more reviews from trusted customers, thus improving Amazon SEO and overall performance for your online store.
Because the tool is Terms of Service (TOS) compliant, you can operate without the fear of violating Amazon’s policies and community guidelines.
2. Track review requests
Sellerise has another tool called the Review Dashboard that gives you an overview of all your campaigns. You can use it to match reviews to products, spot negative feedback, and track the ratings for every sale you make.
The Dashboard also helps you track the number of review requests you send daily, monitor the percentage of positive and negative reviews you receive, and check your score. These metrics are updated in real-time and help you analyze your campaigns’ performance. You can use the insights to fine-tune and improve your review request campaigns.
Set review goals you want to reach for each product and easily achieve them with Sellerise’s AI-driven optimization strategy.
Now, let’s turn our focus to managing negative reviews.
Why you should take action against negative reviews
By now, you already know that customer reviews are all powerful in Amazon SEO and, therefore, product rankings. But did you know for every benefit you get from a positive review, there are an equal number of disadvantages that come from a negative review?
You probably already know that bad or negative reviews and poor ratings affect Amazon SEO. Nothing escapes the mighty A9 algorithm—it omits such products. They stop getting traffic, your conversion suffers, and your sales take a nosedive.
Apart from bad reviews, poor seller feedback can affect your store’s performance on Amazon. When one customer writes a bad review, its effects are compounded. That sounds the death knell for your business, especially when you don’t take care of the matter quickly and effectively.
Thankfully, Sellerise has a state-of-the-art solution that enables sellers to handle negative reviews in a timely and effort-efficient manner.
Manage negative customer reviews with Sellerise Review Puncher
Review Puncher is a nifty tool that expedites managing and deleting negative reviews on Amazon. This 100% TOS-compliant tool automatically sends emails to buyers when they leave a less-than-favorable review. It offers solutions to solve the issue, which are customizable per the rating and subject of the review.
The feature-rich solution allows you to do the following:
1. Send prompt replies to negative reviews
The tool closely monitors the reviews and seller feedback you receive throughout the day. As soon as it spots negative feedback or a bad review, it sends an email to the customer with a proposed solution to their problem. An on-time reply is crucial to managing angry or dissatisfied customers.
With Review Puncher, you don’t have to do the hard work manually because the system is fully automated.
2. Customize your responses
It needs no telling that cookie-cutter responses are easily dismissed by discerning customers and cannot win their approval. To address the problems of most automated solutions, Review Puncher allows you to customize your responses based on keywords or the intent of the feedback you have received.
For example, you can send automatic refund emails to appease customers who have left one-star reviews.
You can also use the robust dashboard to monitor your everyday Review Puncher activity. It gives you an overview of how many negative review responses are sent in real-time, whether the total number of bad reviews on the Amazon storefront is decreasing, and more. Thus, you can easily understand if the tool is working for you.
3. Expedite the process of shortlisting bad reviews
You can also streamline the process of sifting bad reviews from good ones by downloading the Sellerise Downloader extension. Once the extension is installed on your browser, you can download the reviews received by a specific product in an Excel sheet.
This feature is helpful in spotting negative reviews (more details here) that may violate Amazon’s community guidelines or spotting malicious feedback left by competitors to sabotage your business. While Amazon is solely in control of reviewing such tickets raised by sellers, the Sellerise extension makes your job considerably easier, faster, and effort efficient.
As you can tell, Sellerise’s Amazon review tools prioritize performance and precision. They provide holistic solutions to common customer review management problems faced by Amazon sellers. Instead of fretting over these issues, you can deploy these tools to simplify customer review handling. Integrate them with your seller account to ensure you remain Amazon SEO compliant.
Visit the Sellerise website to learn more.
There are other things you can do to ensure customers leave good reviews without being prompted to do so. You can deploy these tried-and-tested tactics to garner positive reviews and good seller feedback for your business.
Additional tips for getting positive customer reviews and seller feedback
Always remember that e-commerce is not just about the quality of the products you sell. Your service, including order fulfillment and customer relationship management, are crucial factors that influence a buyer’s opinion of you. So, cover all your bases to get good reviews, ratings, and seller feedback.
Here are a few things to keep in mind:
- Ensure that your products are of good quality and match the images in the listing.
- Focus on proper packaging of your products so that they don’t get damaged in transit.
- Ensure fast and hassle-free order fulfillment without delays or wrong deliveries.
- Provide clear instructions with an easy-to-read manual if your product requires assembly.
- Include a personalized thank you note with every order—small gestures tend to have a positive impact on customers. You can also use product inserts to thank your customers for supporting your business and request that they leave a review.
- Be prompt and sensitive when replying to customer queries, concerns, or complaints.
- Enroll in the Amazon Vine Program, which allows pre-vetted buyers to get free products to use and review.
- Partner with influencers and ask them to post honest and detailed reviews. Influencers are trusted by their followers, and their recommendations can help drive your sales.
- Make sure you have a hassle-free returns policy because some customers can leave a bad review if they have a negative experience with returns.
- Always prioritize your customers’ needs and experiences.
Follow these best practices if you want to get good reviews organically from every sale you make. You may not see changes overnight, but you will eventually acquire a bank of positive reviews.
Use these reviews extensively in your PPC campaigns, EBCs, and listing images so that first-time buyers can trust your products.
For everything else, Sellerise is there to help you!
End note
Customer reviews play a key role in Amazon SEO, thereby affecting your product’s ranking and conversions. So, do everything you can to ensure you have good customer reviews and ratings. Also, focus on removing negative reviews from your products on Amazon.
Incorporate Sellerise’s Review Requester and Review Puncher tools wherever needed to boost your Amazon business. You will be able to make gains across the board and have more time for decision-making. Try out Sellerise today!
