Amazon Listing Audit in 2025: Complete Guide with SEO Tips

Bottom Line: an Amazon listing audit will do wonders for your conversion rate, profit, and overall sales figures. Poorly optimized Amazon listings leak sales to your competitors, and struggle to rank with Amazon SEO.

To optimize your Amazon listing, focus on three areas: keyword optimization, sales copy and images, using the audit method we outline in this post (How to Rank for Keywords on Amazon).

Poorly Optimized Listing are Costing You Money Every DAY – Here is how you can fix that

Many sellers have low-quality, poorly optimized Amazon product listings. the result of a bad listing is:

• Fewer conversions from people who click through to your listing
• Wasted ad spend from external traffic
• More sales for your competitors
• Low keyword rankings
• Missed keyword opportunities
• Negative customer reviews

Amazon listing optimization is particularly important if you’re advertising outside of Amazon, such as with Facebook Ads.

Poorly optimized product listings have low conversion rates, meaning you’re wasting a lot of ad spend on traffic that doesn’t convert.

Worse yet, the traffic you send will often end up clicking on sponsored or related products and buying.

Congratulations – you just spend money to drive traffic for your competitors.

The good news is, poorly optimized product listings are often quite easy to fix. This should be one of the first initiatives you try to increase sales, and something you look at before you start driving external traffic to your listing. Also consider adding Amazon Premium A+ Content. In 2024 Amazon reduced the eligibility criteria and more Sellers can now leverage it. More on this in our Amazon Premium A+ Content Guide.

This post will help you conduct a listing audit yourself, by showing you the most common mistakes and how to fix them to optimize your product listing correctly. In this post we do not cover how to conduct an Amazon PPC audit, which can be quite complex and is different from Amazon ASIN content audits.

Amazon ASIN Level Audits: Why are they so important?

When we say Amazon product listing optimization, we’re talking about making sure your Amazon product page is set up to attract new visitors, and convert shoppers into sales.

Done right, you’ll maximize your organic visibility with Amazon SEO, and increase your conversion rate.

The second point is especially important if you’re using external traffic, as most of the time you’re paying money to get people to your listing.

If the customer doesn’t buy from you, the result is a huge waste of money. The customer may even go on to buy from a competitor, which is doubly bad.

For a deeper insight, this post has more actionable content on how to optimize your product listing.

The first step for you to optimize your product listing is a listing audit, which we’ll run through now.

Amazon Product Listing Review: Overview

There are three categories to cover in a listing audit.

• Keyword Optimization
• Sales copy
• Product images

Amazon listing optimization means ensuring you’re covering all relevant keywords, your listing is set up to sell shoppers on your product, and your images clearly show your product and features of your product.

Before spending anything on paid ads, analyze these three areas and make sure they are fully optimized.

Let’s look a little deeper into how to analyze and improve each area:

Listing Diagnostics Step One: Optimize Your Keyword Strategy

Part one of your listing audit is to optimize your product for Amazon SEO.

Keyword research and optimization is a core part of selling on Amazon. The most effective and valuable way to get traffic to your products is through Amazon SEO (search engine optimization), by ranking for high volume search terms.

To rank for keywords, you need to display these keywords somewhere in your Amazon product listing. That way, Amazon’s search engine knows that your product is related to these keywords, and will consider ranking you for them.

Areas you can add keywords include:

• Title
• Bullet point/”About the product” section
• Product description
• Backend keywords

Note: keywords in Enhanced Brand Content/A+ Content are not indexed.

The two elements to consider during your keyword research are search volume (customers are searching for this keyword) and relevance (your product fits what someone is looking for when they type in this keyword).

Keywords that have both – high search volume and highly relevant to your product – are the “golden goose” keywords that you want to prioritize in Amazon SEO. Put these keywords in your title, or high up in the “About this item” section.

Common mistakes with keyword optimization

When you audit your listing, look for these common mistakes.

Keywords with high volume but low relevance: it’s easy to look at a high-volume keyword and start drooling over the sales you might get. But you need to ensure it’s actually a relevant buying keyword for your product.

Ranking for a keyword doesn’t matter if you don’t get any sales out of it. Focus only on keywords that could realistically lead to a sale for your product.

Over-competitive keywords: the problem with high-volume keywords is that everyone is trying to rank for them. Sometimes, the keywords you want to go after are dominated by entrenched competitors (big brands, products with a ton of reviews).

In this case, look for keyword variations (“blender” vs “food processor”, for example) that may have less search volume, but lower competition, and consider prioritizing this keyword.

Missing long-tail keywords: long-tail keywords are search terms containing several words – something like “waterproof jacket for men”. These keywords often have low search volume, but are hyper-relevant and high-intent. Meaning, someone searching for this is ready to make a purchase today.

Many sellers don’t consider long-tail keywords, because of the low search volume. But these are often the best keywords for driving sales. Even better, because your competitors may be ignoring them, this is where the most opportunities are for your audit.

Not utilizing backend keywords: backend keywords are a hidden field, invisible to customers, but visible to the Amazon search algorithm. You should make sure you fill out this area with as many terms as possible.

The type of search terms to add in your backend keywords include similar products, colloquialisms, and misspellings of your main keywords.

Summary: keyword research and optimization is vital for ranking high in the Amazon search engine, and maximizing visibility by ranking for as many keywords as possible. Focus on keywords not just with high search volume, but that are relevant keywords (and low competition, if possible). Also, don’t ignore long-tail keywords and your backend keywords field.

Don’t Forget to Optimize Keyword Placement

The Amazon algorithm places weight on certain sections of the product listing page. This weighting means that some parts of your product listings will play a more important role in the ranking. Optimize keyword placement by putting your keywords strategically in the different portions of the product listing page.

The most important placement is the product listing page’s product title. The title is weighted extremely high and contributes powerfully in the search. Focus on the keyword used in the title. Choose the most relevant and powerful keywords, and insert them from left to right in order of importance in the product title.

Besides the title, you can leverage the power of your keywords in the bullet point descriptions of your product. When writing the bullet points, you want to highlight your products most compelling features and benefits using keywords naturally within the text. You can include keywords, keyword phrases, and long tail keywords in this section. Use as many as possible without compromising the readability.

You can insert keywords in the product description too. Write a compelling description that talks to your customer using keywords that pertain to the crucial features of the product. Use this section to describe where your products would typically be used. Deliver your brand and commitment and write focused copy that aims to convert.

Make sure all your Keywords get Indexed

This section relates to the Amazon backend keyword. Known as “hidden keywords,” they are normally used in the backend of the Amazon Seller Account.

Amazon is both a selling platform and product search engine. Similar to the Google “HTML meta,” an Amazon backend keyword will provide Amazon with additional information about the product listing. Amazon backend keywords are not visible to users, but they will affect the product listing ranking.

Amazon backend keywords only work when they get indexed by Amazon; if they’re not indexed, you must do this on your Amazon Seller Central page.

When you start to work on your Amazon backend keyword, you should not:

• Use the UPC codes, ASINs, product name or identifier as the keyword
• Include extremely long content
• Include subjective words such as “good, amazing, etc.”
• Use offensive or abusive words
• Create irrelevant, misleading, and inaccurate info about your product listing

Because there are no notifications for the keyword indexing, you need to test your Amazon backend keyword string once you have created it. Test it, and check the result to know if the keyword string works. If the backend keywords are not indexed, you will lower your chance to gain more visibility of your product listing page. You can use the keyword tool and find other keywords related to your listing. Insert these keywords naturally to the backend keyword string. Make sure the readability of the entire line makes sense.

Listing Diagnostics Step Two: Enhance Your Listing Copy

While optimizing for keywords is important, it shouldn’t be at the expense of readability and convincing sales copy.

Thus an important part of Amazon listing optimization is combining keyword coverage with copy optimized to convert.

Ideally, your product listing should be readable, scannable (no big walls of text), and convincing.

Someone who lands on your product page hasn’t yet made up their mind on whether to buy your product or not. Your job is to convince them.

You do this by highlighting the value your product can bring to the customer, and overcoming any objections they may have.

This post from our Facebook community does a good job of correcting some common copywriting mistakes from Amazon sellers:

Join the community and check out the full post here.

Additional Items to Consider with Amazon Product Page Copy

Here’s some advice to help you ace the copywriting part of your Amazon listing optimization.

Title: the title is an incredibly important part of the Amazon experience. The goal of your product title is to convince people to click through to your listing, over others competing with you in the Amazon search results.

Look at your title, and ask yourself if it accomplishes this.

You should have your main keyword (as well as 1-2 other high-priority keywords if possible) in your title. This not only helps you rank for these search terms, it helps encourage clicks for people who search for these keywords.

Make sure your product title is clear, though, and not just an unreadable jumble of keywords.

Bullets: once someone clicks through to your listing, your bullet points (the “About this item” section) is the next top priority. This area gives shoppers an opportunity to learn more about your product, product features, and how it can help them.

Many customers won’t read any further than this, so it’s vital you capture the reader’s attention with your bullets.

Highlight the unique value proposition and benefits of your product here, while also including your important keywords.

Keep in mind, people won’t read through your bullet points if they’re like a novel. Stick to short sentences. Make your bullet point section easy to read and skim. And don’t just throw keywords in here without considering if it makes sense.

Product Description: if people get down to this section, make it worthwhile for them. The product description should go into more detail, which is especially important for technical products. Like the bullet points, people will most likely skim. So make sure to break up your description into sections that make sense, and use HTML for formatting.

Enhanced Brand Content/A+ Content: if you have Brand Registry, make sure you take the opportunity to add Enhanced Brand Content (now known as A+ Content) to your listing.

This is a great way to display your product (and your brand) in more detail. High-quality A+ Content increases conversions, and can also lead to sales for your other products.

Focus on Benefits over Features

One of the most common mistakes in copywriting is writing about the product features only, and not the benefits.

A feature is a part of your product, while a benefit is the impact it has on the customer.

To put it even simpler, a feature is what – a benefit is why.

For example, instead of saying “350 GSM pearl weave fabric”, you could say “lightweight and durable”. You’re describing why the feature is important, not the feature itself.

Focusing on the benefits and the unique value your product offers is a great way to get more conversions.

Summary: optimize your Amazon product listing copy to convince people to buy. Make sure your product title, bullets and product description are readable and easy to skim, and focus on the benefits of your product, not just features.

Listing Diagnostics Step Three: Create Best-in-Class Product Images

A lot of Amazon listings don’t have product images that do the product justice.

A good product image should help the shopper imagine themselves using the product, and replace the feeling of actually holding and examining it.

You want to ensure you have professional, high-quality product photos that show it in its best light.

Be sure to include a variety of photos showing off different benefits, use cases and angles. And run some tests on your main image, to see if a different main image results in more clicks.

Of course, make sure your images follow the guidelines for what Amazon allows too.

Product images are particularly important on mobile, because they take up the bulk of the screen.

Recap: Conducting regular Amazon Listing Audits is Time well Spent

As this article outlines, it’s worthwhile going through your listings every now and then. Putting time and effort into mastering different aspect of it, such as Amazon keyword selection and usage to optimize your product listings can significantly grow your Amazon sales. It seems tricky at the beginning, but it will help build a successful Amazon business. This blog covers almost everything related to optimizing product listings with keywords.  If you are new to this, think about the above tips, try some of them, and figure out which one works for your business.

FAQ: Amazon Listing Health Check