Amazon Canonical URL is probably the most neglecting factor for optimizing your sales. Amazon is a beast machine as its business spans multiple countries. They are very intimidating, especially for newcomers. However, veteran sellers would still wonder how Amazon did what they did over the years. That is why we have to study how Amazon works and how to benefit from it.
I will let you know how you can change Amazon canonical URL on your product listing. Doing so can help you optimize your product listing using the hidden nugget that most marketers fail to understand.
The Trick to Optimize Your Sales using Amazon Canonical URL
Amazon has frequent changes, more like Google, which changes its algorithm regularly to satisfy users’ interaction with its site. There is nothing wrong with changes, but one problem. It would be hard to keep up with all the latest changes if you don’t know what changes and how to keep you informed.
When building your listing title, it is essential that you pick the right keyword for your title. This one alone is probably the most important thing after your title, which acts as a headline to capture your soon-to-be customers.
Suppose you can understand the connection between keywords and the canonical URL on Amazon. In that case, you will have a better understanding of how you can implement it in your store and be a better seller than everyone else.
What Is An Amazon Canonical URL?
A canonical URL is an SEO friendly URL that contains keywords to optimize user searching. It’s like a primary key to the product when users search for a particular keyword on Amazon. It seems very technical, but it’s quite simple to understand.
In the SEO world, a canonical URL is often called a slug. The search engine uses the canonical URL to determine what keyword is on the page and the embedded title that needs to be so it would rank highly in search engines. The search engine also uses the slug to know what to index the page. If multiple duplicate URLs exist, the search engine would only store one of the documents.
Unlike in the SEO world, Amazon canonical URL follows this formation:
https://[amazon marketplace host]/[words-in-products-title]/dp/[ASIN code]
The canonical URL uses colon and hyphens in between the maximum five keywords. Amazon creates the canonical URL for your product from the main five keywords you define.
For example, here’s the canonical URL for Pokemon Carry Case Playset on Amazon US:
https://www.amazon.com/Pokemon-Playset-Different-Locations-Pikachu/dp/B085QL1ZYN
If you notice, the actual URL for the product would be:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B085QL1ZYN
Amazon has multiple URLs for the same product with various sellers. For example, one version of the URL would be:
https://www.amazon.com/Pokemon-Playset-Different-Locations-Pikachu/dp/B085QL1ZYN/ref=sr_1_5?dchild=1&keywords=pokemon&qid=1610252800&sr=8-5
The above product seller is Amazon. And other URL with the same product would be:
https://www.amazon.com/Pokemon-Playset-Different-Locations-Pikachu/dp/B085QL1ZYN/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=B085QL1ZYN&m=A33BOU9O0KAUE2&qid=1610253220&s=merchant-items&sr=1-1
The above product seller is Oak Creek Trading Company, a third party seller. Although the product has different sellers, both pages have the same canonical URL.
To find the product canonical URL, you can view the page source and search for the keyword “canonical.”
You would lose much time researching this one by one. Luckily, you can also view your competitors’ canonical just by exporting it within ZonASINHunter. Not just canonical, you can extract all kinds of data such as Amazon product image URL.
The Benefit of Putting Keywords in Canonical URLs
Search on Google for this product. You will get the canonical URL indexed search result instead of the long URLs I mentioned above.
As you can tell, Amazon rank #1 strictly for the keywords contains in the canonical URL.
Amazon purposely using this technique to leverage their ranking on Google. Free SEO traffic is always beneficial both for Amazon and its sellers.
Other than Google, the Amazon canonical URL is also beneficial for users searching within the Amazon website. Amazon might only store the ASIN codes on their database, with the canonical keywords as the second keyword. So when users search for the matching keywords as the canonical URL, Amazon shows up the products higher in rankings.
For sellers, this is a goldmine for how to optimize their product listing placement. In this example, you would instantly know that the main keyword for the product I mentioned above is “pokemon carry case playset.”
Why would you want to know the keyword? For marketing purposes, of course. You can also find out what your competitor’s product keywords are targeting so you can do the same. Mimicking successful products would reduce your risk of not getting any traffic at all, let alone the sales.
Having this keyword in the canonical URL for Amazon is also beneficial for Amazon to determine if they forget which product they want to buy because the title of the product was so long.
Increase Conversion Rates and Sales Rank
Having the correct keywords in the Amazon canonical URL is a great way to increase the conversion rate and sales rank on Amazon.
Suppose you want to market your product on Facebook and Google. You would immediately know what keyword to target based on the canonical URL. Just watch out that you use your store URL instead of the default canonical URL. The default would depend on the Amazon algorithm instead of your store. You might end up giving free traffic to Amazon, not your store, and losing customers because of this simple mistake.
Offering your customers specific links to click through social media or paid ads would lead them to your store listing on Amazon. This traffic you get would increase the chance of making a sale. The higher deals you get, the greater your product sales rank on Amazon.
Customers searching through the search engine and within the Amazon marketplace have a higher rank because organic is the preferable source of traffic for Amazon since it is free.
How to Change Amazon Canonical URL
Amazon Canonical URL is a crucial part of your marketing effort after your product title. It would be best to do this keyword research before the product listing because you can’t change it once Amazon created the canonical URLs. Having contacting Amazon to change the canonical and getting 301 redirect URLs is a mess. Especially for your marketing campaign and Amazon, so make sure you do it first before anything else. It takes time and not reliable.
