It’s pretty safe to assume that most brands on Amazon don’t have unlimited budgets. So, with that in mind, there will likely come a point at some stage whereby you need to prioritise the direction of your Amazon marketing and what you should be focusing on first.
The main marketing channels on Amazon are pretty straight forward, but it all depends on what you’re looking to achieve. Do you dive straight into paid ads to increase traffic and sales right away? Or do you play the long game and work on your listings, content, and overall rankings first?
Naturally, you’re going to want both. But when we consider budget constraints, its usually only feasible to tackle one at a time. And this is where it sometimes gets confusing, because it’s not always clear which one is actually going to be best for the success of your Amazon store.
What does Amazon SEO actually include?
When people think about Amazon SEO, their first thoughts are often reduced to backend keyword optimisation and tweaking the odd title or listing description.
What many don’t realise is that Amazon SEO covers far more than that on a technical level.
SEO on Amazon is designed to help how your products are positioned in search, and that does include keyword targeting and optimisation of your titles, bullet points and descriptions. Where it then starts to get a little more interesting, is when we look at the intent behind those keywords and how they reflect what your customers are searching for. If the keywords aren’t there, or if they’re used incorrectly, your products simply won’t get indexed.
Getting indexed in Amazon search is just the start. The way your listings are structured plays an equally important part in whether traffic eventually turns to sales. This is where we look further into content quality, assessing your Imagery, A+ content, pricing, and reviews, to see how all of these influence how well a product converts once someone lands on the page. Its these main elements that feed back into the algorithm which then determines how Amazon ranks your product over time.
So, while SEO does involve keyword targeting and relevance, it also ties directly into content quality and conversion. It’s not just about getting found in a search, it’s about the listing being optimised to convert once you are.
What’s involved with Amazon PPC?
Theres a lot more to Amazon advertising PPC than simply switching on campaigns, letting them run and hoping for the best. It plays a direct role in your paid search visibility and it’s in charge of where your listings show up when customers are actively searching. Whether that’s at the top of results or further down the page depends on how much you’re willing to pay.
What many people fail to realise is that PPC covers far more than just adjusting bids or increasing budgets. Running paid ads is designed to help you capture demand, which all starts with how your campaigns are targeted. That includes setting up the correct campaign structure, so you end up in front of the right target audience.
PPC also allows you to assign budgets across different campaigns, products, and targeting groups. With effective budget control, you’re able to directly influence where your spend is going and how your visibility is distributed.
PPC is designed to do a lot of heavy lifting and helps you target, control budget and increase visibility in the search results to effectively capture demand. Its not just about bids and how much you spend.
So, what should come first?
This is really going to annoy some people, but the truth is, “it depends”. There isn’t a single answer to this, because it mainly comes down to firstly identifying what’s holding your performance back.
If your listings are already strong and have clear titles, good imagery, competitive pricing and solid reviews, then PPC would naturally be the obvious route. Why? Because if your product is already set up to convert, the issue is more about visibility. Without paid ads, it can be difficult to drive enough organic traffic to generate consistent sales.
On the other hand, if your listings aren’t converting, or if your content is weak, then pushing more traffic through PPC just becomes expensive. It’s easy to drive clicks with the right PPC strategy, but if everything else is lacking, you just won’t see solid conversions.
This is where SEO and listing optimisation should come first. Improving how your listings are positioned, how they resonate with customers, and how they convert as a result gives you a stronger foundation to build on. Without that, PPC tends to highlight the problem rather than fix it.
Why paid traffic doesn’t fix poor conversion
Regardless of how much you spend on paid traffic, if your listings are poor, all PPC is going to do is highlight conversion issues faster. More clicks doesn’t mean more sales if the product page isn’t doing its job.
If your listings aren’t already optimised and you’re not making use of A+ content or your pricing doesn’t make sense compared to your competitors, then paid traffic simply becomes more expensive traffic. You’ll still be getting visibility, but without the conversion behind it, it would be fair to say your money’s being wasted.
How should brands balance both PPC & SEO over time?
We rarely come across brands that stick with the same strategy forever, and that’s because balance is key to covering all the bases when it comes to Amazon SEO and marketing. The way most brands approach marketing is to constantly evaluate and understand what’s limiting growth and react accordingly.
Early on, PPC probably does play a much bigger role, mainly because it helps drive overall visibility while giving you a bunch of valuable data at the same time about what’s converting and what’s not. You can then use that data to help strengthen your listings, refine your content and improve your keyword targeting.
Over time, and as your listings steadily improve and start converting more consistently, SEO starts to play a much bigger role. At that stage, PPC becomes more about defending key ranking positions and scaling what’s already working, rather than doing all of the heavy lifting on its own.
