How to Mine Amazon Reviews and Products for Keywords

There are a million different ways to find keywords out there, but a lot of them have one common problem: everyone knows about them. The more readily accessible and commonly known the tool or technique is, the more people in your niche are using it, and the more competition there will be for those keywords.

Recently, I’ve been exploring alternative ways to find keywords from unorthodox locations. One that I’ve hit on that is surprisingly useful is, of all places, Amazon.

No, we’re not buying a keyword list from a vendor named DUOHOXINJE that was selling cheese graters up until last week; instead, we’re looking at various sources of data on Amazon pages and figuring out where keywords can come from them.

Now, I’m obviously not the first person to have thought of this, but I would say that a huge proportion of the people mining Amazon for keywords are doing it for their own product listings, be it on Amazon themselves or on their own competing Shopify stores. Using it for something like content marketing is a little different and worth discussing.

The Two Types of Keywords on Amazon

The first thing I want to bring up is that a given Amazon page actually has two different types of keywords on it. While they can be quite similar – and Amazon sellers often implement a kind of feedback loop to reinforce the similarity – the difference can be important for one of those details I’m always harping on about: search intent.

The two types of keywords are seller keywords and buyer keywords. As an example, let’s look at some random product like, say, a cheese grater.

Seller keywords are keywords in the product listing itself. These are elements in the product listing and information the seller uses.

• The product name. In this case, you have “cheese grater,” but you also have “stainless steel,” “lemon zester,” and even “kitchen gadgets and tools” (even though that last one is from the Amazon category already.)
• The About This Item details. The seller lists product information in some bullet points, where additional keywords can show up. In this case, it lists potential uses, reiterates keywords like zesting and grating, and adds extra keywords like “dishwasher safe.”
• The full description. In this case, we have a bad example; the full description is nothing more than a picture of the item. A different product, like this one, has more information; product material and size, more bullet points for information, and more pictures. There’s some engrish there, though. Yet another example has even better options, with a full FAQ with room for additional potential keywords (like the bit about arthritis.)
• Full product information. Item stats, like size, shape, model number, and so on, can also be keywords, though you aren’t getting them from Amazon for the products you have. It can give you ideas of what information to include, though.

It can help to have some understanding of how Amazon and various Amazon marketers recommend that you use keywords so you know where to look for them. Here’s a guide on exactly that from Amazon themselves.

All of this gives you some idea of what the seller thinks are valuable enough keywords to include to get their item listed near the top of Amazon’s product search, which means they’re keywords with a very high commercial intent. Keep that in mind if you’re creating content around those keywords!

What about buyer keywords? Buyer keywords are also on the Amazon page but come from a different set of sources: the product reviews.

The easiest source is to scroll down to the written reviews and see what people are saying. Looking for what they like and what they don’t like can give you ideas for specific pain points you can target with your own marketing. Maybe a bunch of reviews mention that the cheese grater isn’t that sharp; you can write about how sharp yours is. Maybe they talk about how difficult it is to clean; you can write about how yours is designed for easy cleaning.

A slightly more difficult – and not always available – option is the video reviews. Since Amazon text reviews are so easy to scam and people are starting to not trust them, Amazon is encouraging people to leave reviews in video form. These video reviews often go into more detail than a basic text review and can give you more keyword inspiration.

Where seller keywords are primarily commercial intent, buyer keywords are often more informational intent. They’re also less intentionally used. They represent what people want to know or wish they knew ahead of time, which gives you an opportunity to sate that need with informational or transactional intent content instead.

Pro tip: When harvesting these keywords, make a note of whether they’re buyer keywords, seller keywords, or both. This can give you an idea of the intent to use, how prevalent they are, and how important they are.

A Third Keyword Source: Amazon Itself

I said there were two kinds of keywords on an Amazon page, and that’s true. But there’s more to Amazon than just the product pages. You can use Amazon itself in much the same way you use Google for keyword research. Type in a generic top-level keyword and see what Amazon suggests as auto-complete options. Progressively longer-tail keywords can give you even longer long-tail results, as well.

Amazon’s auto-complete here isn’t going to give you a ton of deeply nuanced data, but it can be a good surface-level skim of the category.

Use Amazon Keyword Tools

Another way you can get keywords out of Amazon is to use Amazon-focused SEO tools.

One of the big ones is an Amazon-native tool called the Product Opportunity Explorer. This is a tool Amazon offers to sellers to help them identify product opportunities, like trends in searches and purchases, trends in reviews, and even pricing trends. The main downside is you have to have an Amazon Seller account, which costs a fee, so it might not be worth it if you aren’t an Amazon vendor yourself.

Another option is Amalyze, an Amazon analysis tool. The website copy is a smidge off-putting, but that’s just because it’s German, so don’t let that bother you too much. It’s a very solid Amazon analysis platform that has an entire section dedicated to keyword analysis.

There are a lot of other Amazon-focused tools as well, pretty much all of which are aimed at some space between identifying products to sell and identifying ways to optimize product listings, often through keywords. DataHawk, Analytic Index, Helium 10, Jungle Scout; there are plenty to explore.

I’ll be honest here; since I’m not primarily an Amazon seller, I haven’t dug deep into these tools. So, if you know which ones are on the better end of the scale, let me know!

Scoping Hidden Keyword Data

One thing I want to mention here is that Amazon has a secret keywords section. It’s somewhat similar to the old meta keywords field for websites, where a site owner could put keywords in a meta field for the search engines to see but where users couldn’t see them.

Google and the other search engines stopped using this mechanism after it was widely used for spam, but Amazon still uses something like it.

Sellers can go into their products and, when editing product information, add “back-end keywords” to their product listing. These keywords are invisible to everyone except the seller and Amazon’s search algorithm, A10.

How does Amazon get around this being used for spam? Their algorithm is built to ignore keywords that aren’t relevant enough to the product. That tends to be enough to keep it in check. Not every keyword a seller puts in the list will be used to index the product to that keyword.

Here’s the bad news: there’s no way to scope out these keywords. It’s not buried in the product page metadata or anything; it’s solely kept on the back end between the seller’s dashboard and Amazon.

What you can do is use some of the analytics tools above to scope out ideas. Some of them allow you to plug in search terms and see if the product is indexed for them. Others show you the top-ranking keywords the product appears for. The latter report is the more useful of them since if you already know the keywords, you aren’t exactly getting that information, now are you?

Sorting and Qualifying the Keywords

Once you’ve dug up a list of potential keywords, you have to figure out what you want to use them for and how well-suited they are for that purpose.

This is where some of that extra data comes into play.

As I mentioned above, seller-implemented keywords tend to be the keywords with the highest commercial intent. People searching Amazon for particular keywords are generally looking for a relevant product, with the intent to at least examine that product, if not purchase it then and there.

These can be tricky to target with content marketing, but they can be very useful for product pages, landing pages, and the like.

Buyer keywords – the keywords you find in reviews – are much more often informational. They contain tips for what you can write that can address customer pain points. If the product did a good job of addressing the point, you know what the user wanted, what they got, and what they thought. If the product did a bad job, you know the pain point is unfilled and can use that information to pitch your product instead.

Armed with that information, you can decide what kinds of content you want to make using those keywords.

• Competing product listings using highly competitive seller keywords.
• Review and comparison posts using a combination of seller and buyer keywords.
• Informational and pain point content using primarily buyer keywords.

The biggest advantage a seller off-Amazon has against Amazon is the fact that Amazon doesn’t let you run a blog. Being able to write a lot of more casual content that funnels people to your store can be a great way to outdo a competitor relying on Amazon alone. Using Amazon to scope their keywords is just icing on the cake.

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