We received a question from Joseph in the Amazing at Home group today about optimizing a variation listing. Joseph says “I’m confused with optimizing a variation listing, do the search terms need to be consistent with the parent dummy ASIN along with the child items?”
The answer is: No, they don’t, the parent is a dummy listing, just as you said, it’s a holder of all the child listings and the child listings to live on their own. So the cool thing about a variation listing is you can actually get more back end search terms in your listing overall, because each of those child listings could have different search terms.
Often when I’m writing variation listings for people, I’ll provide them a whole list of keywords beyond the 249 bytes that fit in the search terms field, that they can spread out throughout their variations. Also, don’t forget to also add misspellings of colors or keywords. And never use the same keywords that use in the front end of your listing, meaning your title, your bullets and your descriptions in the back end search terms field. Back end search terms should be in the format of word, space, word, space word, no commas, or any other symbols or anything like that.

Okay. So what else? Joseph also asks “Do you individually optimize each child item? Are you just optimizing the main parent listings, because they all lead to a page that has all the variations and children?”
Often what I will do is I will create a parent listing with the same title, bullets and description for all variations, and then I’ll go to variations tab and add in the SKU and the product IDs and associated information. That automatically creates the child listings. And then I go into each child item and add photos and back end keywords.
A pro tip for when you’re optimizing your listings is to make sure that you’re filling out the intended use, and subject matter fields in your listing back end.

To figure out what to put in there, you can use the product classifier tool, you just go to the Help menu in seller central and type product classifier tool into the search bar. And click use the tool.

Enter in your item type and click search.

You’re going to see all these categories and subcategories where your item could be, and you can use those words in your intended use and subject matter fields.

Use the same format as I explained earlier, not repeating keywords already used elsewhere

In your More Details tab, make sure you’re filling out as many fields as possible. In the case of variation listings, this would go into parent not the not the child unless one thing is stainless steel material and another is rubber. Otherwise, you just put it in the parent listing.
Many of the fields in more details area coincide with the categories on the left side of Amazon when you’re searching. So search for your item on Amazon and look down the left side and you’re going to magically see some things that line up with the more details have fields.

So those are my secrets to optimizing of variation listing. Thank you Joseph for asking the question. Keep them coming. go sell some stuff.
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