What are the Benefits of Boosting External Traffic to Your Amazon Listings Through Seller Rocket?

External Traffic Plus Media and Content Strategies with Seller Rocket

In today’s Partner Spotlight, Curt from Seller Rocket talks about their content marketing processes. Here are some of the questions he answers in the video:

• What is external traffic and why is it essential in eCommerce?
• What benefits do you get from high external traffic to your listings?
• What tactics can you put in place to boost your external traffic?
• What are the most effective platforms available online for boosting external traffic?

Why External Traffic?

First, some facts. Only 51% of the entire buying population on Amazon came directly to the Amazon website or app to shop. The rest (49%) was led to Amazon from somewhere else – i.e. social media, search engines, online ads, PPC, and more. 

Of that 49% – 60% originates from search engines. 

And in that 60% is where the magic is.

The benefits of increasing external traffic through search go far beyond numbers. Obviously, external traffic would lead to a spike in awareness, engagement, and conversions. But there are also not-so-obvious benefits that you may not realize at first. These benefits may take some time to manifest – but they are evergreen, timeless, and for the longer term.

What are those benefits? Curt and Amy discuss these in the video:

• Specific content can improve brand credibility. Look at best-seller listicles, editorial reviews, advertorials, influencer blogs, or vlogs.

• The Amazon algorithm loves external traffic. The more external traffic your listings get, the higher you rank on Amazon search results.

• Amazon is a safe eCom platform that people trust. Leading your bottom-of-funnel audience to your Amazon listing is not likely to cause friction, unlike unknown independent websites.

One important thing to remember though is that not all off-Amazon content can convert. And not all external traffic is in Amazon’s good graces. For instance, having all your external traffic coming only from one source may not be a good move. Amazon likes diversity in external traffic because having one source could be a sign of rank manipulation (like rebate websites). Listings have been penalized because of that, so you have to be careful.

What we’re trying to say here is that external traffic can be increased in many ways. But there are methods, major platforms, and publishers that are proven effective – and there are certain groups adept in these methods. That’s what Seller Rocket is for. Reach out and see what they have in store.

Transcript

Amy Wees: Hey, everybody, I’m Amy Wees. I’m the founder of amazingathome.com. I’m also an Amazon seller, and I sell on multiple other platforms as well. And I love to talk about external traffic, because it is the number one thing that you can do to kick your competitors butt on Amazon, so I’m excited to talk to you about it today.

And to help you guys be able to do those things off of Amazon, that are going to help you on Amazon, and there’s so many different ways you can do it. And we’re gonna talk about all those different ways today, both free paid organic, lots of different ways, lots of different tips, my goal today is just to like, pour into you guys give you as much value as possible. And I know Curt, and the folks at Seller Rocket are have that same aim, they just want to help you be better at your business and and get the word out, because that’s the thing, you know, we all launch products. And sometimes we forget the marketing angle, we forget to tell people that those products exists. So I’m excited to be here today and and to talk to you guys about about getting the word out.

Eric Suddarth: So I’m Eric Suddarth, I’m a GM here at Seller Rocket. I’ll be monitoring the q&a in the chat, kind of. So if you have questions, please feel free to send those in. And Curt will be running the show here. So thanks again for joining.

Curt Humrichouser: All right. So I will kick things off and show a few examples of external traffic that we provide and talk about, like, how the publishers that we work with are finding the products that they’re that they’re featuring. So I just searched for the best pour over coffee maker. And a few examples I have here, there’s there’s CNN, there’s New York Times, these are all like review type articles. And our thesis is that these reviews that have an authority figure behind them, they tend to drive a much higher conversion rate, because people are already looking for the best type of product. So what we do is we help get you in front of these publishers so that they know you even exist and can feature feature you in their in their articles.

Amy: Maybe we can take one step back, before we get into all this just talk about why external traffic? Right? So these are really great examples of external traffic.

But why? And I would love to hear in the chat from some of our attendees today. Why do you think that you should use external traffic? So external traffic is any traffic that is not on Amazon, right? That comes from off of Amazon. So that could be from social media, it could be from deal sites, it could be from these amazing, highly ranked Google articles that we see here. Right? There’s tons of different ways to send external traffic to your Amazon listings. Even if the traffic is pointed at your website, often it will still point to Amazon eventually, because people like to buy things on Amazon. So they’ll search for that same product and go and wonder if I can get it on Amazon. Right.

So why external traffic, I just want to point out to you guys, that only 51% of the people that shop on Amazon are going directly to Amazon to find products 51% That means 49% of the people who Come on Amazon to buy a product are coming from off of Amazon. So if you’re only running Amazon PPC and you’re not doing anything off of Amazon, you’re missing out on 49% of traffic that you could be driving people. I don’t know how many of you, but we’d love to hear from you in the chat. Many people when they’re researching a new product, they go to Google right 60% of Amazon’s external traffic comes from search. And so what Curt  is showing us here is some of that search. He’s showing you what can happen when customers are searching for that poor over coffeemaker it what happens if they go directly to Amazon? They get so many pages of pourover coffeemakers that they get confused and they’re like I don’t even know I need some authority. to recommend something to meet. So then they see Oh, CNN is recommending best pour over coffee makers. Let me go check that out. And we all know and we’re learning today that we can actually pay for placement in these highly ranked blog articles right that people trust, right? We trust CNN, they can tell me how to make a good pourover coffeemaker. So I just want to start there, you guys really think about that only 51% of Amazon’s traffic is direct. The other 49% is coming from off of Amazon. What are you doing to get into that web footprint, write up some of that traffic and get in front of those customers before they go to Amazon? Get them to trust you, before they even go to Amazon, then they’re not worried about all those other competitors with all those reviews, right? They’re looking at your listing, and they’re going Oh, wow. Well, they were recommended by CNN. That’s, that’s pretty cool. I’m gonna go with this one. Right. So what do you what do you think about that, Kurt? In terms of, like, for example, this pour over coffee makers from CNN, it’s highly ranked. If I just write my own review of pourover coffee Baker’s on my website, am I going to make it to the top of Google search?

Curt: No, not without a lot of help. A lot. A lot of backlinks.

Amy: There you go. So this is like cheating, right? It’s like cheating. So I just put a bunch of my products were in the top 10 list for Black Friday deals. And I use content marketing, just like Curt showing you today. And to get, you know, to get my products in those top 10 lists. So so let’s talk about we talked about, you know, why external traffic, and also you guys something important to note, external traffic ranks your product three to one over PPC. We’ve run extensive tests on this extensive, we’ve been running external traffic for since 2018, Google ads, content marketing, this kind of thing, three to one ranking on your best sellers ranking over PPC. So you cannot, you cannot I mean, because think about Amazon’s algorithm, right? They’re going, they’re saying oh my gosh, all of this traffic 87% I think of Americans are prime members. Amazon wants 100% of Americans to be prime members. So if you’re, if you’re sending traffic, and the algorithm sees that and say diverse traffic like this, especially from top grade blogs, like cnn.com, right? Amazon sees that and goes, woohoo, this is this pourover coffee maker is super relevant customers are coming from off of Amazon to find it, move that sucker up. Amazon has a six times higher conversion rate than other ecommerce websites for search. So when you apply that to apply external traffic to that, and you tell that that algorithm Yes, I’m super relevant. I’m not only relevant on Amazon, I’m relevant off of Amazon and customers are coming on to Amazon and searching for that thing and finding my product. Man, it moves you up. It’s really, really crazy what it could do on your rank. So anyway, I know I’ve been talking for a while. So we talked about why external traffic and what forms can we utilize. And that’s what Kurt was just bringing up the different forms of of external traffic. So let’s go over some different forms. As you were saying, Curt, you’ve got the articles here.

Curt: Yeah, yeah. So there’s the articles that are being written by the publishers. The publishers are also if you see this, this ad here, they’re advertising their own placements that they’ve created, their own pages have been created, the more eyes they can get on their content, the more that they’re going to sell. So you’re, you’re helping them help you by getting your products featured. And there was a question in the chat about why not use those publishers and direct the traffic to your website. And that’s, that’s great. I mean, everyone wants to save some money and not pay out the additional fulfillment fees and whatnot if they’re going to Amazon but Amazon just converts so much better and didn’t she say what, what did you say like six to one or what was the

Amy: Six times higher Amazon convert six times higher than any other e commerce website as far as the search engine goes, but the reason that you would want to drive to Amazon and the reason these publishers want to drive to Amazon, is customers see Amazon like a big box retail store. They see Amazon on par like I said, like something like 87% of Americans are prime members right there. They’re shopping on Amazon on a regular basis, not to mention the pandemic even ramped that up even more, right? All of us our sales triple, you know, during the pandemic because of the increased traffic online. But think about it from a publisher’s perspective, right? If I’m a major publisher, and I want to get those clicks, right, these publishers make money when they’re able to send when they’re able to get buys from these other websites, right. So Amazon, you know, pays that that kind of affiliate commission to publishers. So it’s in that doesn’t cost you anything, right? Amazon pays that out, because they love external traffic so much. But if I’m a major publisher, would I rather put Bob’s thing about Bob’s dot com on there? Or would I rather put, you can get this on Amazon, right? Amazon’s a major, major channel. So there’s, there’s a balance there, I definitely think that you should be doing some content marketing to your website, you should be writing blogs, you should be doing all those things to to increase your website’s rank. But even if you run traffic to your website, people are still going to go on Amazon and search for it. And I’ll give you an example. I did some content marketing with a partner agency where what they do is they offer like a discount on your product through their website, right. And then they publish to you through content. articles like this, right there. What they want to do is they want to sell your product on their website, and, you know, make some extra money from that besides what you’re paying them to publish inside of these articles. And they offered a $10 coupon off of my product, a $10 coupon. What did people do, Kurt? Did they take the coupon? No, they went to Amazon. And they paid $10 more. So some people did take the coupon. But they don’t know that site. Right. They don’t trust it as much as Amazon. So some people did take the coupon. But what happened is my sales doubled on Amazon, as a result of being in all these news articles and everything. And even though that particular publisher was offering a $10 off coupon to sell it on their site, from these articles, right? If they had like a deals link in there, right? People were still going to Amazon to buy it for $10 more. That’s a significant this is a $45 product. So to save $10 on a $45 product, you would think that you know that that wouldn’t really make a huge difference in Amazon. But it did, it made a huge difference in the amount of traffic that was going to Amazon even though the link was leading to their website with the $10 off, because people were still going, Oh, that’s a cool product. Oh, awesome. Let me go type that into Amazon. So yeah, that’s that’s the reason you have to balance it. And we’re not saying don’t send traffic to your website, we’re saying pick and choose your battles, right. If you have a major publisher like this, you want to send it to a major trusted source. And then sprinkle in some other content marketing, and maybe your Pinterest pins, your Instagram shopping, shoppable posts, that kind of stuff, drive that traffic to your website, get it get a bunch of traffic going all over the place. And that’s only going to help you on Amazon in the long run as well.

Curt: We, we’ve there’s some posts we’ve had for our clients where they’ll have a double link, thinking of the LA Times specifically, they will have like the link to Amazon and a link to the public to the brand’s website. And what we found is that the LA Times converts when it’s going to Amazon are like 11 and a half percent. And if it’s going to the to the brand’s website, it’s like 1%. So even if people are following those links, it’s it’s a must, it’s going to have to take

Amy: into account that on people’s website. It’s not always optimized for purchase. Right. So how many of us are spending time on our websites and really working through that user experience and making sure that you know there’s no problem when they add it to cart, you know, that you were doing upsells or cross sells that people are people are going to trust them? Right? We’re on Amazon, they know their credit cards protected. They know that it’s going to come right to their address. They know they’ve got that free Prime shipping. So it’s it’s just a it’s a great to have both. It’s great to build both. It’s going to help your brand.

Curt: That was good. We just got a good question from Sean, I get this question all the time. If, if the publishers will use the brand’s Amazon attribution link, and the publishers they get paid by Amazon through their links, so they’re not going to want to use someone else’s, someone else’s link.

Amy: And that goes for influencers too, which is another form of external traffic. So let’s say that you find a really good, you know, like, for me cat blogger, you know, I have, I’m in the cat business. And so my brand is based on cats. And I found a couple of cat bloggers that are pretty decent, pretty ranked, you know, sent them my product, ask them to just write up something about it and create some content. And you know, I wouldn’t ask them to use my attribution link. In fact, a little hack that you can use is you can actually find Amazon Associates using the search term AMZ n dot t o, you can use that search term. And then what you can do is, if that associate is already promoting products like yours, you can reach out so if you’re working with some micro influencers, or a blogger, you can reach out to them and say, Hey, I noticed you’re an Amazon associate, you know, I could, I would love to send my product is on Amazon, I would love to send you a sample have you do some content on it. And you can even offer if they’re really responsive, you can even offer to double their commission, because Amazon only pays 3% in some categories of the purchase price as an affiliate commission, so that 3%, let’s say you have a you know, whatever your your product prices, no matter what, though, that if the customer purchases, whatever that commission is that they get from Amazon, it’s gonna be like 30 cents, 50 cents, depending on the cost of the product, right. But you can offer to double that commission. So if you have a good relationship with that person, you can say, hey, send me your associates report at the end of the month. And I’ll double whatever you made guess what’s a lot less than a click for PPC, so and you’re getting external traffic at the same time. So that’s a little hack that you guys can use. And to find those you can just go on like YouTube, which is another form of external traffic, right and, and I would love for Kurt, for you guys to talk about how your publishers sometimes use YouTube and video marketing. But let’s say we go on YouTube, right, and we search for, let’s say I’m selling cat toys, and or cat care products. I can search cat care space in a MZ n dot t o and now I see all the videos were in the description. They have those associates links. So that’s just a tip for you guys. And what about you guys, Kurt? How do you for really great authoritative sources? How do you guys utilize video marketing.

Curt: So I’m not each one of the publishers that we work with have their own methods for promoting products. And some of them they’ll do like deal newsletters and like they’ll, as we saw in the search results, they’ll sponsor their post. They’ll do social media posts, I think social media would be the place where we’re going to find a lot of a lot of videos.

Amy: Yeah, that’s what I noticed, too. Like on Mashable, for example, I just had an article published about the top 10 You know, Black Friday deals for cat people. And I noticed in the traffic bump, it’s not just the article, it’s also on their social media. And a lot of these publishers correct me if I’m wrong, a lot of these publishers have multiple social media channels. So all I did was search for my product that day that all of a sudden my traffic was just through the roof, right. And that’s the thing about using publishers like this is you’re not just going to get this thing that you’re seeing on the screen here. This is going to be shared across everywhere like their their emails, their websites, their social media channels, affiliate social media channels, because think about all the people that promote different deals and stuff. They’ll share this right so it’s like you just get a huge bump. It’s not just this one thing, you get a humongous bump across social media across you know, everywhere, like their email lists all of that. So it’s just such diverse traffic for one post.

Curt: You mentioned multiple channels, this here in front of us this ad from best reviews, this is best reviews dot Guide, which is another best reviews channel. So they’re putting these articles out on like this is a totally different website. But it’s best reviews still similar articles. So there’s sometimes we work with publishing entities to have many websites that they that they publish through. And so getting your product featured by one of these publishers it is being pushed out to multiple channels, like multiple sites. And then each one of them probably has their own social media and, and so you get pushed out pretty far. There was a question

Amy: How these guys, so let’s say that they sign up with seller rocket and they get there, they they get in some of these top 10 list they get in some of these really great publishers articles, what I would love to do is give them tips on how they can get 10x on that, right. So already you guys see that there’s these publishers are sharing everywhere, right? They’re sharing on social media, they’re sharing on different websites that they own. They’re promoting it on Google ads, they’re doing all the things, email lists, all of that kind of stuff. And what you can do with that, so that this is what we do, every time our products get featured in a news article, or one of these major publishers articles, we go and we create FOMO posts, right? So I take those logos from each of those channels, and I’ll throw them in Canva and create a social media post that says we were just featured here, here, here, here and here. Do you not have this product yet, and people are gonna see those major channels that major authority, and they’re gonna be, oh my gosh, so now I just took that, and I tripled it right? Or use that those feature things in your pitch decks, use them on your website, right? Say, Hey, we were featured here, here and here and here. And suddenly, that makes your website look so much more authoritative. That’s going to increase your conversion rates on your website. So I want you guys every time like I tried out for shark tank in 2018. And I didn’t get picked for the show. But you know what, I sure did use that for press. So I hired a media guy. And I was like, let’s let’s publish this on all the platforms. I tried out for the Shark Tank, I you know, this was is my story, you know. So that’s press right there, that’s good press, people are interested, I still use the name of Shark Tank, to create a buzz around my trying out for the show, even though I didn’t get picked, right. And that got a lot of traffic to the website. And still to this day, if you search for it, like if you search for my product, or whatever, those articles are still on top. And so what’s great about being published in some of these articles is it’s the gift that keeps on giving. It’s going to be on the internet for a long time, it’s going to remain ranked on the internet for a long time. So when somebody searches pour over coffee brewers from six months from now, these articles are still going to pop up and they’re going to pop up way before your own content. That’s on your website. Right. The other thing September 2021. I love that. The other thing you guys can do is create backlinks. So go to your blog, and create an article about we were featured here. And you know, here’s what what we love about this or whatever, you know, and include backlinks to those major articles. Right. So now that’s moving you up in Google search as well. The other thing you can do is make sure that you guys are doing things on YouTube, because besides these major ranking articles, right, and then you can use utilize this authority in your YouTube videos as well. But do unboxings do how tos do unboxings? Do your own versions of product reviews? Right? Because people actually search for that, right? So like pour over coffee unboxing, right and do an unboxing of your product, maybe do an unboxing of a competitor’s five, do a top three, whatever, right? But you can mention, and this product was featured in this, this, this, this and this. And then you do two other ones, and they don’t have as much pizzazz, right, but you’re showing that you’re reviewing other ones as well. So just every time you guys, you guys work with a publisher, like selling a rocket, you want to make sure that you’re utilizing all of that everywhere, because it really will make your post that much more authoritative. And it will drive more traffic to you as well.

Eric: So just just a time check here. So we’re down to about four minutes left. And current one thing that I wanted to make sure that that we went back to Amy brought up a great question there about sort of how can a client of Celeron get the most out of our services? So can you talk a little bit about how we see people use on Amazon and off of Amazon editorial content together that kind of helps grow their brand. We see the best lift there. Could you maybe address that?

Curt: Yeah, yeah. So the editorial well, okay, so external traffic is helpful. for improving your organic rank, and the other half of what we do is with the Amazon editorial recommendations, I would try and pull it up, but it might take a while. And so the editorial recommendations work best if you’re already ranked on the first page for the search terms that you’re that you’re targeting. Otherwise, the because of the way that the editorial show it’s based on the algorithm, and you’re, if you’re not on the first page or less relevant for it, it’s going to hold down the conversions. And so, yes, it works out much better if you’re ranked on the first page. So by using external traffic, it is a good segue to get you ranked higher, so it’s more likely that editorials is going to work.

Amy: What options do these guys have with you guys? So if they’re getting if they’re wanting to get started with all of this, and they’re like, Yes, I’m convinced I want to do this. What options do they have with seller rocket? Do they can they just get is like one package? Do they just get? Can he pick and choose? Like, how does it work? And where do you feature that?

Curt: Yeah, for for most Amazon sellers, we have two services that you’re gonna want to look at Amazon editorials or external traffic. And you could do them both as a combination, or just one individually or certain products or doing external certain products or doing on site. And so yeah, there’s, there’s a lot of different package combinations that you can that you can choose from. And it’s really it’s unique to each product. So I like when When sellers reach out to me and say, Hey, I have this product, like, what could we do with it? Because sports products we have, like, New Year, New Year’s coming up real soon. And so sports products are really great. We have publishers that love featuring sports, health, fitness, outdoor recreation type products, and their content ranks on the first page really easily. Some workout mat, this article, it ranks or does this number two, or number three overall in the search results almost immediately. It’s been up for just over a month. And so there was a good question, what works better internal or external recommendations. So if you’re not ranked on the first page, then you might have a bad experience with the Amazon editorials that you might not even get it to show on the search page. But for the products that are ranked on the on the first page, they’re running an aggressive PPC strategy, the editorial works as a page optimization. So it really makes that search term work a lot better for you it’ll convert like it’s a branded search page. External is really great for improving your organic, your organic rank. And it’s also it’s the gift that keeps on giving as, as Amy said, that piece of content is going to live for a long time out there. The editorial recommendations, I think are the most powerful, at least that that I’ve seen, we can measure I saw there was a question from Sean about being able to measure the effect. We do have a dashboard and part of our relationship with these publishers is they share the commission report that they get from Amazon and so we know which which transactions they’re being paid a commission on and and you can verify this back against your your seller central data.

Amy: Yeah, I love that about seller rocket that you guys offer a dashboard so that people can check like what’s working. Right, what what traffic are you bringing them and how is it converting? I think that’s something that’s unique about seller rocket as compared to some of the other PR type of firms that I’ve worked with is, you know, yeah, I can pay for this article to be published or you know, any of these other things. But how do I actually track that it’s working. And that’s something that’s unique about seller rocket is that you guys actually track what you’re doing, because that’s how you get paid, right? You get paid that commission off of how many sales you’re driving for, for clients. So I think this is just a really great way for them to work with a publishing tool like this, and actually be able to see what is working best so they can go oh my gosh, that Sports Illustrated article is just man it’s driving some striving, some conversions, right.

Curt: There was a question, what if you receive bad external traffic that doesn’t convert? Will animal will Amazon penalize organic rankings? Can I answer this one? Yeah, please do.

Amy: This is the number one question I get because I teach Google ads and a lot of big events and stuff like that because we’ve been running Google ads for a long time. And so the answer is yes and no. Are you? Are you going to be penalized by Amazon? If you if you use all of if all of your traffic is coming from one source and it does not convert? Yes, you will be if you’re sending, let’s say you’re in this is where people are getting in trouble with their rebate flows, right? They’ll use one rebate website, and it’s coming from that one link. And it’s not converting, and they’re like, What the heck happened? Right? Or they’ll stop there rebates. And all of a sudden they’re on page 10. Because the algorithm saw that and went, huh, no, that was pretty obvious there that, you know, you’re trying to manipulate rank and traffic, right. But this is diverse traffic, you guys, this is anytime you run a Google ad, or you utilize some of these different like ads and stuff like that. Remember what Kurt said about how every time they publish an article, it’s coming from all over the place, right, their email lists their different websites, it’s not just coming from one link. So it does the opposite. It sends diverse traffic to your listing. And that’s good. Whether it converts or not, it doesn’t matter because you’re sending Of course, it does even better if you convert, which is why you should always check your listings, you should always check your listings against others on the page and make sure that you have a good offer. And a free offer that I have for you guys today. If you’re wondering if your listing is ready to start running external traffic, send it to me, I will give you a free review, I will tell you what you need to do for free, I will send you a video of me going through your listing and telling you exactly what’s wrong with it. So you can go to amazing@home.com and go underneath the Services menu and choose free listing review. And I will send you a listing review. And I will tell you whether you’re ready to start working with seller rocket, or whether you’re going to send some traffic because I never want you to pay for clicks if they’re not going to convert, right? So I’m going to be real honest with you and say yes, you’re ready, go go sign up, go run some external traffic, run some Google ads. But if you are not, I’m gonna also be very honest, I’m a straight shooter. So go underneath the Services menu. Curt on the top there and the right and click free listing review. Three listing or review. Yeah, and you guys can just fill out this little form here, it will go to my email and I will send you a video of me going through your listing and I will tell you exactly what’s wrong with it or what’s right with it. What I love what I don’t love what you should be concerned about. So this is an offer for you guys today for me. And that hopefully answers that question. Inspired to run some external traffic. Definitely get out there. And you know, of course start with your listing. Start with your offers, make sure that those things look great. But then diversify, right get some different if you can get the opportunity to be featured in an Amazon editorial. Or if you can get an opportunity to be featured in some of these really authoritative press articles. You’re going to win like I said, it’s the gift that keeps on giving. So give it a try. And then don’t forget what we said how to 10x it, use it yourself use it for press use it to share a feature and on on your website and in your images and all of that and that’s really just going to take everything that somebody like sellin rocket is going to do for you and it’s just going to just create a snowball effect.

Curt: Thank you, Amy.