Product Lifecyle and Content Refreshes

The average product content on Amazon get changes once every three years. Imagine many changes a PPC manager would be making in that same amount of time. Anyone who has actively managed an Amazon ad accounts knows that thousands of changes per month are required to keep an ad account functioning properly. Why is it that so many sellers still believe that Amazon content is set it and forget it? The truth is, most Amazon sellers understand the opportunity that is being left on the table when they fail to properly manage their product content, but these sells fail to execute because of the complexities that get in the way. In this article, we will go over the benefits of re-writing content to respond to the current competitive circumstances, and how to overcome the obstacles that prevent most sellers from properly managing their portfolios.

Benefits of Ongoing Optimization

So you have done all of the competitor and keyword analysis, you have prioritized and created a good keyword strategy for your product and now your new content is written approved and ready to publish! But after we publish, how long is this content going to last until we need to make adjustments? If I worked so hard to make my content better, shouldn't it be good for years to come now?

The short answer is no. In order for content to be effective, it needs to stay in alignment with the changing preferences and behaviors of your target audience.

Preferences change both seasonally through the Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter Months, but also change in the long term over the years. Seasonal changes in customer preferences and behavior are cyclical and predictable, long term changes over the time slowly and are harder to predict.

Different Stages Different Strategies

You can categorize all of your products into 3 distinct stages.

Top Seller Products - Has multiple keywords with organic top 10
Traction Products - Has multiple keywords with organic rank 11-50 but less than 2 in top 10
No Traction Products - Has less than 2 organic keywords in top 50 organic slots

Lets go through 1 by 1 and analyze the differences to your content refresh strategy changes for products in different lifecycle stages.

Top Seller Products
These are the products that you will want to spend the most time on managing, both because these products probably take a majority of your PPC spend spend, and also because making content changes to products like this have greatest consequences positive or negative. Changes should be done one by one with tracking and if performance deteriorates, reverting back to what was working should always be on the table. Its these products where a single keyword moving in and out of the title can be the difference between winning the top spot on high traffic searches or disappearing through the page.

The title and images are undoubtably top priority on products like this. Increasing the overall conversation rate is the best thing thing that you can do to solidify your products top spot, but changes should be carefully considered and not taken lightly.

Traction Products - Refresh as needed and Reposition
On products that have momentum but are not fully actualized, changing content is more feasible. Depending on needs, content should be refreshed every 6 weeks to 3 months. Titles, especially parents titles are a main concern, but you should also be focusing on making sure all content gets refreshed so that keywords with changing search volume and competitive landscapes get changed out to better respond to market conditions. Generally put, the rule is that is everything seems to be improving month over month, leave it along. If things are staying the same or worsening OR if there is any major volume changes in the search terms that you product is relevant for, then that warrants an immediate keyword refresh and re-write.

Products like these benefit from trying out different kinds of positioning. Think of this stage as the awkward adolescence phase where the a teenager tries on different identifies trying to figure out what suits them best based on how their environment reacts. Its the same for your products. A "women's beanie" can be re-positioned as a "unisex beanie" without changing any physical characteristics about the product. Now is the best time to be thinking about these kinds of experiments.

No Traction Products - Cheap Traffic and Refresh Often
Products without organic traction, whether they be old stagnant products or new launches that haven't quite had the change to mature should be treated differently than products that already have some momentum. The good news on these products is that you have nothing to lose. Changing content at an accelerated pace (once every 6 week) can be a good strategy to allow products like this to index for a wide variety of keywords and hopefully hit on some emerging trends that can help them get a foot into the door and start growing. PPC can also be done differently. Instead of optimizing your PPC campaigns carefully to ensure only the most relevent traffic gets to your product page, these products will not suffer so greatly from getting less relevent, cheap traffic. Whereas top selling products that get an influx of low converting traffic can actually hurt your organic ranking by being a negative signal to the algorithm, sending the cheap traffic to No Traction Products does not incur the same penalty since they currently have no organic rankings to lose. This should be a short term traffic to help build initial sales; however, because eventually you will want to start optimizing for conversation rate to help these products become organically successful and turn into Traction Products.