Bullets are an essential part of an Amazon product page and can be optimized to improve a brand’s presence in Amazon organic search results. Due to their location above-the-fold, the bullets are visible to potential customers right away and improving their scannability ensures consumers gain the necessary information from your product’s detail page without becoming overwhelmed.
What Makes Good Amazon Bullets
It’s more effective to keep things simple when creating Amazon bullet points. Shorter text increases scannability and won’t overwhelm shoppers, leading to a positive initial impression. While Amazon allows up to 256 characters, we recommend keeping each bullet to around 80 characters.
They should be brief and clear and represent a single aspect of the product. Amazon recommends writing bullets in sentence case with only minimal punctuation, if at all.
The following examples bullets represent the recommended Amazon structure for a pair of headphones:
- Earphones with three individual balanced armature speakers
- Noise-isolating design attenuates outside noise by an amazing 26db
- Recording-engineer studio-reference quality sound
- Comfortable and secure ear loops
- Includes Universal Fit kit and a protective metallic travel case to store earphones
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of Bullets
The above product listing is an example of good bullet point usage. They supply a brief description of the company, major and minor product details, the included accessories, and product compatibility. While they used commas for list separation, they kept punctuation usage to a minimum and didn’t attempt to describe the product in depth.
Above are the bullets used in this StarPack listing for kitchen tongs. They supply relevant content but try to stuff their bullet points with too much information, which limits scannability. Using all caps is helpful for highlighting key points to the consumer, however, we would recommend shortening the last all caps bullet header. We are seeing this trend more on Amazon and believe it can be an effective solution, depending on the product category and brand voice. And as always, we recommend keeping bullets clear and concise.
This company decided to take scannability to the next level by eliminating any relevant product details. Additionally, they have failed to optimize their presence in Amazon organic search results as no keywords will be indexed. When viewing this listing, the user doesn’t gain any additional information about the blender other than what is available through the product image.
Future-Proofing Bullets while Optimizing for Voice Search and Alexa
Voice-operated assistants, such as Amazon’s Echo, continue to fill homes and there are steps brands can take to ensure bullet points are correctly transmitted.
Last year, content26 tested a number of products on the Echo and Echo Show to better understand how they handle bullet points. We discovered that devices will relay title and price information for the highest ranked product in Amazon’s organic search results. Users then have the option to ask for more details.
Alexa will then announce the product’s star rating and the number of reviews before reciting bullet points verbatim. However, there are instances where the devices will shorten the bullets for their small screen (Echo Show) or change them completely.
The following tips will help optimize your bullet points for voice-enabled devices:
- The shorter, the better
- Avoid punctuation
- Beware of special characters
- Word order matters
- Add conversational elements when possible
Things to Consider
- Besides bullets, brands need to a find a balance for the length of their product descriptions when creating product content. Too long and it will bury important details in a wall of text, while going too short will likely leave the customer with questions; our recommendation is a description of roughly 450 words
- Bullet points are indexed so including keywords and terms related to the product can help improve SEO
- Avoid punctuation as much as possible and beware of special characters
Takeaway
Shoppers are shifting more and more to online channels and Amazon is already a fiercely competitive market. Brands can use these strategies to improve their rankings and ensure effective transmission of product details across all platforms. Titles carry the most weight when it comes to Amazon organic search, but strategically written bullets are another way to get an organic SEO edge.
