Amazon is like an expansive universe full of endless possibilities waiting to be explored and harnessed. While some may find its complexity overwhelming, others see it as an opportunity to blaze new trails and make groundbreaking discoveries. Every day, ingenious sellers uncover new tricks and techniques that shift the paradigm and revolutionize the Amazon private label community’s selling practices.
When it comes to selling on Amazon, optimizing your product listings for both Amazon’s search engine and traditional search engines like Google is crucial for reaching a wider audience and increasing sales. While many sellers focus solely on optimizing their Amazon listing for Amazon’s search engine, it’s important to remember that a significant number of shoppers still use other search engines outside Amazon like Google, Bring, and many such to find products before making a purchase.
That’s why it’s essential to pay attention to focus on Amazon’s External Traffic. One of the important ways to bring more external traffic to your Amazon listing is by properly optimizing your canonical URL. In simple terms, the Amazon canonical URL is the main URL of your product listing that Amazon recognizes as the original and authoritative source. Think of it like a website’s domain name, except for your Amazon product listing.
By creating and maintaining an Amazon canonical URL for your product, you’re essentially telling Amazon and other search engines that this is the most relevant and authoritative page for your product. This can help your listing show up higher in search results both on Amazon and Google.
In this context, We are going to explore some important points on “Amazon Canonical URL”
A quick look into the content:
- Understanding Amazon Canonical URL
- Structure of Canonical URL
- How can we check the Amazon Canonical URLs?
- Importance of Canonical URLs
- When to use canonical URLs?
- How Canonical URL can help you to get more external traffic?
- How to set up the canonical URLs
- Factors that need to consider before creating a canonical URL
- Definition of Amazon Canonical URL
Amazon’s canonical URL is basically important to be indexed in google. You will often see some keywords in your Product URL. These keywords play a vital role for external search engines to locate your product and give them a higher position to rank. In simple words, the canonical URL is the Amazon product URL that Google indexes for search results.
- Structure of Canonical URL
Basically, Canonical URLs keywords are separated by hyphens. Normally, you can find it in the
Middle of the URLs.
Amazon’s Canonical URL Structure:
“https://www.amazon.com/words-from-the-products-title/dp/ASIN”
As shown in the following image, the URL in the address bar contains 5-word keyword phrases that comprise the Amazon Canonical URL for that particular product.
“https://www.amazon.com/Bathroom-Absorbent-Microfiber-Non-Slip-Machine/dp/B08XZ2KQZR”
For this product, we can see “Bathroom-Absorbent-Microfiber-Non-Slip-Machine” are the keywords pulled by Amazon from the product’s title. Here, “Non-Slip” is considered as one word as it is written with a hyphen “-”. Don’t get puzzled, you will get to know everything very clearly in this blog. But in most of the cases you can not see the keywords used in the canonical URL properly. T
- How can we check the Amazon Canonical URLs?
There are many ways to check the canonical URL.
Step 1: Go to an amazon product page (I am taking “Jackery Portable Power Station” as an example). Click somewhere and select the view page source or type ctrl+u.
It will open the following new window:
Step 2: Now try to find the canonical URL by the shortcut – Ctrl+F and then type “canonical”. Here you will find the exact canonical URL. In the URL, you can see a 5-word phrase “Jackery-Portable-Explorer-Generator-Optimal”.
These words help the search engine rank the page at the top. Now if someone searches “Jackery Portable Explorer Generator Optimal” in google, this product should be shown at the top of the SERP.
Even if we remove the brand name “Jackery” from the search, it will show at the top.
Whenever someone searches with this keyword in google, this product will come at the top. Now if I click this product, it will redirect me to the product page, not to any search result page. So, it is helping to avoid all the competition and will get huge traffic. The more traffic a product gets, the more sales it will likely make. So this is 100% organic. And this is the magic of the keywords used in the Canonical URLs.
Now we need to check if these Keywords used in the URL are well optimized or not.
If we check with helium 10, we will see there is literally no search volume for this keyword; even in google, none is searching for this keyword. So, this means, these five words in the Amazon canonical URL are not well-optimized.
The seller is losing a huge potential of getting more organic traffic from search engines. So Optimizing the canonical URL with well-researched keywords is so important. By this, we can easily beat our competitors by ranking at the top of Google. So, if you know that people will search for something on google to buy the kind of product we are selling, just put that keyword at your canonical URL. Because this way, people will come directly to our product page, and they will not see any competitors in the way, which will help us to increase the conversion rate and make more profit.
- Importance of Canonical URLs
Canonicalization is important in web development and search engine optimization (SEO). Essentially, it refers to ensuring that multiple URLs with similar or identical content are consolidated and recognized as a single URL by search engines.
So, why does canonicalization matter? Well, there are a few reasons:
- Avoiding duplicate content penalties: When search engines crawl websites, they look for unique and relevant content to serve their users. If a search engine encounters multiple URLs with the same or similar content, it may interpret this as duplicate content and penalize the website by lowering its search engine ranking. By using canonicalization, you can consolidate these URLs and avoid duplicate content penalties.
- Improving website authority: By consolidating multiple URLs into a single canonical URL, you can also consolidate any authority those individual URLs may have gained. This can help to improve the overall authority of your website and improve your search engine ranking.
- Providing a better user experience: It can be confusing and frustrating when users encounter multiple URLs with similar or identical content. By consolidating these URLs using canonicalization, you can provide a better user experience by ensuring that users are directed to a single, authoritative content source.
- How can Amazon Canonical URL help you to get more external traffic?
When it comes to selling products on Amazon’s marketplace, ensuring that your product pages are optimized for search engines is crucial. However, having multiple product pages with identical or similar content can cause confusion for search engines and customers alike. This is where the Amazon Canonical URL comes in handy.
Amazon Canonical URL is a feature that allows you to identify the primary product page among multiple pages with similar content. By specifying the canonical URL, you can signal to search engines which page to index and prevent duplicate content issues.
But Amazon Canonical URL offers more than just avoiding duplicate content. It can also help you to gain extra traffic from Google’s search engine results page (SERP). With a clear and consistent URL structure, your product pages can rank higher in search engine results and be more visible to potential customers.
Moreover, having a canonical URL can also establish trust with search engines and customers. It indicates that your page is the primary source of information about the product and can improve the credibility of your page. As a result, customers are more likely to trust your page and make a purchase.
By using Amazon Canonical URL, you can optimize your product pages for search engines, increase their visibility to potential customers, and establish trust with both search engines and customers. This can help you to get more external traffic and increase your sales on Amazon’s marketplace.
- How to set up the canonical URLs
Setting the correct canonical URL for your product listing is crucial for maintaining the integrity of your online store. It helps search engines identify the preferred version of your page and avoids duplicate content issues.
One of the best practices for setting a canonical URL is to do it at the beginning of creating your listing. If you don’t set it up properly from the start, it can be challenging to correct it later on.
If you need to update your canonical URL, it’s recommended to choose a valuable and relevant phrase with a high search volume. You can use keyword research tools like Helium 10 to help you identify these phrases.
To select the most effective keywords, keyword hinging can be helpful. This process involves identifying frequently associated words with your product and incorporating them into your URL.
For example, if you sell a 300W power station under the brand name Jackery, you should first identify important keywords to optimize your product listing and attract external traffic. You can use tools like helium 10 to find high-volume keywords, as shown in the image below:
Once you have identified your target keywords, you can create a canonical URL for your product, such as “Jackery 300W Portable Power Station.” In the canonical URL, you can only use 5 words, so after selecting the initial 5 words of your title, give a hyphen “-” to separate these 5 words from the rest of the title and force Amazon to set these 5 words as the canonical URL.
So these are the following words we have taken for our canonical URL:
“BrandName 300W Portable Power Station”
Overall, setting a correct canonical URL is a critical step in maintaining your online store’s credibility and visibility. By following best practices and using keyword research tools, you can create a strong and effective URL that will help your product stand out in search results.
- Factors that need to consider before creating a canonical URL
When it comes to creating and preparing the canonical URL for your Amazon listing, there are several important factors to consider:
First, you need to decide whether or not adding your brand name at the beginning of the title is valuable for you. If it’s not, you can skip the brand name and add extra keywords to the title instead.
Second, keep in mind that hyphenated words count as a single word in your canonical URL. This means that you can use hyphenated words to add more words to your URL without exceeding the maximum character limit. For example, if you write “Anti Slip” with a hyphen like “Anti–Slip”, this will be counted as one word instead of 2 words.
Last but not the least, let’s address a common question that many Amazon sellers have: Can I change the canonical URL for my existing listings? The answer is both yes and no. Amazon doesn’t frequently update canonical URLs once they are set, but there are ways to force a change.
The easiest way to update your canonical URL is to modify your Amazon listing’s title to include only the keywords you want in the URL and remove all other parts. Before making any changes, be sure to back up all of your important information. Then, you can create a support ticket or call Amazon Seller Support to request that they update your canonical URL with the new title.
If Amazon does not allow you to change the URL through this method, the only other option is to relist the item. However, this should be a last resort since it can be time-consuming and may negatively impact your sales history.
Concluding thoughts
Amazon Canonical URL is an essential component of the product’s SEO strategy. By using Canonical URLs, Amazon can signal to search engines which version of a product page to index and rank in their search results, avoiding duplicate content issues and consolidating their ranking signals. With the help of canonical URLs, you can get non-amazon customers from other search engines like Google, Bing, etc, for your amazon products. This results in improved user experience, increased traffic to Amazon’s website, and, ultimately, higher sales and revenue. So, while you may not see Canonical URLs as a customer, they are critical in ensuring that Amazon’s massive selection of products is visible and accessible to potential customers.
