Important Search Terms Update (Amazon US & EU)
Amazon search terms update & recommended action
On 2 August 2018, an announcement titled “Update to search term field” was made on Amazon US & Europe seller central. It said “Amazon limits the length of the search terms attribute to less than 250 bytes.”
This had already been announced before, but we did some testing on our own listings and it appears:
- Previously, this was less than 250 bytes (EXCLUDING spaces)
- But, NOW it seems to be 250 bytes (INCLUDING spaces).
As a result, there are even fewer characters and words you can include in your backend search terms.
My recommendation - make sure your listings are compliant by checking the search terms for all of your listings are less than 250 bytes. You can use this site to check the number of bytes => http://bytesizematters.com/
When your listings are not compliant, this can lead to suppression by Amazon and a decline in performance.
In the past, sellers could enter 5,000 characters in their back end search terms! The overall trend is that Amazon is continuing to move in the direction of providing more relevant results to customers in search.
The impact of this is that keyword research and listing optimization is now more important than ever.
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