Amazon Listing Audit: Full Checklist to Fix Your Sales

According to a recent State of the Amazon Seller report, 49% of Amazon brands and 48% of sellers identified improving their listings as their top growth strategy. 

One of the most essential steps when optimizing your listings is conducting an audit to determine where you are losing sales. An Amazon listing audit also provides insights into refining your product pages to increase your impression-to-conversion ratio.

However, you must know where to look, which is why you need an Amazon listing audit checklist.

This article outlines what to include in your Amazon listing audit checklist and how to conduct a comprehensive assessment to determine where you are missing out on sales.

TL;DR - Amazon Listing Audit Checklist

Can’t read the whole article right now? Here’s a quick overview of what to include in your Amazon listing audit checklist:

1. Key metrics

2. Product title optimization

3. Image quality and compliance

4. A+ content and bullet point usage

5. Keyword indexing

6. Pricing strategy

7. Reviews and customer feedback

8. Variations

9. Compliance and technical checks

If any of these elements are weak, they can affect your listing's traffic and its conversion rates.

Keep reading for an in-depth review of each listing area, including how it affects your Amazon seller account.

Why Amazon Listing Audits Matter and When to Run One

An Amazon listing audit lets you analyze how your products are ranking, getting clicks, and converting, so you can fix high-impact issues before they hurt your bottom line.

Here are the main reasons to audit your Amazon listings:

• Accurate Diagnosis: An audit will pinpoint issues contributing to weak sales, such as visibility, conversion rates, and click-through rates. This allows you to target the actual problem, rather than assuming you aren’t getting sales because you aren't spending enough on Amazon ads.

• Improving Listings: An audit helps you identify issues that hurt your listing’s visibility, such as IP infringement and keyword stuffing. You can use the findings to refine your listing and boost visibility on the Amazon marketplace.

• Market Knowledge: Listing audits compare your products to competitors. This helps you identify listing gaps that your competitors have yet to exploit and highlights weaknesses in your listing approach that need to be addressed to maintain competitiveness. 

• Staying Compliant: Regular audits help you maintain compliance with Amazon listing rules and prevent listing suppression or suspension for policy violations.

When to Run an Amazon Listing Audit

 We recommend auditing your Amazon listing regularly, such as monthly or quarterly. 

However, some situations would warrant auditing the listing outside these scheduled cycles:

• Amazon Policy Changes: Amazon often changes its seller policies. As such, it is advisable to audit your Amazon listing after significant changes to ensure compliance.

• Unexplained Sales Drops: Sudden drops in sales volume and revenue also warrant a thorough Amazon listing audit to identify why the conversions are declining. The most common cause often includes using outdated images or listing inaccurate product features.

• Frequent Buy Box Losses: Initiate a listing audit if you keep losing your Buy Box on Amazon, as this often indicates inaccurate/incomplete listings or other policy violations.

• Rising ACoS: Consider auditing your Amazon listing if your advertising budget is increasing without a proportionate rise in revenue after several months. This often means you may be targeting irrelevant keywords or that your listings lack essential product details, turning shoppers off.

The 9 Core Areas of an Amazon Listing Audit

A comprehensive audit helps ensure your listings remain compliant with Amazon policies and that your products continue to appear in relevant searches. 

There are many aspects you could evaluate to determine compliance. However, we’ll focus on the core areas that every audit should cover:

1. Key Metrics Analysis

Review your Amazon seller account’s key metrics to identify bottlenecks or to see how you match up against competitors.

For example, suppose your click-through rate is lower than your competitors’. This could arise from several issues, such as blank or low-quality product images.

In contrast, a high click-through rate and low sales could indicate issues with your product descriptions, such as content relevance and information hierarchy. 

2. Product Title Optimization

Check that your product titles are optimized, such as including a primary keyword within the first 80 characters. The title should also stay within the category character limits, usually 200 characters or fewer. 

Additionally, confirm that the title clearly communicates the product types and highlights its key features. 

3. Image Quality and Compliance

The main image is critical to the click-through rate. As such, confirm whether the main image has an 85% frame coverage, a white background, and no texts or logos.

Additionally, evaluate your utilization of lifestyle imagery, infographics, comparison charts, dimensions, demonstration images, and videos. Top-performing listings often have 6-8 images. 

4. A+ Content and Bullet Point Usage

Is the content well-written, up-to-date, and relevant to shoppers’ search intent? Also, are the product features listed in bullet points or in prose? 

Ensure the product descriptions are coherent, written in proper grammar, and free of punctuation errors, so they reflect well on your brand. Also, ensure proper bullet point usage to make your product descriptions easy to scan, which helps keep shoppers engaged.

Additionally, check for an information hierarchy, which helps shoppers understand and retain the content, increasing their likelihood of resonating with your products. 

5. Keyword Indexing

If your listing isn't indexed for important keywords and search terms, it will never rank for them. An Amazon listings audit will review whether your keywords are indexed and searchable.

It will also verify that primary keywords appear in your titles, secondary keywords are present in the bullet points, and backend search terms are used efficiently.

6. Pricing Strategy

Proper pricing is among the best practices for ensuring you have a buy box in your Amazon listing. As such, compare your prices with those of competitors offering the same perceived value proposition and with the average category pricing.

If your product is priced higher than the category average and similar competitors, then it must clearly justify the premium pricing. 

7. Reviews and Customer Feedback

Evaluate your listings' overall rating, review volume, common complaints, and feature requests to check what shoppers say about your product.

Common warning signs include multiple complaints about your products having unclear instructions, or the listing images or description not matching the delivered items.

8. Product Variations

Assess your variations or parent-child relationships to ensure they highlight differences in product attributes, such as color, size, or flavor, and that no distinct products are grouped.

Additionally, ensure your listings include images that highlight these product variations, as this helps shoppers choose their preferred specifications.

9. Compliance and Technical Checks

Cross-reference your Amazon seller account data with the Listing Quality Dashboard on Seller Central to identify suppressed listings and restricted claims.

Check whether you have pending policy warnings and intellectual property complaints that could lead to listing suppression or account-level penalties.

How to Conduct an Amazon Listing Audit Step-by-Step

Now that you know which areas to focus on during an Amazon listing audit, let’s discuss how to undertake the process to unearth issues that could be hurting your Seller account’s performance.

Here’s a simplified guide:

1. Analyze Performance Metrics: Begin by reviewing key metrics, such as click-through rate, conversion rate, keyword rankings, and sales trends. You should also review your advertising cost of sale (ACoS) and return on ad spend (ROAS) to ensure your spending aligns with sales performance. 

2. Evaluate Your Competitors: Identify the top-performing listings for your keywords, and analyze the title structure, image quality, and price positioning. You should also analyze your competitors’ customer reviews to understand what buyers want from brands and resellers selling similar products on Amazon. 

3. Conduct Keyword Research: Leverage various Amazon seller tools, such as Helium10 and Jungle Scout, to identify high-performing keywords and search phrases and compare them to your current list of keywords. Next, evaluate your keyword coverage and ensure you use high-performing, long-tail keywords effectively in your product descriptions. 

4. Evaluate Your Visual Content: Ensure your main image stands out and meets all Amazon requirements, including a white background and 85% product fill, and that the product photos are optimized for mobile devices. 

5. Evaluate Content and Messaging: Assess whether your listings clearly communicate benefits rather than just product features. The content should also be easy to read, be free of promotional jargon, and highlight your unique selling points (USPs).

6. Check Technical Compliance: Ensure your listings comply with Amazon's rules. They should be in the proper category and should not have restricted keywords. Your product descriptions should also not include false, misleading, or unsubstantiated claims, particularly about a product's health and safety or its ability to cure, treat, or prevent diseases. You should also check the FBA inventory section on your Seller Central for stranded inventory to prevent your listings from being tagged as unavailable. We recommend using an FBA inventory rescue checklist to determine the cause of the delays and resolve the issue before it affects your sales.

7. Optimize Your Listings: The final step in the audit process should be to address the identified gaps, so that they don’t affect your listing’s visibility or click-through rate. You can implement the changes in-house or hire Amazon listing optimization services to refine your product listings and monitor performance.

Common Issues an Amazon Listing Audit Uncovers

Amazon listing audits help you identify recurring issues so you can address them and develop strategies to prevent future incidents.

The most worrying issues for most brands and resellers selling on Amazon include:

• Low-Quality Images: You may find that the images you used fail to meet Amazon's white background requirements. Additionally, poorly lit, low-resolution, or scale-irrelevant images could reduce your listing’s click-through rate and conversions.

• Low-Quality Content: The audit may also reveal that you are using generic product descriptions, which could be the reason shoppers click your listings but don’t purchase your products.

• Poor Mobile Optimization: Another common issue is using Amazon listings that aren’t optimized for small screen sizes. This locks out mobile users, who make up a significant share of shoppers. 

• Poor Keyword Usage: Many audits often reveal that Amazon listings rank poorly because they fail to utilize high-volume search terms. They also underutilize backend keywords and use outdated practices, such as keyword stuffing in titles to manipulate search rankings. 

• Pricing Mismatch: You may realize that you have priced your products higher than your competitors’ without justifying the expected value for money. Review your pricing strategy to align it with your product’s perceived value to encourage more shoppers to buy. 

• Inventory Inefficiencies: Insufficient inventory can harm your visibility, as Amazon often pushes down brands that regularly go out of stock. A proper audit can help you identify products that are running low on stock, so you can top up your inventory before it starts hurting your listing’s visibility.
  

Stop Guessing - Let Experts Audit Your Amazon Account

While you can perform an Amazon listing audit on your own, it is advisable to partner with experts to ensure the process is thorough and to unearth the reasons your sales are struggling. 

At Seller Candy, we offer specialized account management services for Amazon Seller Central and Vendor Central accounts, including Amazon listing audits and optimization.

Our Amazon listing optimization workflow comprises three key steps:

1. Detailed Listing Analysis: Our team of Amazon experts audits your listings to evaluate your keyword strategy, product titles, descriptions, and images, and how they compare to competitors'.

2. Issue Identification: We identify the root cause of your suppressed or underperforming Amazon listings, including IP infringement, generic images, and inaccurate product descriptions.

3. Solutions & Ongoing Support: We implement interventions to reverse the drop in listing performance, with common solutions including content rewrites and information accuracy checks.

We are official Amazon service providers with combined decades of experience helping brands and resellers selling on Amazon audit their listings to determine why their visibility is declining. Additionally, our process is transparent, allowing you to track all steps and make unlimited requests for ongoing support.

Schedule a free consultation, so we can start auditing your Amazon listings.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Below are answers to common questions Amazon brands and resellers ask about the Amazon listing audit process: