#489 – 2026 Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass – Part 1

Audio version above. Video version below

If you’ve ever wondered which keywords are actually driving sales on Amazon, this Amazon Keyword Research Masterclass Episode is for you. In Part 1 of this two-part series, Bradley Sutton walks through the fundamentals of Amazon keyword research in 2026 and why keywords still matter for discoverability, both for Amazon search and the AI tools shoppers now use along the way.

This episode is centered on Helium 10’s Cerebro, a reverse-ASIN tool that lets you see exactly what keywords a product is showing up for; organically, through ads, and through Amazon’s own relevance signals. Bradley explains how to quickly filter down to the terms most likely producing revenue, then demonstrates how to identify where competitors are winning and where you’re missing opportunities.

You’ll also learn how to “time travel” with Cerebro’s historical features to see how a product’s keyword footprint changes month to month, perfect for diagnosing sales dips or understanding seasonal spikes. Finally, Bradley reveals how to view which keywords Amazon considers most relevant for any listing, plus how to pull top keywords across multiple competitor ASINs. Part 2 will build on these foundations with even more advanced Amazon keyword research tactics and hidden gems. Stay tuned!

In episode 489 of the AM/PM Podcast, Bradley covers:

  • 00:09:45 – Introduction To Cerebro
  • 00:14:06 – How To Find The Keywords That Are Driving Sales For Any Product.
  • 00:20:30 – How To See The History Of All The Keywords A Product Has Ranked For.
  • 00:26:50 – How To View Which Keywords Amazon Thinks Is Most Relevant For Any Product.
  • 00:30:20 – How To See The Most Relevant Keywords For A Group Of Products
  • 00:36:16 – How To Compare Your Product To Your Competitors.
  • 00:40:04 – “10 Money Making Cerebro Strategies”

Transcript

Bradley Sutton:

How to see the entire history of where any product on Amazon has been ranking. How to see a secret keyword relevancy score for any listing on Amazon that no one else has access to. This and more on today’s keyword research workshop.

Bradley Sutton:

Hello everybody and welcome to the AMPM podcast. My name is Bradley Sutton and I’ll be your host and this is the show where we discuss all things Amazon, TikTok shop, and Walmart private label and how to generate recurring revenue streams 24 hours a day during the AM and the PM, hence the name of the show. Get it? AM/PM podcast. And as a matter of fact, this week I pulled three all-nighters working to help a seven figure seller who sells handwriting workbooks to completely re-optimize their Amazon and TikTok advertising. But even though I wasn’t even touching my own Amazon accounts, they were still making money. How cool is that? Pretty cool, I think.

Bradley Sutton:

And so, I’m very excited to have this keyword research workshop. We do this maybe once every two, three years, and it’s going to be based in Helium 10 tools, but the strategies here doesn’t matter if you’re using other tools. Some of the stuff that I’m going to talk about, you can use other tools, so you should still stick around. These are important strategies to go over. Most of you are using Helium 10 already. You have access to probably every single one of the things I am going to be talking about. And this is one of the most important aspects still in 2026 of Amazon success, and that is having the right keywords in your listing. Contrary to popular belief, guys, the search algorithm has not changed too much. It still matters what you have in your listing if you want to be indexed, if you want to be relevant.

Yes. And even if you want to be relevant to different AIs that are out there, keywords still are the most important thing for discoverability, for how most people shop on Amazon. Now, interestingly enough, a while back, about six months ago, I did a study. I’m actually going to update this soon for my speaker circuit talk that I’m going to be doing, but I did a deep dive into data to show, hey, how much has search behavior changed because of AI? One year after Rufus was launched, Rufus was launched on Amazon in July of 2024. And so I was like, hey, what can we see that shows what has changed and what hasn’t changed? Are keywords less important now? Like, do I just need to forget about all keywords and, you know, just worry about optimizing for Rufus or optimizing for AI and things like that? No, was the resounding answer.

Bradley Sutton:

And I’m going to have new data to see. I think since I checked this in July, I have six months more of data. And I really believe that searches have to have gone down maybe a little bit in the last six months. But here’s the thing, guys. Take a look at this screenshot right here. Search has search volume changed. If you look at search career performance, we’re looking at thousands of keywords from July of 2024 to July of 2025. Basically, search volume did not change at all. Alright. So, this is a way that we could see how much Rufus has influenced search. This is a way I verified with, you know, the Amazon search performance team that would work to be able to see where at what point in the shopping funnel are people using Rufus. And basically, if a million people were searching for all your keywords before Rufus came, guess what? Last year, still a million people were watching. What is this year? Well, we’ll see. I’m going to have some new numbers soon. The other thing that I checked was the number of clicks. Like, are people searching a keyword? And then once they get the search results, they use Rufus to go off and do their own thing. The answer again was no. Pretty much the same number of people are clicking on products after search as they were before Rufus came. Click through rate, that didn’t change. Alright. That is something that Rufus could have affected. Where Rufus had the biggest impact was conversion rate.

Bradley Sutton:

You might be thinking, wait a minute, doesn’t Rufus help improve the conversion rate on some listings? And the answer is yes. But what happens in search query performance is if somebody starts using Rufus in the shopping funnel, the search query performance data stops there. It disappears the search query performance because search query performance only checks people who search for a keyword. They click on a product and then they buy it kind of like right away or within 24 hours. If you start clicking around back on your browser, you start clicking on sponsored brand ads, you start clicking Rufus, it stops. Alright. And so it’s not to say that Rufus has slowed conversion. It’s actually helped increase conversion according to reports from Amazon. But as you can see on this graph here, there is a big dip in conversion rate for search query performance for keywords across thousands of keywords the exact month that Rufus was introduced and it stayed fairly low. And the reason is because a lot of people, the people who are using Rufus for a year through last July, were mainly using it on the product page to do things like look at the price history, understand the reviews, dig deeper into what the listing might have, etc. They still probably ended up purchasing the item, but just search query performance couldn’t pick it up anymore because some people started using Rufus. Alright.

Bradley Sutton:

Now, when I say there was a big dip, we’re talking like 20 percent down to 14 percent. It’s not some huge, gigantic change, but still, this was a steady number until Rufus came. So you can tell that, yes, some consumer behavior has changed by a couple percentage points because of Rufus. So, again, the point of this exercise was to prove that, hey, how important are keywords in 2025 and how important are keywords in 2026? Still super important. Alright. Think yourself, the last time you needed something to buy, what did you do? Did you go directly to Rufus and start having a conversation if you already knew what you were going to buy? The last thing I bought online was a scrub brush for my tile in the bathroom.

So what did I search for on Amazon? Scrub brush for tile, right? I searched a keyword. You probably did something similar. Those of you who do use AI or even Rufus or other things, most people I’ve polled, they’re using it because they’re not 100 percent sure what they want. It’s stuff that they would have done in Google before. You’re like, hey, what’s a good gift to give a 40-something-year-old divorcee or something like that, right? You don’t type that into the search bar necessarily on Amazon. You used to go to Google and you try and look that up, right? Or you go now to AI and start having a conversation to see, and then you figure out, oh, this is a good thing to do.

Bradley Sutton:

And probably still you end up searching for a keyword on Amazon, right? But Rufus, you can now do that there without even going to ChatGPT, and maybe there will be search results there. But most people, again, still are using keywords when they search on Amazon. And even for Rufus and other AIs, the keywords in your listing, the images, these are the things that make up how Rufus can even read your listing. If you just put up a blank listing and just an image of your product, I’m sure Rufus could extrapolate some things, but it’s not going to know all of the use cases for your product. It might not know how people might search for it. So even when we’re talking about AI, keywords are important. So that’s why we want to do this workshop on how to use Cerebro especially. And in part two next week, we’re going to go into some other advanced tools. And a lot of this stuff, guys, is stuff that 98% of your competitors are not using. I’m going deep into stuff that nobody else has. And even the people who have Helium 10, they don’t even know it exists. And these are important, guys.

Just think, if you can find 30 more keywords that you can get indexed for and potentially rank for, send traffic to an advertising. And let’s say these 30 keywords only get you one sale per month, not even per week. It’s the most conservative of all.

Bradley Sutton:

A lot of keywords can bring you 5, 10, 15, 20 sales each a month. But let’s just go way under board here and say, you know what, let’s just say these 30 keywords only bring you one sale a month each. What if your product was $30? That’s like 30 times 30. It’s a 30-day month. We’re talking $900 more of sales. So just by 30 keywords in the most conservative of efforts, we are talking about thousands, thousands of dollars a year more in extra revenue on just one listing, let alone across your whole catalog. So yes, this workshop is about to be thousands of dollars important. So, let’s go ahead and hop into these strategies, how I’m going to do this. I’m going to structure these in almost like separate videos where it’s like, hey, here is not step-by-step how to use Helium 10. I’m going to start with like a problem, something to solve, some way to make money. And then I’m going to show you guys how to do it using Helium 10. You ready? Let’s go.

Bradley Sutton:

First off, I’d like to just give you an introduction and overview of Cerebro, the most advanced keyword research tool that has ever been made for Amazon. This is important because it’s like when we get into these strategies, you need to understand the kind of metrics and things that you’re looking at. What is the main purpose of Cerebro? What’s the first thing that you should do if you’re just getting in there for the first time? Basically, think of Cerebro as a reverse ascent tool. What that means is like you can spy on any product on Amazon and Walmart to see where they were ranking for at any time right now or in the last few years. No other tool can do this. Why is this important? How can this make you money? Let’s say you were selling physical goods in a grocery store, right? Can you imagine if somebody told you, hey, go into the store and I’m going to give you this special knowledge? When you look at the aisle at your competitor’s products or your own products, you’re going to be able to know in seconds exactly what the customers who bought your products and your competitor’s products were thinking of right before they bought your product. Wouldn’t that be valuable to have? That’s like fantasy, right? In real life, you can never do that. No such thing. Maybe in the future, maybe 100 years or something, right?

Bradley Sutton:

With Amazon, you can do that thanks to Helium 10. Basically, Cerebro is a tool where you can put in any product and see all of the keywords that they are showing up in the search results for your product or your competitor’s product. So, it’s literally what somebody was thinking before they found any of the products, because obviously, if they’re typing in keywords, that’s what they were thinking about, right? And so, this is going to help you to know what keywords to put in your listing. So here in Cerebro, as you guys can see, I put in a product and I’m going to show you exactly how to extrapolate this data and how to filter it down. But you’re going to see things like the keyword phrase. There’s 976 phrases that came up, right? You can actually enter multiple products. So, if you enter multiple products, those will show up right here under the product search. You’re going to see the distribution of keywords, right? I said there’s 976 keywords. Well, here I can see that 720 were organic. That means non-sponsored placements. There was 270 paid placements that could include sponsored brand ads, sponsored product ads. It can include sponsored video ads and also 200 Amazon recommended. What is Amazon recommended? That is a super secret and cool metric I’m going to talk about in a later strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

You can see the total search volume, right? Of all keywords that people are searching for in the last 30 days. How many times did they search in those last 30 days? I can look at different time periods. I can look at both organic rank, sponsored rank. There’s going to be a lot of these filters here that you guys see in Cerebro like keyword sales, title density, and more that is really going to help you understand. Alright. So here at the top, this is where you put in an ASIN, either one ASIN or a group of ASINs, or you can actually put a keyword to get more data. I’m going to talk about that in a later video about how you can actually enter a keyword into Cerebro as well. We have a lot of marketplaces that you can look at for Cerebro, Amazon, USA, Canada, Mexico, Germany, Spain, Italy, France, UK, India, Netherlands, Australia, Japan, UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Brazil, and also the Walmart marketplace. So you would just hit the dropdown menu and go to any of these marketplaces, and you’re going to be able to see keywords that are relevant to your product potentially.

Bradley Sutton:

If you want to see any of these trainings later, make sure to hit this Cerebro training button on the top, right? You also have a history button here where you can see any search that you had done here in Cerebro, even in the future, you’ll be able to go back to them to kind of like see what was going on at the time that you searched. This is by far the most powerful tool in Helium 10 and the one that you should be using from day one. So how can you start making money in Cerebro? Let’s find out in the next strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

How to find the keywords that are driving sales for any product. Why is this important? How can it make you money? Hopefully this is kind of self-explanatory. This is like the Holy grail of things that Amazon sellers wish they knew years ago before this tool existed. And that is, hey, how can I know all of the different ways that somebody could search for my product? How can I know how my competitor, maybe they’re making a thousand dollars a month, maybe they’re making $10,000 a month. A big portion of those sales is coming from keyword searches. How can I know what are the keywords that are driving those sales? The answer is using Cerebro. So how do you work it? Watch this. And this is the very first thing that you should do. As soon as you’re using Cerebro for the first time, I would suggest running it on your own product. So here I’m searching for grooved handwriting book, and here’s the account that I was working all nighters this whole week on it’s called a Graceful by Design. And they have these grooved handwriting workbooks. Let me find their ASIN.

Since I have the Helium 10 extension on, I can actually just copy the ASIN right here. So I’m going to copy the ASIN from Amazon and just paste it right here into Cerebro and hit get keywords.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. So what we see here is it found 1,168 keywords that I was either organically ranking for this product, or I was showing up in sponsored search results or that Amazon recommends. And that’s like a very key metric or we’re going to talk about later. Now, what I like to see is, all right, where were the keywords that were driving sales? So maybe I’ll say, Hey, show me the keywords with at least 100 searches that I’m showing up for in the first 10 search positions. And I can go ahead and hit apply filters. And I can see, oh, this is actually not that great. They’re only showing five keywords here that this product is ranking for in the top 10, all with pretty low search volume. Alright. So sales are probably way lower for this, but I can see, all right, they’re branded searches. People are typing grooved learning.

People are typing a little explorer’s book handwriting. Alright. So, these are the keywords that are driving the sales this month for my product.

Bradley Sutton:

But what about my competitor? Maybe I’m like, hey, Alright. My sales are down. What sales are driving to my competitors? So I’ll go ahead and copy the, you know, top seller for this niche and I’ll go ahead and run their product in Cerebro. And once it loads, I can actually do another search. I’m like, hey, show me search volume of minimum 100 and organic rank between one and 10. Let’s take a look. And we’ve got, wow, 328 keywords. So, they are absolutely crushing me in search results. No wonder why my competitor is selling way more than me. Look at this. All of these keywords, they have more than 300 more keywords. They’re in the top 10 for with a total search volume of 58,000. Whereas I had just like five keywords with only 500, right? So, this is how you can just instantly get data and see where any product is ranking for. I can actually see where is this product showing up in search results for sponsored? Like, where are they concentrating their spend? Where are they bidding for top of search? I can go right here and look at sponsored rank and I’ll be like, Hey, show me where they’re showing up in the top six search results. Where are they isolating their spend? Here’s another 300 keywords that came up here. You can see their sponsored rank over here. This is which sponsored rank position. For example, I could see right here, they are in one of the top third sponsored rank for this keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. And so if I were to actually look in Cerebro, I would see something similar where they were probably in the top five here. So how did they get to the top of the search? They probably are bidding on this in Amazon PPC and bidding pretty high. So now I can just kind of like spy on my competitors and say, hey, where are they focusing their spend? Alright. This is a mind-blowing tool guys, where you can see anybody where they’re ranking for. And, and the difference of this and any other tool you’ll see out there is you’re going to see all pages of the search results, right? As you can see in this search, I typed in grooved handwriting book. Now there’s hundreds of listings that come up in the search results, but there’s only seven pages of search results. Now this is important because Helium 10 is checking all seven pages to show you which keywords, which products are ranking, where other tools out there, you’re only getting the top page, the top two pages, sometimes up to three pages. Why is this important to see all pages? Well, Amazon shifts ranks a lot, sometimes based on the browser you’re using sometimes based on the address that you have in your Amazon bar, sometimes based on just random reasons.

Bradley Sutton:

And so an important keyword oftentimes will all of a sudden show up on page five or six or seven. And if you are only looking at the first one, two, or three pages of search results, you are going to miss some important keywords that may be tomorrow. That keyword would have been on the top of the search results, right? So Helium 10 is checking the most times with Cerebro where it’s ranking. We’re rotating browsing scenarios to make sure we give you a holistic view of where you’re ranking. And this is going to show you the most important keywords for your listing. One last thing, this works, like I said, on multiple Amazon marketplaces, but on Walmart, instead of copying the ASIN, you actually copy the product ID. It’s a numerical number that’s in the URL, the address of the website or the actual Walmart page. And you go back to Cerebro, you enter Walmart, then you paste the Walmart product ID and you hit get keywords the same way that you do it on Amazon. And lo and behold, you get all of the keywords that are showing up for that product. Now, if you think that’s cool, wait until you see the next strategy.

Bradley Sutton:

How to see the history of all the keywords a product has ever ranked for. Why is this important? How can it make you money? Well, in the last strategy, we talked about, hey, what’s happening right now? We’re in the last 30 days. Where is our product getting its sales from now? But what if you have a seasonal product, right? What if like, let’s say it’s a weight loss product where 80% of the sales happen in January of each year and then the rest of the year it doesn’t sell much. What if it’s a Christmas ornament, right? When I’m recording this video, it is not Christmas time. Alright. Let’s, let’s say it’s February or March. Most Christmas ornaments aren’t even in stock in February and March. So how would I even use Cerebro or any other tool to see what are the main keywords in a listing that was hot selling in December like Christmas ornaments? Guess what? Unless you have a Helium 10, you would have no way to do that.  So that’s why looking at the history is important. Also, it’s, it’s great to be able to see, hey, I had a dip in sales. Did my dip in sales happen? Because from one month to the next, my keyword ranks dropped. Did I have a peak in sales from one month to the next? Was it because I increase in rank? Right? Helium 10 is the only tool that you’re going to be able to use in order to get this super valuable information. Uh, what are the ways to look at the history? Let’s hop into it.

Bradley Sutton:

So if you are just in one of your Cerebro searches here, you scroll down to this button called historical trend.  And then this chart is going to show up here where you can see the history of this product and how many keywords they were showing up month by month, year by year for sponsored products. Like interestingly enough, this company has looks like they kind of increased their spend around may of each year. Um, but then they really dropped down this month, their spend on Amazon. Alright. So not many keywords in January they are advertising for. So maybe I want to see, hey, what were they doing way back in June of 2025? I just hit the June of 2025. And then I hit apply filters. And now it’s like, I’m taking a time machine back to June of 2025. And I can see where were they ranking? What was the search volume of those keywords back in June? Did they have different sales, you know, back then, right? Super, super valuable guys.

Bradley Sutton:

Now I mentioned also that this is something that can help you identify where your products had keyword increases or decreases that resulted, uh, in sales, uh, increases or decreases. All right, here’s how you can do that. Like if it’s your own product, you know what the sales history is, but if you’re looking at a competitor product, like I am doing right here, um, I have to look at the BSR chart here with the Helium 10 Chrome extension. And I could see where this BSR chart, when the BSR is high, what does that mean guys? That means sales were low when the BSR is super low. What does that mean? Sales were high. So, I’m looking here and their BSR was terrible. Uh, looks like in August or in June, in June of 2025, this product was not doing well. But then I’m looking at September. I’m like, oh my goodness. Their, uh, BSR was as low as can be. So, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to run a comparison and try and see if I can find what keywords resulted in the big increase in sales. And why is this important? Well, now I’m going to be able to see, hey, if these keywords ranks are so important that it like doubled or tripled their sales, hey, I better make sure that I pay attention to these keywords because I could double or triple my sales if I’m ranked high. Right?

Bradley Sutton:

So, here’s how you do it under your regular, uh, Cerebro search, you go and you click monthly comparison, and then you can select one or two, or you can select two or three months. And so I’m going to go back and I’m going to say for my first month, I want to see June of 2025. And for my second month, I want to see September of 2025. And I’m going to compare both of those months. Uh, I can put in some filters here. Like I want to see, hey, from keywords that had at least a hundred search volume, where were they ranking in August? Let’s say that was outside of the top 10. Okay. But in September, they were top 10 for the products. Alright. In other words, keyword ranks that went up, let’s see how many keyword ranks went up for them from September to or from June to September. Look at this 73 keywords. Uh, they went up and let’s sort by some search volume here. Look at this keyword right here, writing practice for kids, age three to five in June, they were ranked towards the middle of page one position 20 in September. They jumped up to four. You think that that increased part was part of their sales. You better believe it. Look at this keyword here, three-year-old writing practice in June, they were ranked 90th or 88th. That’s like on page two or three, where were they ranked in September position 10, they skyrocketed to page one. So instantly now I have 78 keywords that helped my competitor to increase their sales by three X from June to September of last year. And now I can take this information and use it in my own advertising to try and jump up my sales and ranks to.

Bradley Sutton:

Guys. So this is super valuable. I would probably pay $500 a month just for this historical feature. That’s how viable it is, not just on seasonal products, but as you can see a product that sells throughout the year, what was the reasons of declines in sales? What was the  inc or the reason for increases in sales? That’s how you can use this historical information in Cerebro. So make sure that you guys are using this probably one of the top three features, not just in Cerebro, but the entirety of Helium 10.

Bradley Sutton:

How to see which keywords Amazon thinks is relevant for any product. Now, this is important because you might write what you think is the best listing, but for whatever reason, sometimes Amazon gets confused about a listing. Let me tell you about a quick story that I had. I was once selling these socks, right? And they were pink socks, but on the bottom, they had words on it. Alright. So these, my main keyword wasn’t pink socks. It was gifts for coffee lovers. Why? Because on one sock, it says, uh, if you can read this, the other sock says, bring me coffee. So my main keyword was, should have been gifts for coffee lovers, uh, gifts for moms who love coffee, things like that. But I could not rank at all or get advertising impressions for those keywords. And I’m like, dumbfounded. I made my listing correct. I have the word coffee all over my listing. Why can’t I rank for coffee related keywords? When I ran that listing through Cerebro, I saw through this relevancy score or Amazon recommended number that Amazon did not think I was relevant for the word coffee. And I thought about, I was like, oh, you know what? That makes sense. Coffee is a keyword that’s kind of reserved for the grocery category, right? I’m selling a cloth, a clothing category product. So, you know, that, that was why in the beginning when I first started listing, I couldn’t get relevant. So I had to like send a lot of traffic to there and, and do some kind of like tricks and things that get relevant for it. But the reason I knew I wasn’t relevant was because of this score.

Bradley Sutton:

And so when you’re starting out to make a listing or you’re having trouble getting impressions for a keyword, this is how you can check for that. You can only do that in Helium 10. Here’s how it works. Basically go into your listing or your competitor’s listings, run it through Cerebro, and then sort by Amazon recommended rank. There’s a scoring system that actually goes from like one to 999 in Amazon’s backend that Helium 10 has access to. And we assign a score. So like if there is a score, a keyword that has a score of 999, it was the highest score that this listing had. That would be Amazon recommended rank one, right? And then if there was another one that was 970, that would be ranked two, et cetera, et cetera. So now I can see that for my competitor’s listing, the most relevant keywords that Amazon thinks for this product is grooved handwriting practice for kids, handwriting without tears. That’s a funny keyword, handwriting practice. Alright. So I can now see how Amazon thinks about my product and competitor products. And this is important too, because like if I really want to be kind of like relevant to one of my competitor products, especially so I can target them in advertising, having some of these exact keywords that my competitor is the most relevant for having that in my listing allows me from day one to kind of tie my listing to them. And it makes it easier for me to advertise, uh, in sponsor display and other forms of advertising on that product. And it also is something you do for your own listing. I highly recommend this when you first launch your product.

So you can immediately check to make sure is Amazon confused about my, what my product is, because if it is, you’re going to have a heck of a time trying to get advertising impressions, trying to rank for your main keywords if Amazon is confused. So make sure to use this exclusive Amazon relevancy tool.

Bradley Sutton:

How to see the most relevant keywords for a group of products. Now, why is this important? Alright. I could see where any one product, my product or a competitor is ranking for in Cerebro. We all, we all saw how valuable that is. But sometimes if I’m just looking at one product, I don’t want to just like copy their keywords. They might have some random keywords that aren’t relevant to me for whatever reason. But if I can look at the top sellers in a niche, like the top five or top 10 sellers, and then look where almost all of them are ranking highly for a certain product or for a certain keyword, I resent. And then if I look at where all of them are ranking for a certain keyword, that gives me a lot more confidence that this is a super relevant keyword to my product. And one that is very important for getting sales. If multiple competitors are all getting sales for this keyword, how do you do that? Let me show you.

Bradley Sutton:

If you don’t have your own listing, you first need an ASIN that is not one of the top ones. This is just kind of like a nuance of Cerebro that helps you to kind of compare. If you are comparing your product to theirs, I’m going to show you how to do that in a separate video, but let me go ahead and copy one of these ASINs that is not selling too well. I copy that ASIN and I drop it in as the first product in Cerebro. And now what we’re going to do is I’m going to fast forward this, but I’m going to pick the five, six or seven top products that are most similar to my product. And so I’m going to be able to see what keywords are driving their sales. Okay. I just chose about five products here and I’m going to hit get keywords. Now, what this is going to do is it’s going to find me any keyword that any of these products are showing up in the search results for either organic or sponsored placements. And as you can see, it found over 7,000 keywords. Now the easiest way to see the top keywords is just by hitting this one click button right here at the top called top keywords. Once I do that, it’s going to show me keywords that have at least 500 search volume. I can change it. That’s not a magic number or anything where the competitor rank average, meaning if I take where these products are showing up in the search results for that keyword, what’s the average rank it’s between one and 40. So they’re kind of ranking on page one and at least three out of these top five are ranking forward and take a look here.

Bradley Sutton:

There are nine keywords here. And let’s take a look at some of these keywords. Look at that grooved handwriting practice for kids, 2000 search volume. Why did this keyword show up? If I go all the way over here to a relative rank and put my mouse over it, I’m going to be able to see, oh, wow, look at this. One product was ranked two. One was ranked four. One was ranked 11, 12, 16. All of these main products are all ranking on the top of page one. You think that’s going to be an important keyword? You better believe it. An easy way to see which ones are the top ones is by looking at this competitor performance score. It’s the last column and anything that has like an eight, nine or 10. Those are usually going to be your top keywords for a niche. Now, another one button filter that we have here at the top is called opportunity keywords. Now, this one is different because it is looking at keywords that only one or two products are ranking for. Now, why is this important? Well, this is important because what, you know, those main keywords, those are good keywords, but it’s a little bit harder to compete. It’s going to be more expensive, right? Because everybody, every single one of your competitors is ranking. But with this one click tool, now I can say, hey, show me where only one of these products is like ranking in the top 10 and the others are just kind of like all over the place. Because then that means guess what? I only have one product I’m fighting for position in the top 10 as opposed to all my competitors.

Bradley Sutton:

So it’s just another way to get valuable keywords. And so with that one click, I can see that, hey, preschool books, only one product was ranking highly for it or two at the max. Let’s take a look. Look at that. One product is ranked five. The rest of the products ranking nowhere other than one other one was 213. So that means for this keyword, I only have to worry about one competitor if I was like trying to fight for position on that page. So that’s another valuable way to kind of compare your rank versus theirs. One more thing I like to do when rounding out my keyword research is I like to say, you know what, hey, show me any keywords where at least one of my competitors was ranking like in the top hundred positions that maybe has at least 500 search volume and I hit apply filters. And now 78 keywords came up and I just know now because of what filters I put that every single keyword here, at least one of the products that I identified as my top seller are ranking in the top, uh, you know, page on Amazon. And so these are also more relevant keywords. Uh, I could dive in and say, hey, where are my competitors are ranking for in sponsored ranks? Where are they focusing? There’s spend multiple competitors, focusing their spend. There’s just so many different ways, uh, that you can filter out this data. I’ll show you some of those ways in some later strategies, but this is another one, guys, if you are making a brand new listing, you need to put, uh, one of those throwaway ASINs first, and then five or 10 of your top competitors. And this is how you get the top relevant keywords for your brand new product.

Bradley Sutton:

How to compare your product to your competitors. Why is this important? How can it make you money? As you can see, uh, the product that I was working on, they only had maybe 200 sales last month, but some of their competitors had 800 up to 7,000 sales. A lot of those sales, you know, maybe comes from TikTok or it might come from off of Amazon. Sure. But a number of those sales are coming from keyword searches because our product is not ranked high. How can I see what keywords my competitors are getting sales from and beating me on and how I can improve either with advertising or maybe making my listing more relevant. Watch this. In this situation, I am going to take my product and make that the seed ASIN or the very first ASIN in my Cerebro search. It’s very important that you put the, your ASIN first in this multi-ASIN search. Then I’m going to put five to 10 of my top competitors. I’m going to do that right now. And I’ll be back in a second. Alright. So I put my ASIN first and all of my competitor ASINs here. And I came up with, wow, 16,000 whopping keywords here. So what I’m going to do here is I’m going to say, you know what? Show me the keywords where there’s at least 200 search volume. Maybe I’m not even on the first half of page one. I I’m beyond position 20, but at least one of my competitors is in the top 10. Let’s see how many keywords come up here. I mean, you want zero to show up here, right? Uh, because you want to be beating your competitors, but look here, 47 filtered keywords. So 47 keywords. There’s one of my competitors that is crushing me, but I am somewhere else.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. So let’s take a look at this keyword. Learn to write for kids age four, my relative rank. That’s the important one is seventh. I’m coming in last here. I’m at position 115, but look at my competitors. One is at three. One is at four. One’s at 11. One’s at 14. My relative rank is terrible. Look at the relative rank of all of these keywords. These are keywords where my relative rank is five, six or seven relative rank means where do I show up regardless of what page is on, but in relation to my competition and this, the, the results here are kind of shocking, right? This is not good at all. So what do I need to do in order to see how can I rank for these keywords? The first step is I need to make sure I’m indexed. Alright. So I would take these keywords and copy them and paste them in Index Checker, another tool of Helium 10. But if I’m re ranking for it at all, and the, my rank is not blank. I know I’m indexed for it. I must be searchable. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be in the search results. But if I found a keyword here that I wasn’t ranking for at all, but my competitors are getting sales for, I need to use Index Checker to see if I’m searchable or not. And if I’m not, do I need to put the keyword in my listing? Maybe I, uh, maybe I do. Alright.

Bradley Sutton:

So this is going to be a important way for me to be able to go and see where am I missing out on sales because my competitor is getting sales from a keyword that I don’t even have in my radar at all. And I can do that for organic ranks. And I can also do that here for sponsored ranks. So play around with that guys, put your ASIN first. If you are an existing seller and this is day one for you, this is what you have to do also. Put in your ASIN and your top five, 10 competitors, see where they are getting sales from that. You’re not look where your relative rank is low on super important keywords. And now you know that you have work to do to try and catch up to your competitor sales.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright. Now you guys have gone over the most important strategies of Cerebro, but there’s so many hidden gems here. Um, because of all the filters, all the different, you know, columns we have here, I’m going to give you some quick hitting top 10 hidden gem strategies, uh, money-making strategies here in Cerebro. Number one, the search volume history and keyword sales. Uh, as you guys have been seen, we can see the search volume of any of these keywords, but you see here, there is a graph next to it. And this is important because now I can see throughout history where, uh, the search volume was. I can see that this keyword here, maybe I’m like, this is not an important keyword. The search volume is 234, but because I clicked on that graph, I could see that, Oh my goodness. In August, this keyword is going to shoot up to 2,900. So I know that this is a big keyword in August or September. The other thing that you should look at is the keyword sales. Not all keywords are created equal. Not every search results in a keyword sale. Take a look at some of these keywords here. Here’s a keyword that has 54,000 searches. Does that mean it’s automatically a good keyword? No, this keyword is called kids. So people are just typing in kids. Do they have buyer intent? Probably not. Look how many sales that keyword, uh, Helium 10 estimates had 187. Alright. But look at this other keyword. This keyword also has 50,000 searches, but look how many sales it has 1,700 for fountain pen. Alright. So which keyword has a lot more buyer intent is a lot more valuable keyword. The one that has more search volume 54,000. No, it’s obviously the one that has keyword sales. So make sure you look at both of these columns when you’re looking in Cerebro.

Bradley Sutton:

Number two, common roots here in all of these, uh, search results, I can see which keywords are used the most. And this is important because now I can see, hey, man, if I just put gifts in my listing, there’s potentially 1500 longer tail keywords that I could rank for. So if I hit this button now, I’m going to see all of the keywords that are in the search results that have the word gifts in it. So this is a great way to look at the keyword roots to see what is making up the majority of these relevant keywords. I probably should have filtered it down before I did that, but you can get these root keywords at any aspect in your keyword research journey.

Bradley Sutton:

Number three, Cerebro IQ score. This is a score that is not meant to mean something is good or bad. This is just a numerical score that represents the relationship of how much search volume there is compared to the number of competitors there are. Alright. What does number of competitors mean? Uh, if I go and I search for this keyword, uh, gifts for four year old boys, do you see how the search results says one to 48 of over 10,000 results. So that means that there are over 10,000 competitors who are all searchable or indexed for this keyword. And that’s why you see here a 10,000. So the Cerebro IQ score for this keyword is 263 relatively low because it’s saying there’s 10,000 competitors, but only 2,600 search form. Again, that doesn’t mean good or bad. It just is showing you without having to calculate competing products with search volume, you know, the relationship take this number here, here is a keyword book gifts. It has a pretty high Cerebro IQ score 2000 without me even having to look at number of competitors. I know that probably there’s not that many people index for this keyword compared to the search volume. And sure enough, that’s the case. Only 1000 products are indexed for it. And the search volume is still over 200. So Cerebro IQ score, uh, might help you find some like hidden gem keywords. Perhaps if you’re, if that’s something that’s interesting to you where you’re like, hey, I want to find keywords where not many people are, um, you know, indexed for, or you could go on the flip side. Let me see the IQ score that has a very low number. So I could see where there’s just tons and tons of competitors all ranking for the same keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

How to see the top competitors that are related to a certain ASIN. And let’s say I entered an ASIN into Cerebro and I wasn’t sure if I should, you know, which ASINs were some of the top ones. And I didn’t want to look on Amazon. If I hit this get competitors button, this is going to show me the keywords that are most similar to whatever product or products I put into Cerebro. So this is a good way to see who are some of my top competitors, uh, without even having to go to Amazon. Frequently bought together. As you guys may know on a listing, there are sometimes sections that say frequently bought together. And these are products that people bought the same time as they bought whatever product you’re looking at. So if you want to see any of these products, what were some of the top frequently bought together, uh, was you just hit this three little dots right under the multi-product search and hit frequently bought together. And we will show you the top products that are bought with any of the products you entered in the Cerebro. This is a super unique tool. Nobody else has anything like this. Uh, very cool. It’s a great tool to potentially say, hey, maybe I should advertise on these products because I know that people buy them together with my competitors products.

Bradley Sutton:

AI filter. We have a beta AI filter where you can enter in using natural language, certain things on how you can filter out the search results. Like for example, I can do show only the Spanish keywords. You know, there’s a lot of Spanish keywords that sometimes show up on Amazon USA, or there’s English keywords that show up in Amazon, Japan. And so this is going to filter out for me, hey, what were the Spanish keywords that people are searching for? And here are a hundred of them. Libros para niños, uh, tablas de multiplicar para niños, 119 relevant keywords that people are searching in Spanish. This can add to your keyword research. That’s just one of the ways that you can have this AI filter here. Translation. Maybe you’re not a native English speaker, or maybe you are an English speaker and you’re trying to make a listing in Amazon, Germany, and you don’t speak German. And you can see all the keywords that Helium 10 finds in German, but you’re like, I don’t even know what the heck these keywords mean. Well, this is how now you can enter in and look at all of these keywords and find an instant translation. So let’s say I’m a Spanish speaker. And so I can hit Spanish. And now every single word here in the search results from Cerebro, I’m going to be able to see, like, for example, right here, I can see, uh, Sharpie pens, B bolígrafos, Sharpie.

That’s what it means. Ah, I see. So like, I’m a Spanish speaker. I don’t understand these English words. Now I know what every single keyword here means. You can do this in a lot of languages, Chinese, French, et cetera, and going back and forth from Japanese to English, English to Japanese, understand all of the search results here in Cerebro, what all of the keywords mean, regardless of which language you speak.

Bradley Sutton:

Title density. Title density is another Helium 10 exclusive tool. This shows how many listings on page one have this exact searched keyword in the title in phrase form. For example, we see here 14 title density for the keyword notebooks for school. So that means if I were to search here, notebooks for school, 14 of the listings on this page will say notebook for school in exact phrase form. Whereas look at this one here, this keyword only has four title density classroom must have. So that means out of all the listings on page one of this search results, only four products have the keyword classroom must haves. Now what, why is this important? How many listings on page one that have a search keyword? That’s also an indication of how difficult it’s going to be for you to get to page one. If you find that, that one that only had a title density of four, that means only four listings have classroom must haves in their title. And if that was a super important keyword for you and you had it in your title, there’s a chance that like from day one, you could be on page one of the search results for that. Alright. It doesn’t mean that high title density is bad. Low title density is good. It just helps give you a heads up about how difficult it might be for you to get to page one on a certain keyword.

Bradley Sutton:

ABA stands for Amazon Brand Analytics. We’ve got some great data here that shows you the top three click products, how many clicks they had overall. Like for example here, journaling supplies, there was ABA total click share 17%. That means the top three click products got 20% almost of all the clicks that ever happened on the page. But look at this other product right here or this other keyword, kids toys, the top three click products only had 10% of the sales. If I click on this graph, I could actually go in week by week or month by month and see what were the top three click products. This is not a Helium 10 estimation. This is direct from Amazon data. I could see what were the top three click products for any month or any week for whatever keyword I’m looking at. You’ll be able to see, was I one of the top three clicked? Was my main competitor one of the top ones? What percentage of the clicks did they get? What percentage of the sales for that keyword did they get? Did they have a high percentage of clicks but a low percentage of sales? That must mean that people aren’t liking their listing. Was it opposite? Oh, that must mean everybody really loves their listing and anybody who landed on it was buying it. There’s a lot of great insights you get from this.

Bradley Sutton:

Alright guys, that was 10 different little quick hitting strategies to round out this Cerebro workshop. Plenty more stuff here in Cerebro. I mean, I could probably do 10, 15, 20 more videos here, but this is enough hopefully to get you guys started to using the most valuable tool in Helium 10 for research and the most valuable tool for keyword research anywhere in the world. And that’s Cerebro.


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