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Selling online is never easy, but some selling channels are more challenging than others. For all its benefits, Walmart is one of the more difficult ecommerce sales channels, particularly for sellers who are just starting out. If you want to sell on Walmart Marketplace as a third-party seller, you need to apply and get approved to list, must demonstrate to Walmart that you run your fulfillment process in an approved way, and are limited to selling only on Walmart's four international markets. After jumping through all these hoops and finally getting approved to list, discovering that your listings aren't getting the traction and visibility you'd hoped can be disappointing. Luckily, there are many things you can do to improve your Walmart SEO strategy to get better visibility and conversions from your listings.
In this guide, we'll teach you how to improve your Walmart SEO strategy with 10 proven methods for creating listings that rank better in searches, get better conversion rates, and perform better in sponsored ads. Ready to level up your Walmart SEO strategy and increase your sales? Keep reading for 10 listing optimizations and good practices to help you get more out of your Walmart listings.
While you may be familiar with the concept of SEO in a general sense, you may be wondering what SEO is in relation to Walmart, and what makes it different from SEO on other platforms. On Walmart, SEO (short for Search Engine Optimization) simply means creating a high-quality product listing or page that will perform better in searches. Better performance means appearing only in relevant searches, and ranking among the first few search results in as many relevant searches as possible.
On Walmart, however, product listings work differently than they would on eBay or Etsy. Instead of each seller having a listing, which can result in multiple listings for identical items, Walmart Marketplace works on a catalog system, where multiple sellers sell through a single product page. When buyers click into a listing, they'll be able to choose to buy from multiple sellers through a single listing. But despite this seemingly convoluted system, Walmart SEO follows the same core SEO principles as other marketplace search engines, placing heavy emphasis on keyword optimization, listing quality, and customer experience. In the next section, we'll take a look at how Walmart's search algorithm works, and understand how to optimize listings for optimal performance on Walmart Marketplace.
Walmart's algorithm works a little differently to the search algorithms you'll find on platforms like Etsy or eBay. Rather than assess a listing on various content optimization factors, it begins first by first determining every listing's overall quality, and assigning it a rating out of 100. This rating is known as a listing quality score. As its name suggests, this score reflects the overall quality of the listing; the higher the listing quality score, the better its ranking, and the higher its chances of being featured in the Buy Box. Walmart assigns a listing quality score based on three factors, which are sometimes referred to as the "optimization triangle": content, offer, and performance.
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Content refers to the quality of the content on the listing itself. Does it include keyword-optimized content, high-quality item images, and enhanced content? Offer refers to how competitive an offer is overall. Does the seller offer the item at a competitive price, with fast and low-priced (or free) shipping? Do they consistently have the item in stock? Finally, performance refers to the overall shopping experience a seller provides. Do they answer buyer messages promptly, and do they ship their orders out on time? Do they consistently get good ratings and reviews?
While creating a Walmart SEO strategy for your business requires a tailored approach, all Walmart SEO strategies work to improve your listings' performance based on the same three guiding principles:
With a solid understanding of what makes for a good Walmart SEO strategy in hand, we'll go over 10 essential methods to help you optimize your Walmart listings and create the best SEO plan for your Walmart business. Each method draws on at least one of the three fundamental principles of Walmart SEO – ranking, keywords, and content – in order to reach an optimal balance between the three factors that determine a listing's quality score and overall success: content, offer, and performance.
Keywords form the base of every search algorithm, and on Walmart, keywords are very nearly an exact science. There are two steps to getting the most out of keywords: research and implementation. In order to use the best keywords for your listing, you'll use a Walmart keyword research to find keywords that are relevant to your product. A product will have one main keyword (known as a short-tail keyword), for example "body lotion," and several more specific secondary keywords (known as long-tail keywords), like "body lotion for dry skin." Aim for 3-4 keywords for each listing, and limit yourself to no more than 5 keywords at the absolute maximum. With these in hand, you'll move on to the next step: implementation.
In your title, the most important keyword to implement is your main keyword. But just having it in the title isn't enough; the main keyword must be at the beginning of the title, right after the item's brand and model name or number. This way, the algorithm knows exactly what your listing is for, and can better match it with relevant buyer searches.
If this process sounds a little daunting, EasyChannel offers an easier way to find the right keywords and create optimized listing titles with a variety of AI ecommerce tools that conduct keyword and create a fully optimized listing title for you.
After the listing's title, the second most important place to include keywords is in the body of the listing, in the bullet points and product description. This is where you'll include long-tail keywords that are relevant to the product, alongside your main keyword. The most important thing to keep in mind here is to incorporate the keywords naturally into the text, and avoid keyword stuffing at all costs. The goal isn't to repeat the same keyword as many times as possible; it's to include a variety of additional relevant keywords that can be picked up by the algorithm, so you get better targeting for every stage of the sales funnel.
In our example above, an important long-tail keyword is "body lotion for dry skin." Implementing it in various iterations into the bullet points and description has contributed to this product becoming Walmart's popular pick for shoppers searching for "body lotion for dry skin," as you can see expressly written on the listing. Here, too, EasyChannel's AI-powered listing optimizations can help you find the best long-tail keywords for your product and implement them into the key features (bullet points) and descriptions of your listing, allowing you to create better optimized listings in less time and with less effort.
Just like keywords, product attributes are another way to provide information about an item, both to Walmart's search algorithm and to shoppers. More detailed product information is always beneficial for getting a product noticed and ranked highly by the algorithm, but adding plenty of product attributes has another key benefit.
When buyers search for an item to buy, they're looking for something to fulfill a specific need or solve a problem. In our body lotion example, we can see that this Nivea body lotion listing has the attribute "skin type" filled in with a value of "dry skin."
When shoppers search for an item on Walmart Marketplace, they're able to filter their search results by various product attributes. When searching for body lotion, for example, buyers can filter by the attribute "Skin Care Concern" to view lotions that are specifically formulated for dry skin. When a buyer filters their results by the attribute value "Dryness," product listings that have that attribute value in will rank higher in that search, improving its SEO on Walmart.
Walmart's algorithm is more complex than just matching keywords to queries of course, and one of the factors it takes into consideration when matching listings with buyer searches is the product category in which a product is listed. Assigning an item to the correct product category is helps ensure that the algorithm places it at the top of search results, above listings that may have some relevant keywords but aren't categorized in the most accurate product category for the buyer's search. When you use EasyChannel to optimize your Walmart listings, you'll have access to a smart AI-powered category mapper that finds the right category for your product to achieve optimal performance in search results, eliminating the guesswork from product categorization and boosting your Walmart listing's visibility.
Additionally, buyers will sometimes browse products by clicking into a category rather than searching for a keyword, and ensuring that the product is in the correct category is crucial for getting it seen by relevant shoppers.
Including plenty of high-quality product images is a good listing practice no matter where you sell, but on Walmart, it's also a crucial component of a listing's quality score. Product images are an inherent element of listing content, and utilizing the maximum number of high-quality listing images is a great way to improve the content of the listing, increase its listing quality score, and improve its overall SEO on Walmart.
Another benefit of high-quality images is their unparalleled contribution to conversion. Buyers consistently rank product images as one of the main factors that affect their purchase decisions, and listings with a variety of informative, illustrative, and aspirational product images always convert more than those without.
Walmart's algorithm prioritizes product listings and sellers who can provide buyers with a good experience from start to finish. A reliable indicator of the quality of a product is the reviews it received in the past from other shoppers, which is why listings with a large number of positive reviews will always rank above those with poor reviews. As such, prioritizing positive product reviews an integral part of a well-rounded and successful Walmart SEO strategy.
If you've been selling online for any amount of time, however, you probably already know that getting positive reviews is often easier said than done. Walmart knows this, and has decided to take advantage of this age-old ecommerce seller's dilemma in an innovative way: the Walmart Review Accelerator Program. The Review Accelerator Program allows sellers to enroll eligible listings into an incentivized review scheme, where sellers can entice buyers to leave reviews in exchange for a discount. For every review left, the seller must pay a fee to Walmart in addition to the incentive paid to the buyer. This is a great option for listings that are having a hard time getting reviews organically, but it's best to enroll a given listing until you reach a goal number of positive reviews.
Sometimes, especially in highly competitive product niches, the only way to get increased visibility is by enrolling product listings in sponsored ads. Sponsored product ads can appear in several locations across Walmart's ad network, but one of the most sought-after placements is the first results of a product search. In example above, we can see that the first four results for the search query "body lotion" are actually sponsored ad placements, which means that the seller of each respective product has won a PPC (pay-per-click) auction to appear in that slot. Whenever a buyer clicks on the sponsored post, they'll pay the amount they bid on the slot.
Sponsored ads are a good choice for highly competitive niches, but the more competitive the selling niche, the higher the bid you'll need to place on each click, and the higher your overall ad spend will be. Like all marketing campaigns, sponsored ads need to be carefully planned and regularly assessed for profitability, and optimized for better performance. No matter how long you choose to run sponsored product ads for, the listings you enroll and ultimately pay to advertise must be flawlessly optimized, both for visibility and conversion. In our experience, promoting a product listing that is not 100% conversion optimized more often than not results in throwing valuable money down the drain in ad spend, since it very rarely yields profitable results.
Maintaining competitive pricing is ecommerce selling 101, but on Walmart it's more than just a way to entice shoppers to make a purchase, it's also a key component of a successful Walmart SEO strategy.
Going back to Walmart's optimization triangle, the competitiveness of a seller's offer is one of the three pillars of Walmart listing optimization. As an integral part of a listing's overall quality score, the pricing has a direct effect on ranking in search results and overall visibility. Additionally, the more competitive the offer, the higher the chances of attaining the Buy Box, and the better the chance of making a sale.
Alongside the item price, shipping cost is a key component of the competitiveness of a listing's offer, and therefore a key factor in determining its overall listing quality. The less you charge for shipping, the better and more competitive your offer. But while low-price shipping is nice, online shoppers have become accustomed to free shipping, and it has in turn become an industry standard on professional-seller-oriented online retail platforms like Walmart. Similarly, 2-day shipping is now expected by shoppers and marketplaces alike, with shoppers even opting to buy an item at a higher price as long as it arrives within the 2 business days they've become accustomed to.
Since the purpose of Walmart's algorithm is to match buyers with listings that will result in a sale, it prioritizes listings that have free 2-day (or next-day) shipping over those that don't, even if all other factors are equal. As such, offering free 2-day shipping whenever possible is key to successful Walmart SEO.
A good Walmart SEO strategy is one that never stops optimizing. Walmart listing optimization is a process, because the Walmart algorithm is dynamic and ever-changing. As a seller on Walmart, you'll need to continuously monitor your listings and make necessary tweaks and adjustments to ensure they not only attain optimal visibility, but also maintain it over time. Remember that things like seasonality, new competition, and behind-the-scenes algorithm updates can all have an effect on the ranking of your listings. And while these things are outside of your control, you can adjust your Walmart SEO strategy to take them into account. Ultimately, the algorithm does not like stagnant listings, so regularly updating listings as necessary is, in and of itself, a good Walmart SEO practice.
Now that we've understood the three key elements of Walmart listing optimization and gone over ten concrete Walmart SEO strategies to help you attain optimal performance and the best possible listing quality score, we'll take a look at some frequently asked questions Walmart sellers have asked us about Walmart SEO.
A good Walmart SEO strategy begins with finding the right keywords for each listing. Choosing the right keywords for a listing will determine how successful any other listing optimization efforts you take will be, which is why it's so important to ensure that you are indeed choosing the right keywords from the start.
Because it's the foundation of Walmart listing optimization, we recommend utilizing a Walmart keyword research tool to find keywords for your products. Keyword research tools not only help you find keywords, but also give you valuable data about each keyword, such as search volume, difficulty, and trends over time, making them an invaluable tool for finding the best keywords to target.
While SEO strategies share many core similarities across platforms, every search algorithm is unique, which is why every SEO strategy must be uniquely tailored to the algorithm it optimizes for. Walmart's algorithm specifically has several key differences from other search algorithms. This is most obvious when looking at the three components of the Walmart optimization triangle: Offer, Content, and Performance.
These three things are given equal weight in the eyes of the algorithm, and any successful SEO strategy will aim to strike a balance between them. Walmart's algorithm has several unique quicks you won't find on other marketplaces; many ecommerce search algorithms will not assess things like in-stock rate when analyzing the quality of your offer, and some do not even consider the competitiveness of your pricing at all.
Walmart has a unique approach to listing optimization that's aimed at created a shopping experience on Walmart Marketplace that shoppers have come to expect from the Walmart brand. This results in a unique algorithm that calls for a Walmart-specific SEO strategy. Luckily, however, with its straightforward listing quality scoring system, understanding how to optimize a listing for optimal performance on Walmart is much simpler than deciphering the inner workings of search algorithms on other platforms.
There are many mistakes sellers make when trying to optimize their Walmart listings, but there are several that are particularly common.
There's no hard and fast rule for how frequently you should update your Walmart listings, but it's generally a good idea to update them if you begin to notice otherwise inexplicable dips in their performance.
Walmart sponsored product ads can be a valuable tool for Walmart Marketplace sellers, but there are some basic rules you have to follow in order to ensure you get the most out of them.
First, you need to ensure that the Walmart listing you want to promote is fully optimized in terms of keywords and content. This means that you've conducted thorough keyword research, narrowed down your keywords, and implemented them into the title and body of the listing correctly.
Next, you'll need to optimize your shipping options. Since you pay an advertising fee every time a shopper clicks on your promoted listing, you'll want to offer free 2-day shipping to get the best conversion rates possible out of these clicks, and not lose out on any sales due to shipping costs.
Finally, if the listing is eligible to enroll in the Review Accelerator Program, we suggest enrolling it, even though it means adding another expense on top of already costly paid advertising. Since promoted listings are meant to drive traffic to sluggish listings, simultaneously enrolling them in the Review Accelerator Program allows you to get the most out of this traffic by gaining positive reviews from it too. Since you're already not making optimal profit on the listing after paying for advertising, you may as well take on another cost during this trial run and give your listing better chances of gaining good pro
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