Overview

Amazon sellers rely on the keyword field in Seller Central to determine whether their listings surface when shoppers type queries. Optimizing these search terms can dramatically boost organic visibility, while poor usage wastes valuable character space and reduces sales potential.

Key Points

• Search terms drive lexical matching — Amazon’s engine scans the keywords you supply to align your product with buyer queries; a well‑filled field can make the difference between appearing on the first page or being hidden deep in results.
• Strict character limit — The backend permits up to 250 bytes (roughly 200‑250 characters), so each letter, space, or punctuation mark consumes a portion of this finite allotment.
• Formatting rules affect indexing — Using only lowercase letters, separating words with single spaces, and omitting commas, slashes, or other symbols ensures the algorithm reads each term correctly.
• Redundancy reduces efficiency — Repeating the same word, adding both singular and plural forms, or inserting filler words like “the” or “and” occupies space without adding new search relevance.
• Synonyms and abbreviations expand reach — Including alternate expressions (e.g., “cutting board” and “chopping board”) or common abbreviations (e.g., “LED” for “light‑emitting diode”) captures a broader set of shopper language.

How Search Terms Work

1. Keyword ingestion — When you save a listing, Amazon parses the text in the search‑terms field, breaking it at each space. For a bamboo cutting board, the string “bamboo cutting board” becomes two distinct tokens that the engine can match against buyer searches.
2. Normalization — The system converts all characters to lowercase and strips punctuation, so “Bamboo‑Cutting‑Board” and “bamboo cutting board” are treated identically. This step prevents mismatches caused by capital letters or hyphens.
3. Lexical matching — During a shopper’s search, Amazon compares the entered query to the stored tokens. If a buyer types “butcher block board,” the token “butcher” and “block” from the example string “butcher block bamboo” will trigger a match, even though the exact phrase isn’t present.