Outranking Amazon & Etsy

Hello BHW, my first post here.

So I have found a good niche for a dropshipping store. Ahrefs is telling me that keyword difficulties for my product keywords are 0 with relatively high volume. However, the top pages are Amazon & Etsy. How hard would it be to outrank these marketplaces? I have an old domain with about 20 authority score and some semi relevant backlinks for my niche.

Hi and welcome to BHW!

When I used to have Amazon sites (around 2015) I didn't manage to outrank Amazon most of the time, but it's true that I also never tried to, because I've been happy with the few sales that I got (I've never been a greedy dude), so I was happy with page 1 ranking most of the time.

This being said, I do believe that Amazon are hard to outrank (probably Etsy, too)... at least for keywords with high search volume, despite of those keywords having 0 difficulty score. I'm not saying that you can't outrank Amazon, but rather that it takes ticking all of the checkboxes, which for many SEOs (and definitely for newbies) is not worth the trouble.

Still, I've stopped doing Amazon about 6 years ago, and things might have changed in the meantime. Better wait for answers from people who still do Amazon, they might offer you better answers

tazarbm said:

but rather that it takes ticking all of the checkboxes, which for many SEOs (and definitely for newbies) is not worth the trouble.

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This is absolutely spot on. As long as your content is on point and you have decent links, you can outrank sites like Etsy and Amazon fairly easily. If you know your on-page is right, it is all about links. Keep getting more quality links and eventually you will outrank them.

It is actually exactly the same for Amazon affiliate sites and normal e-commerce sites.

Also, do not trust Ahrefs difficulty score, it is absolutely wrong, all the time.

fasttrak said:

This is absolutely spot on. As long as your content is on point and you have decent links, you can outrank sites like Etsy and Amazon fairly easily. If you know your on-page is right, it is all about links. Keep getting more quality links and eventually you will outrank them.

It is actually exactly the same for Amazon affiliate sites and normal e-commerce sites.

Also, do not trust Ahrefs difficulty score, it is absolutely wrong, all the time.

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Thank you for the answer. How else should I determine the difficulty of keywords then? Recommend other tools?

ElliotG said:

Thank you for the answer. How else should I determine the difficulty of keywords then? Recommend other tools?

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I personally use KWFinder and check the top 15 manually to judge difficulty.

It is very difficult to beat Amazon but if you make rank in top 3 also, it will give lot of traffic.

Hard to outrank amazon for products.
Having in the first page is still good tho