Keywords – what are they, how do you use them and some new research for KDP users!
by author, Mark Brownless
This post will
· Define and explain keywords on Amazon
· How to do keywords research
· The latest thinking in general and exact match keywords
· Using keywords for audiobooks
Keywords – what are they?
Quite simply they are the search terms you type into Amazon. If you use Amazon regularly you might type in ‘rugby headguard yellow’, ‘It chapter 2’, ‘UV steriliser for aquarium’ (my last three searches). These are all keywords. So, the first thing is that a keyword isn’t a word per se, but a search term. This is very important and we’ll come back to it later on.
When you self-publish your book on Amazon, you select a number of keywords that your book will rank for in searches. Thinking of keywords as an author might lead you to type in ‘books’ or ‘fiction’ into Amazon’s browser window, but you are going to get such a broad spectrum of results and a massive number of hits that it will be impossible for you to be heard over the noise if they were your chosen keywords. This is why you need to do some keyword research to find out what people are actually typing into Amazon to search for your type of book.
When you set your book up on the Amazon-KDP platform, you are given seven keyword slots, each of which can use up to fifty characters. Here is the traditional method for doing keyword research.
Go to your browser and open up a new window in ‘Private browsing’ or ‘In cognito’ mode depending on your browser. Open up Amazon. This opens up a ‘blank’ version of Amazon, rather than the one that remembers all your previous searches and buying history. In the pulldown click on ‘Books’ or ‘Kindle’ whichever you want to look at, or open a tab for each (it’s a good idea to book mark these so you can open them instantly whenever you want to do some research). Then type in a search term. You will notice that a list of other search terms will drop down as you type. Typing in ‘psychological’ for example gives you a list of ‘psychological thrillers’, ‘psychological thrillers paperback’, etc. Typing in ‘psychological suspense’ brings up ‘psychological suspense thriller’. If you select these terms you will see, in the top left of the screen, how many results you bring up for that search term. ‘Psychological’ returns 80K hits, while ‘psychological mystery crime suspense thriller’ produces 10k hits, so is still busy and people are searching for it, but it’s more competitive. A search with 80k hits might be impossible for you to be seen in, but 10k gives you a better chance of being seen and a thousand even better. A search that generates 20 or 30 hits means that keyword isn’t being searched for, so, although your book would be seen if that keyword is entered, so few people are searching for it that you aren’t going to sell anything.
Another example – ‘medical thriller’ – returns 10k hits on UK Amazon, so it’s quite popular, and depending on how ‘big’ an author you are on Amazon, you have to ask if you would make yourself heard in amongst that lot. Typing ‘psychological medical thriller’ returns 1k hits, which is more reasonable, and adding ‘suspense’ to that mix doesn’t narrow it further but it adds another keyword. And there we have a keyword, only competing against 1000 others. You still might think that 1000 competitors is quite a lot, but that is for all the books on Amazon with that keyword. A great many of these will be old and not being supported or clicked on very much, so Amazon will regard as less relevant – more on that later.
Now, have a think about the words and combinations of words that best describe your book – the search terms that people might use. If they do use these terms you want to make sure your book is popping up on their results page. Spend some time doing this for your keywords and combine logical ones to come up with a bigger term, or ‘long tailed’ keyword. The traditional advice has been to try and select as long a tailed keyword to use as you can for the fifty characters you are permitted by KDP for every keyword slot.
Let’s go back to our example of ‘psychological mystery crime suspense thriller.’ You might worry that it’s quite unlikely that someone will type in that whole search term on Amazon, and you might be right. The good thing is that if this is one of your keywords and someone types in ‘psychological mystery’, or ‘crime thriller’ or any other combinations, then your book will feature in those searches, because the Amazon search algorithm will pick them out.
Remember how we talked about KDP giving us seven keyword slots? Well not only does Amazon search each long-tailed keyword for combinations, it searches between keywords too.
Consider if you had keyword slots of:
Psychological thriller and suspense
Medical horror thriller books
British ghost stories
If someone types ‘psychological horror stories’ into Amazon, your book will show up in that search.
Psychological thriller and suspense
Medical horror thriller books
British ghost stories
Just to finish our getting-up-to-speed section on keywords, Amazon also searches for keywords in your title, sub-title and your blurb – your ‘meta-data’ as it is called. So, having a sub-title with the words ‘psychological crime thriller’ in there will produce hits on keyword searches even if you don’t have those in your seven keyword slots. Considering placing keywords in your sub-title and blurb is very important, but it’s also important, for fiction writers, not to be obviously ‘stuffing’ keywords into the blurb so it doesn’t read like a coherent enticing sales pitch to the potential buyer.
Relevance
Amazon’s search engine is based around it’s algorithm, called the A9, which is a massively complex equation that will look at a large number of parameters and weight them (in Amazon’s view) of their relative importance. When you type keywords into the search bar, it tests these against the A9. It will look at keyword match, how old the product is, how it’s selling and even reviews alongside probably a whole number of other things.
Where you rank in a search will be based on how well you do when the A9 has ‘done the math’ as they say. The most important thing that Amazon is looking for, and something I go on about a lot, is relevance. This is how it works. If someone types the exact same search term into the Amazon search bar as one of your KWs, you can’t get any more relevant than that, and you will rank really highly in searches, right? Maybe. But as we’ve said, it’s not just down to this, even if I get a better keyword match than Stephen King, Zon won’t think I’m more relevant than him and rank me higher in searches, unless it’s one of his older books that isn’t selling very much anymore. The more you sell, the more (good) reviews you have keeping Amazon’s customers happy, the more positive history you’ve got on the platform, the more relevant you are.
This is why it’s a very bad idea to regularly search for your book and click on it to see your rankings. You might think that because ‘someone’ (you!) has searched for your book it makes it more relevant. It’s actually the opposite, you obviously don’t go and buy the book, so Amazon regards this as a no-sale or click-away, and it will adversely affect your relevance.
Back to our KDP dashboard and selecting our seven keywords.
Specific v General.
So, bang as many keywords as you can into all 7 slots and you’ve got (hastily does some maths) 350 characters to flog your book, right?
Wrong. That was the thinking in the last few years and how I started off. Now the thinking is more sophisticated, trying to get the A9 to work better for us. Now the thinking is along the lines of trying to target a few keywords that are likely to be exact matches to what someone might type in – and that might mean they are shorter and don’t use up anywhere near the 50 characters. The remainder of your keyword slots should then be the general catchalls of every other term you can think of that describes your book. This idea comes from research done by Dave Chesson of Kindlepreneur which he was presenting at conferences in the Autumn.
An exact match is more relevant and will give you a better chance of showing high up on searches – ideally on the first page. A match that Amazon has to go looking for between keywords, still has relevance, but less so and may be a lot lower in a search. Matches found within the meta-data will have even less relevance, and so on. That said, if the search term typed in is an unusual combination of keywords, then the number of results in the search will be low and you’ll still show high on the search.
If you are going for, say, 3 exact matches, it may be that you repeat search terms within those to gain that exact match. As we know, the A9 will combine search terms from several of your keywords to match something typed into the search bar, so in general, repeating oneself in keywords is something to be avoided. But because you are going for exact matches, you will end up repeating use of a word or term, which, when you’ve always been taught to avoid that, is quite hard to do! Just make sure that you don’t do any repetition in the slots that are left where you put all the other general keywords and search terms relevant to your book.
A word on audiobooks
I can only speak for ACX / Audible, but on this platform you can’t select keywords. You can choose two categories – and these aren’t the massive wide range that Amazon / Kindle books have available – they are much more limited. Select a couple of categories that you want to compete in and email ACX with your selection.
Audible searches look for your title and blurb – your meta-data – for keywords. So, when publishing your audiobook, it’s very important to NOT just copy and paste your existing blurb from Amazon unless this is carefully thought out for all the keywords you want. Either change the blurb across all versions of your book, or have a different one for the audiobook. Again, it should be a readable blurb that entices the customer but also with your main keywords contained within.
If you want to change your blurb after publishing, again email ACX with your request and they’ll do it for you.
Mark Brownless is a self published author of phsychological thrillers and horror, check out his latest book The Shadowman, here.