Ep 112: Keyword Tips for Getting More Amazon Book Sales

One can easily overlook that little piece of the Amazon upload process where you specify 7 keywords related to your title. After all, who wants to filter through the millions of options to find 7 that are most likely to ensure your book is seen by the readers actively looking for it? 

It might not sound fun, but it's a step you don't want to ignore or breeze through. 

In short, strategically choosing keywords helps to ensure visibility and connection with the right audience. In this episode, we explore practical keyword strategies and how tools like Publisher Rocket that can help authors succeed in an incredibly saturated marketplace. 

TOPICS COVERED:
• The importance of keywords in book discoverability 
• Common misconceptions about keyword relevance 
• Strategies for selecting effective keywords 
• How to analyze competitor keywords  
• The unique benefits of long-tail keywords
• How intentionally crafted book descriptions can enhance keyword effectiveness

RESOURCES MENTIONED

*Publisher Rocket: How to Choose the Most Effective Keywords

Google Suggestion Expander extension 

*Affiliate link

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Chapters

• 1:30 The Importance of Book Keywords
• 12:36 Effective Keyword Strategies for Book Marketing
• 24:13 Optimizing Keywords for Book Marketing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:30

Elizabeth Lyons than absolutely necessary Because, let's face it, some overthinking, second-guessing and overwhelm is going to come with the territory, if you're anything like me. In short, I love books and I believe that story and shared perspective are two of the most impactful ways we connect with one another. A few things I don't believe in Gimmicks, magic bullets and swoon-worthy results without context, as in be sure to reveal that a result took eight years or required a $30,000 investment in ads, because those details are just as important. What I believe in most as an author, the long game, is the shortcut For more book writing and publishing. Tips and solutions. Visit publishaprofitablebookcom or visit me over on Instagram at ElizabethLionsAuthor.

Speaker 1: 2:20

Hello, hello and welcome to this episode of Write the Damn Book Already. Last week, we talked about hybrid publishing and some of the red flags to look out for, important questions to ask a hybrid publisher before you sign an agreement to work with them, and some of the ways that hybrid publishing can be really beneficial for indie authors who, for one reason or another, just don't want to full-on self-publish. Today, what I want to talk about is another topic. That's not. You know, everyone wants to talk about how to reach bestseller status, how to make millions of dollars how to get people lining up around the block. And the thing is, in my experience, which has spanned a little over two decades now let's not do the math but getting to that point comes down to talking about the little things that just feel overwhelming. They don't feel fun, they don't feel sexy or glamorous, but they're really, really important, and one of them is keywords, and specifically I'm talking about Amazon when I talk about this, because when you load your book both the ebook and the paperback and the hardback if you have that version up to the KDP platform you will be asked to enter seven keywords as well as three different categories that are applicable to your book.

Speaker 1: 3:37

And this is one of the things that I talked about in the last podcast, again on hybrid publishing, because it's really important to make sure that if you're using a hybrid publisher or even a hybrid publishing service, you have some information about who's in charge of deciding what those keywords are going to be and what the process is for changing those keywords down the road, should you decide that you want to. They play a much bigger role in your book's discoverability than you might think, and there's a little bit of a myth associated with keywords, which is that they are primarily used for your book's discoverability, and the thing is that they do help with that, but the other thing that makes them so incredibly important is that they help Amazon make sure that your book is being shown to the right people. If your book is about organic gardening but for some reason the Amazon ecosystem thinks that your book is about Taylor Swift because you're trying to ride the coattails of her popularity or whatever, it's going to be showing your book a lot to all the wrong people, which has a very negative long-term effect on your book's visibility and on its sales. So in the world of how to make things more findable, we sometimes see well, we see black hat strategies, which I never pay any mind to. Then we hear about what we call hacks, many of which not all, certainly but many of which are not great because they're not sustainable. They're based on some short-term realities, whether that's the algorithm or some new platform that's come up or some new feature of a platform, but once that little area gets saturated the air quote hack no longer works. So what I am a big fan of even though it definitely takes longer but it's more sustainable are the little tricks and tips that work in perpetuity. So they're proven strategies that over a long period of time they don't stop working and, in fact, the sooner you can have them be part of your approach to book marketing, as opposed to just like what's the latest and greatest magic bullet that will get me at the top of a bestseller list or will get me a few sales. You'll see how it becomes really delightful when you log in and you start having sales every day, as opposed to a bunch of sales here and then never again for six months, and then a bunch of sales for some odd reason and then never again for six months. So that is what I am here to help with.

Speaker 1: 6:13

When it comes to keywords and full disclosure, there is a software program that I have been using for I swear I've been using it since it came out, because it wasn't even called this at the beginning. It's now called Publisher Rocket. It was put together by Dave Chesson's team over at Kindlepreneur, which is one of the platforms that I have supported for so long and will continue to support because, well, first of all, dave Chesson is just a great, all-around human being. Second of all, he is extremely well-versed when it comes to what's working in the KDP ecosystem. Third of all, he's not about hacks or black hat strategies and he really does understand how the Amazon ecosystem works and his goal isn't just to make a dollar here and there, but to keep people with him for a long period of time, which I've always really respected. All of the tools and the workshops and the blog posts and everything that he comes out with around the technology behind, specifically, amazon has always been among the best of the best, so I can't imagine a time when I will not recommend him.

Speaker 1: 7:16

But Publisher Rocket, as it's now called. It used to be called, like Kindle Rocket or something else, rocket, it doesn't matter. It's now Publisher Rocket. It's a software that I've had for years and years and years and it has continued to evolve and become better and better and better, and I do use that religiously when I am looking for new keywords, whether I'm running ads or not, as well as when I'm looking at categories, because it takes all of the brainwork of which there is a lot out of manually sorting through what keywords are working, what's being searched? Well, what's being searched on Google versus Amazon, the whole thing. I mean Amazon. We might as well look at it as a Google because it's the third largest search engine, next to Google, then YouTube, then Amazon, the whole thing. I mean Amazon. We might as well look at it as a Google because it's the third largest search engine, next to Google, then YouTube, then Amazon, then Pinterest, and so it's really important to think of it that way.

Speaker 1: 8:02

So there are eight key points that I want to make about keywords, and I myself have gone back in over time and adjusted keywords. The first point, which isn't even part of the eight, is do not be adjusting your keywords with regularity. I do not like to adjust my keywords more than once a month because the system needs time for it to figure out where your book is naturally being placed, which will happen based on who's buying the book. So there are all these different things and aspects that go into Amazon knowing who to show your book to, and a lot of it has to do with how well the book is selling consistently, so not just for one day or two days, but consistently over time how many good reviews you have, how well your keywords match up with your description and what your book is actually about, and how many times people click on your book and what your book is actually about and how many times people click on your book and then actually buy it. What that says, whether you're running ads or not, is that they were searching for something your book popped up. As a result, for that, they clicked on it and they bought it. So that's the most straightforward way to make a sale that there is is for your book to come up automatically.

Speaker 1: 9:13

Surely you've had an experience where you search for, say, gardening, and then some like crazy erotic fiction pops up at the top of your. I mean, I don't know, maybe there's something going on in the garden, but nevertheless it's wildly unrelated and it's like why is that? Why is that popping up as a sponsored post? So for those who aren't, if you're not aware, if a listing on Amazon says sponsored next to it, it does not mean that it's sponsored by Amazon. It means that the author or the publisher is running an ad for that particular book or for that particular product, for that matter. So just so you know, that's what that indicates. But sometimes they're wildly irrelevant and we don't want that. You don't want that for your books.

Speaker 1: 9:53

So the first point I want to make is that of those seven keywords and you have seven for your paperback. You have seven for every version. So I only have paperbacks, ebooks and audiobooks for the majority of my books. Not all of my books has an audiobook, but most of them do. And for the paperback and the ebook you have seven keywords. So that's a total of 14 keywords. Now sometimes people split those up and they'll use seven for the ebook and seven different ones for the paperback in order to kind of spread the wealth. And there are other recommendations that say use the same ones because Amazon kind of sees that it's the same book but you're using different keywords and they see that as a little bit of you trying to hack the system.

Speaker 1: 10:36

I am, admittedly, not sure what the current thinking is on this. Perhaps I need to reach out to Dave Chesson and ask him, but nevertheless those are kind of two different approaches. The approach I take is to use the exact same keywords for my paperback and for my ebook. I do use different categories because the ebook store and the paperback store are actually two different stores on Amazon, so they have different categories. Some of them overlap and some of them don't. So if there is a more applicable ebook category which there oftentimes is, for example, for my twins books. There is a parents of twins and multiples and I think that category is only available for ebooks and not for paperbacks. It might be the reverse, but bottom line is it's available as a category for one of those stores but not for the other. So I use it in one of those stores because it's a dead on category for me and it's not available in the other store.

Speaker 1: 11:29

But to get into the actual eight tips that I want to provide today, the first one is be sure that you're using keywords that attract the right people. It is not about how many eyeballs can I get on this. Hopefully, if I get a thousand eyeballs or 500 sets of eyes, I will get five sales. It's really about can I get 10 sets of eyeballs and two sales? Because again, that reinforces to Amazon that you are doing this the correct way and that you're not misleading a whole bunch of customers to a product that they are not interested in. So high traffic keywords are great, but not if they're not relevant to your audience. So what we're looking for really are high traffic, low competition. But it would be even better if you had lower traffic, low competition, than the very highest traffic if it's not relevant or if it's a little bit off. So I'll give you an example my latest book, write the Damn Book.

Speaker 1: 12:36

Already, one of the suggested keywords that I came up with when I was doing all this research through Publisher Rocket was creative book writing. The truth of the matter is so I tried that and I didn't try it for very long. But the truth is what most people who are searching for creative book writing are looking for is a book on how to write fiction, some genre in the fiction category romance or historical fiction or women's fiction, something fiction, something creative, not memoir or nonfiction, which is what my book speaks to. Is writing memoir or nonfiction like how to prescriptive, how to. So I removed that keyword rather quickly because a lot of people were clicking on it and weren't purchasing because it was misleading. I didn't mean for it to be misleading, it just was. So we end up at a place where we start narrowing down which keywords are effective. We kind of go from a very broad let's cast a wide net to let's like rein that net in. Do you rein in a net? I don't know. Let's bring that net in and get really clear about what people are clicking on. That's truly relevant.

Speaker 1: 13:46

The next thing is don't think about single words. This is a mistake I made very early on with Amazon, where, well, first of all, I wasn't even really thinking about my keywords in the right way at all. I was barely thinking about them at all. And for, let's say, my book is, let's say, I was doing my first book about the first year with twins, and so into the keywords I would just put things like twins, and then another keyword might be multiples, and then another keyword might be parenting. What you really want to do those are so incredibly broad is think about the phrases that your ideal reader would search so expectant, parent of twins, expecting twins, what to do when you're expecting twins, how to get through the first year with twins, the first year with twins, things like that you want to go more into. Plus, it gives you more words so you can have it be a phrase, and then the Amazon system kind of does its thing, which is a little too complicated to explain in the course of this podcast without making you want to pull your hair out or pull over to the side of the road and grab a piece of paper to write it down, and then you'd still be confused, so we'll hold that for later. But when you have a phrase, let's just say, it offers you the opportunity for Amazon to kind of reorder those words and maybe take a word out and add another word in and still count it as relating to that phrase, and it lets you get more specific about what your book is about, as opposed to just saying. So if you've written historical fiction instead of historical fiction, you could say historical fiction in the South, or historical fiction early 1900s or historical fiction World War II or something of that nature, because you wanna get very specific about what your ideal reader is looking for and enjoys.

Speaker 1: 15:27

The third suggestion is especially effective for nonfiction books. So any kind of a how-to book, and it's using keywords that reflect where the buyer is. So examples for dummies, for beginners, quick guide, blueprint, roadmap when people are at a certain stage or beyond that right. So advanced advanced marketing techniques for women, professionals, or I mean my God. I could come up with so many examples. But getting clear about what stage of the put air quotes around game your reader is at, especially when you're writing prescriptive nonfiction, is incredibly helpful because it lets the reader know immediately that your book isn't going to be over their head or something that they already know?

Speaker 1: 16:16

The answers to the fourth tip. This is the one I'm most excited about right now and it's what competitors and you know I don't like the word competitor, but it is what it is, but I don't love it what similar books are, because lots of times here's why I don't like the word competitor Lots of times people will buy it's not this or that, it's this and that. So people like to get different perspectives on things, specifically in the nonfiction world. They'll buy two or three or even four or more books on a particular topic to get a whole variety of information. A great example of this right now for me is perimenopause. I swear to God, if someone seems like they might be a somewhat expert on this in any way, shape or form whether it's medically, psychologically, emotionally or all the other like I'm buying the book. So I have six books sitting here, all by different people with different perspectives, different levels of expertise, and I'm going to read all of them because I like to put each of their thoughts together in order to create my own philosophy. So the idea that someone's going to buy this or that is not often true. It's certainly not always true, especially in the nonfiction space. Many times it's this and that.

Speaker 1: 17:30

Now you might wonder well, how can I figure out what keywords similar books are using? And here's how this goes. Again, this comes back to Publisher Rocket. Now, a lot of things you can do without Publisher Rocket and this is not meant, by the way, to be an ad for Publisher Rocket, it's just I don't know what I would do without it. And there are. But there are some things you can do without it. This I don't know how to do it without it.

Speaker 1: 17:51

There's a new feature in Publisher Rocket called Reverse ASIN A-S-I-N. Every book on Amazon, or at least every ebook, has an ASIN associated with it. It's like an ISBN, but it's the Amazon serial number instead. So what you can put in the ASIN and what it will do is it will return to you not the keywords that the author or the publisher has input as the keywords, but the keywords that Amazon is returning that book for. So what are the search keywords that Amazon thinks are related to that book, where, if a user goes and puts that keyword in the search bar on Amazon, Amazon is likely to return that particular book as a suggested resource? So the title of the book and the author of the book are almost always going to be included and, depending on how long the book has been on the market and or how popular the book is, that will determine whether or not there's like three results or 30 pages of results and some of them will make absolutely no sense. So again, it's not that the author or the publisher is saying, oh yeah, our book should be found for this keyword. It's that, for whatever reason, amazon is returning it. It's associated in Amazon's little brain Well, it's not a little brain, but you know what I mean. It's associated that keyword with that book, probably with many other books as well.

Speaker 1: 19:19

But if there's one that is a really good fit that perhaps you haven't even thought of, it's a great way to mine the data of similar books and that works very well in the fiction space also. I have worked with several authors recently who are like I don't like what, especially in the romance category, what in the world would I use? And I say go find a similar novel, right, like a similar genre, similar style, and do a reverse ASIN on it, and if it's been out for a minute and or if it's a bestseller, it's going to have a good bit of data and see what keywords and then find the ones. Don't grab the ones that just are like high search, low competition. Grab the ones that are high search, low competition or medium search, low competition or medium competition and relevant. So if someone searched that, they would find your book and go love it. That's what I'm looking for, okay, so here's a fun.

Speaker 1: 21:07

One is considering, I guess, niche specific language. So if you have written a book about I don't know why I always come back to gardening, but I do Organic gardening, like what do your readers call that? Do they call it organic gardening or might they call it like organic propagation techniques or sustainable farming or regenerative farming? If they're a little, I guess you could call them buzzwords, but they're nuanced words or they're terms that are really specific, whether they're trending or not to a particular category. Consider using those, knowing that that's probably what your readership is looking for.

Speaker 1: 21:54

Really smart was in the rom-com category for romantic comedy. One of the keywords was great dialogue, romantic comedy because some people, like Emily Henry, is known for her incredible dialogue and some people love a book that is a rom-com that has phenomenal dialogue, especially because a lot of those people like to listen to that book on audio, and so the audio, like the great dialogue, makes them feel like they're listening to a TV show with their eyes closed. So consider those sorts of things when you're trying to come up with what keywords you'd like to use. Okay, the next tip and I think we're at number seven is try to do the most cross I'm going to call it cross promotion of keywords as possible.

Speaker 1: 22:45

So one of the things that Amazon is looking at is not just is the key, like how relevant is the keyword and the way that they can assess that, or a way they can assess that or the system can assess that is, if you're putting it in as one of your seven keywords, are you also willing to put it in your book's description if it's not already in the title? So, if the keyword that you want to use, because it's a good search volume and it's a medium to low competition, is organic seed propagation, but you're not willing to put in your description, even if it's not on the back cover because, remember, your description on Amazon can be significantly longer than your back cover copy If you're not willing to put and I'm making this up as an example one of the things that you'll discover in this book is. And then you've got a bullet point how to handle organic seed. What did I say? Germination propagation, whatever the heck I just said. If you're not willing to replicate, you're not going to be able to do all of them without it feeling really sterile. So what I like to do is take the one keyword or the one or two keywords that have at present time the best ratio of medium to high searches with medium to low competition and is extremely relevant, and make sure that I work it in somewhere somehow to my book's description on Amazon.

Speaker 1: 24:13

And if you're really savvy upfront or even on the backend, if someone writes a review, reviews count in the search for your book. So if someone writes a review, reviews count in the search for your book. So if someone writes a review that you put in the editorial reviews, or if someone writes a review underneath and you know that you want your book to rank high for a particular keyword, that's obviously relevant. You can ask people to include that keyword or that keyword phrase even better in their review. And that's just one more place where it shows up. So it's sort of like the more heavily a keyword or a keyword phrase shows up, the more it tells Amazon that you're committed to it, like you're willing to stand on that platform of. This keyword is very much associated with this book and anyone who's searching for this keyword is going to be very happy much associated with this book and anyone who's searching for this keyword is going to be very happy to have found this book.

Speaker 1: 25:03

And my final suggestion is there are auto suggestions and long tail keywords and you don't need Publisher Rocket for this one. You can use it for it, but you don't need it. When you go to Amazon. There is an extension that you can get. It's a I think it's a Google extension. I will put the link to it down in the show notes. It's called the AMZ Suggestion Expander and what happens is when you start typing in keywords that are related to your book.

Speaker 1: 25:31

So let's take my first book, the First Year with Twins, so we'll do expecting. If I type in expecting twins into my keyword bar, I get all the stuff. There's multiple columns, so on the left column are the highest rankings. So expecting twins, expecting twins book, expecting twins gift, expecting twins shirt, all those sorts of things. Then in the next column it'll tell me what keywords pop up that people put words before. So again, what I had typed in was expecting twins. Well, the two highest things that people will search are what to expect when you're expecting twins. So they're expecting twins was on the end. And then expecting twins back support, which, yes, I understand, having had twins, that is, I'm sure, a very high search term. But the other then they have an other category that people search. So when you're expecting twins, triplets or quads book had it loved it when you're expecting twins, triplets or quads, what to expect when expecting twins and pregnancy gifts for expecting mom twins. So that's where I've mentioned before, when you have a phrase like expecting twins, it can also trigger the keyword and put keyword in quotes, because it's really more of a keyword phrase pregnancy gifts for expecting mom twins which people put in. And then there's a little icon it looks like a bar chart to the right of each keyword and you can click on it and see what the monthly search volume estimates are for that particular keyword. And that is a paid feature. I think it starts at like $10 a month. But it can give you some really good ideas, either without using Publisher Rocket or in conjunction with Publisher Rocket, because Publisher Rocket will tell you what the search volume is, what the competition score is. It will give you related keywords.

Speaker 1: 27:17

The long tail keywords can be extremely important. So if you haven't heard of a long tail keyword, it's just a longer keyword. It has a longer tail. I don't know why they use that, but it's just, it's a longer keyword. So instead of saying twins, you can say expecting twins. But an even longer keyword would be book for parents expecting twins. So it's usually between three and five words and it's quite specific. It also tends to avoid generics. So instead of saying expecting twins, it might be book for parents expecting twins, triplets or quads, best for expecting multiples, or something of that nature.

Speaker 1: 27:57

What it does is it helps you again attract higher quality traffic to your book. So it's not just about getting eyes on your book, it's about getting the right eyes on your book. Also, long-tail keywords are notoriously less competitive than their extremely short-tail counterparts. So over time well, upfront and over time you're likely to pay far less per click if you're running ads and you're likely to get more eyeballs on your book if you're not running ads when you use niche-specific, relevant, targeted, long-term keywords than not. So all this has hopefully made it even more clear why it's really important that, no matter who is loading your book to Amazon, they understand how important keywords are and they're not just out there, you know, throwing them in willy-nilly without doing any research into whether or not they can even be effective. It's something that most of us keep up with every, I would say, quarter to maybe twice a year, just depending how long your book's been on the market, because things update and new search terms come out and things drop in popularity and they rise in popularity and there's never not a new opportunity or way to help your book be discovered by new audiences, no matter how long it's been on the market, which is why I always say your book has longevity for as long as you decide you want to be promoting it.

Speaker 1: 29:25

I will put all of the resources that I have mentioned in this episode in the show notes. Do not hesitate to email me at elizabeth, at elizabethlyonscom, or DM me over on Instagram at elizabethlyonsauthor, if you have any questions about keywords or anything else related to indie publishing, and I will talk to you again next week. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode, this is your friendly reminder to follow or subscribe, leave a quick review and share it with someone you know has a great story or message, but isn't sure what to do next. Also, remember to check out publishaprofitablebookcom for book writing resources and tips and to see all the ways we can work together to get your book out into the world. Again, thanks so much for listening and I'll talk with you again soon.