Lesson III: Common Mistakes and Continuing On
Do Not Anger Amazon
Amazon will get mad at you — which you really don’t want — if you include any of the following:
- Author’s names that aren’t associated with the book.
- References to awards or accolades that you haven’t received
- Anything that deceives customers
- Anything patently false or not accurately descriptive of your book
- HTML tags
You really have to just play Amazon’s game. If you try to be clever, instead of just giving them what they want, they will not think twice about banning your book. The algorithm itself will downgrade you in search for most of these things, sometimes even if it shouldn’t. And getting in touch with someone at Amazon to have your book “unbanned” is close to impossible. Don’t take the risk. Give Amazon what they want.
If you are in doubt, lean toward the things that will make customers happy and create a nice storefront for Amazon. That is ultimately what they value. If you present something unprofessional, misleading, or tricky, you are taking a risk. Consider what you would want if you were Amazon and had millions of books for sale.
Things Amazon Doesn’t Love
Amazon doesn’t like when you make subjective claims like “best novel” or “award winning” in keywords. Those things should be in your description instead, and should be used sparingly. If the book, or the author, actually won an award, then you may want to include the name of the award specifically in your description. Also skip the keywords “Kindle Unlimited,” though if a big part of your income is from KU page reads, then the keyword KU may work for you even if Amazon doesn’t really love it. Abbreviations and slang terms like KU are things that Amazon might not already know about your book, so they are great for keyword boxes. But don’t add the word “free”. Amazon already knows your book is free to KU subscribers, so it won’t help, and it’s a keyword that the algorithm doesn’t like.
Don’t Waste a Single Word
Don’t use any keywords that have already been mentioned in your categories, title, or description. This includes author names. Basically, don’t use any words that are included in anything you’ve already told Amazon about your book.
Don’t use generic terms like “book” or “free” that Amazon will already choose for you. IF your book is free, then Amazon gives you those keywords in search already. A long tail search term that gets you a few hits a year is better than using those terms.
Other things Amazon already knows about your book are things like whether it is in Kindle Unlimited, on sale, or free. No need to include those things in your keywords.
Keywords are best used to add things that people might search for to find books like yours, but that don’t fit into the description
Remember, keywords are best used to add things that people might search for to find books like yours, but that don’t fit into the description. You might not put ‘enemies to lovers’ in the description of your romance novel (though it’s not a bad idea). And you may not want to include all three words ‘werewolf’, ‘shape-changing’ and ‘lycanthropy’ in your description for your werewolf book, but some people will be searching for each term and those are people who may want to buy your book, so add them to your keyword boxes.
Testing your keywords
Amazon changes how it runs search terms often. You will need to keep up with how your search terms are performing. Luckily, you can test your keywords with a few simple steps. Once the book has been for sale for a few weeks, go get your list of keywords and run an Incognito Search Test.
Incognito Search Test
Start by opening a browser window in incognito mode. Then go to Amazon and search for your keywords. Search individually and in groups, any combination that you think people might actually search for. But DO NOT click on your book if you see it in the search results. Amazon will consider this a failure to convert and you will hurt your own search results. In fact, don’t click on any books in this mode. Whether Amazon considers it a good thing to get a click for the search term, or a bad thing to get a click and not convert, changes unpredictably as they update the algorithm. And you don’t want to do this test too often. Once a month is fine. Otherwise you may be telling Amazon that people who search for these terms are not going to click on your book, and it will downgrade how often your book shows up.
Where and how often your book appears will tell you how well you are ranking for that term. The higher up they show, the more likely you should keep them, with page two generally being the cutoff. There’s just not a lot of value in being on anything but the first page.
While you are checking your keywords, you should keep track of any useful search terms that come up in the auto-complete in the search box. If you type in “haunted house” and one of the autocomplete options is “haunted house trapped” then it tells you that people are searching for that term with some frequency. If people searching for that term are likely to buy your book, then add it in and you can check it next month.
Get rid of any terms that your book isn’t ranking for. Swap them out with the new terms from autocomplete or the list of viable terms you didn’t use from last lesson. You may need to repeat your keyword picking process to find completely new terms if too many of your original terms aren’t showing well. And remember, a long tail search word that gets you one click a year is more valuable than a common search term that doesn’t show your book in searches at all.
Training the Algorithm
There is a trick that we have coached some authors to use. Be very careful with it. If your book is ranking for a combination of terms that will bring in people who don’t buy your book, you may want to train Amazon to not show your book for that particular combination. So, if your book is showing up for “house thriller” when people are looking for books about House MD and they aren’t looking for your books, the algorithm will probably figure that out. If it doesn’t seem to be figuring it out, and your conversion rate is low, you may want to search for “house thriller” in incognito mode a bunch of times and click on the correct books to train the algorithm about what people are looking for.
Assignments:
- (At least two weeks after entering your search terms) Perform an Incognito Search Test to assess your search terms’ performance
- Replace underperforming terms
Continuing to refine and your replace your books’ keywords will keep them fresh in Amazon’s algorithms. Don’t worry if your first few attempts don’t move the sales needle much. As you experiment more with creating and testing them, you’ll get better at picking profitable terms, which will be great for the sales of future books because you’ll start out with good search terms for your first month where you get a nice boost in search from Amazon.
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Protected: The Key To Keywords — Free Course