Lesson I: The Basics of the Keyword Boxes
When uploading your book to Amazon, you will be presented with a set of seven keyword boxes to fill in, as below.
Your first instinct with your keyword boxes might be to either use words that best describe your book, or words you think will get the highest number of search results. This is the mistake that 99% of authors make when they fill out those keyword boxes. Remember, all we care about is selling books, and anything we do should be with that goal in mind.
So why aren’t those two things our primary goals with our keywords? Wouldn’t they lead to sales, which is our ultimate goal?
No. Our best path to selling a lot of books is a high conversion rate. When someone visits our book’s page on Amazon, we want them to buy it. If Amazon sees that people who visit our book’s page will usually buy it, they start sending more people to it. More visits, and a high percentage of those visits turning into sales, means lots of sales.
Conversion rate is the thing Amazon values most in search results. If everyone who went to the page bought it, your book about dishwashers would be at the top of the search results for everything from “Historical romance” to “Transmission cable for 1987 Honda Civic”. This is not an exaggeration. If you have ever had search results that didn’t make sense on Amazon, this is why. Conversion rate is everything to Amazon.
If you just use your keywords to describe your book, you will be wasting most of them by telling the Amazon search bot things that it already knows. Putting “Western” in the keywords box is pointless if your book is already in the Westerns category. It won’t increase your search results at all.
If, instead, you use your keywords to try to get lots of hits in search results and appeal to a wider audience, your conversion rate will be very low. Every person who is looking for something else, even if it’s just a slight difference in sub genre or a different setting, and sees your book, is going to click back to the search results. Amazon considers that a failure.
If your book fails to convert customers, Amazon’s search algorithm drops the book in search rankings. So even the people who are looking for your specific book won’t see it, because Amazon doesn’t think people will buy your book. The key takeaway here is that if Amazon thinks people don’t buy your book, they will stop showing it to them. And if no one is seeing your book, then it’s very tough to get your conversion rate back up.
What to Focus On
To achieve a high conversion rate, we need to set up our keywords to bring in buyers. And we want to filter out customers who won’t buy our book. If they aren’t going to buy, we don’t want them to see it at all.
The best way to make sure that most of the people who see our book will buy it, is by using only those terms that appeal to people who will buy your book. Long tail search terms, words that are more targeted and less broad, are usually the best way to achieve this. Avoid using generic terms, or words that might bring people who are looking for something else.
If your book is about a vigilante, then “vigilante” might be a good search term unless it’s already in your title, subtitle, or description. But you may also think that you should add the term “subway” because he kills bad guys and takes the subway home, which is why the newspapers start calling him the “subway vigilante” in the book. But this would be a mistake, because there is already a famous “subway vigilante” and people who are searching for biographical books about Bernhard Goetz probably won’t buy your fiction book. A few of them might, but most of them will click away because they are looking for something specific that your book doesn’t offer. And there goes your conversion rate.
Once you get a list of potential keywords, make sure to remove any words that might bring in people who won’t buy your book.
What Is a “Long Tail” Search Term?
If you try to get your book to rank for the term “horror books,” it will end up lost in the ocean of thousands of horror books vying for the same term. If your horror book doesn’t convert viewers into buyers, even if you’re spending thousands of dollars on advertising, you won’t rank in search results for the term. And if you do rank for it, you’ll need your book to be generic horror that competes with Stephen King and Clive Barker or you will lose too many customers.
The “tail” of a search term is comprised of the more specific examples that get less traffic but are easier to rank in. So rather than trying to rank for “horror book,” you might have a much better shot, and a higher conversion rate, ranking for terms like “Halloween short stories” or “Haunted house thriller”. If your book fits into a search term like that, something with less overall search traffic but that is more likely to include your target audience, then the long tail search terms will be much more effective.
A long tail search term is easier to rank in, and better for conversion rate, often making it more profitable than a term with a higher number of searches
You can sometimes find long tail search terms just using the autocomplete on Amazon, but keyword tools like Publisher Rocket are your best option. Drilling down into your subgenre and finding terms that people will be searching for when they want to buy a book like yours, will be more valuable than more vague terms, even if they only get a few searches a month.
We will also talk about how to combine words for multiple long tail search terms later in the course. But for now, it’s easy to add words so that if you want to rank for “haunted house” but also “horror thriller” then “haunted house thriller” is perfect. It is a long tail search term on it’s own, but it also includes the words, in order, “haunted house” which matters for the search algorithm for that term.
Associated Search Terms
If keywords are in the same box, then the search algorithm sees them as more closely associated. And if they are together, and in order, they are even more closely associated. So you don’t lose much for the term “haunted house” by adding thriller to it. A box with “haunted thriller house” would not rank as well for the combinations “haunted house” and “haunted house thriller.” Word order matters.
Using wider search terms also tends to bring up pages that are filled with sponsored results. If you did get your book to rank high for “Historical Romance”, without any additional words, you wouldn’t get nearly the boost in sales that you might expect because that search term brings up multiple rows of sponsored ads and Goodreads recommendations before it even gets to the real search results. With a long tail search term like “romance ancient Greece” you won’t have nearly as many ads and sponsored listings above your book because people aren’t targeting that specific term.
Check out this search for “horror book”:
You can see that there is some scrolling to do before a customer even finds the organic search results for such a broad term. The first three rows are all either ads or special listings for books that sell really well. The first organic search result was book number sixteen. This is one of the biggest problems with broad search terms. Even if you can rank for them, customers would have to scroll through a bunch of best seller just to see your book. Longtail search terms usually don’t have this problem and they’re much easier to rank for.
Countless authors have worked hard to be ranked for broad search terms with a large number of searches. But being ranked #18 for a term like “horror books” would not only be very tough to do, but would also put you at book number thirty-three, assuming there weren’t more ads in the first few rows of results, meaning that a potential customer has to scroll past six rows of books without seeing anything they want, and then decide that your book grabs their attention when all those highly ranked books didn’t. Not likely.
Now if you were ranked number eight for a longtail search term like “Haunted House Short Stories” (assuming that was an accurate description of your book), it’s probable that customers will see your book and click on it after searching for that term. There would be a few other books like yours, but there would be some books that don’t belong there, and some ads for books that the customer won’t be interested in because they are looking for a specific type of book, so you’ll be one of the first results that is relevant to them. And that is much more likely to convert, which will mean that your ranking for that search term will climb over time.
Readings/Viewings:
Since everything works together when trying to convert visitors to a sale, do the following so that your book page doesn’t let those precious clicks get away without a purchase:
- Watch this video on Amazon reviews — number of reviews might be the biggest predictor of conversion rate
- Read the Writing Descriptions That Sell article for the basics of good book descriptions
- Take the Book Description Course — a full course on writing descriptions that convert
Assignments:
- Pick a book of yours to assign keywords to — We will use this book for the remainder of the course
Protected: The Key To Keywords — Free Course