Amazon lets you choose 7 different keyword phrases for each book. These keywords make it more likely that someone who is looking for your topic will discover that you have a book for sale. These keywords show up in Google as well as in Amazon’s search function. While your keyword selection isn’t of life and death importance, good choices may lead to 10-20 more views per day than bad choices, and an extra sale every day for years. This can add up, just like selecting the right category for listing your book on Amazon. Spend a little time becoming a keymaster.
It only takes, at most, an hour or so to do some light research and improve your odds. There is no perfect science to this. It just takes a tiny bit of good instinct, good sense, and experience to start learning the art of keyword phrase selection. Oh yeah, that and Google adwords freaking amazing keyword planner tool.
In keyword planner, you can enter a word or phrase that describes the topic of your book. Let’s say you wrote a book on raising Nigerian Dwarf Goats. Under “Search for a new keyword and ad ideas” you enter the phrase “Nigerian Dwarf goats.” Then you click on “keyword ideas” and see a screen that looks like this:
This tool gives you some good keyword phrase ideas and also shows monthly searches by people all over the world and the adword competition for those terms. The competition rating isn’t that relevant, but I always feel more confident that I can actually show up close to the top in any search phrase on Google or Amazon when choosing low competition terms.
After spending a half hour or so playing with the tool, looking for terms that seem like what a potential buyer of your book might search for and that also gets a decent amount of monthly searches (I’d say you want to look for terms that get 100-1000 searches a month… if you go too big you’ll be buried and never found by anyone… better to be #3 in a small search than #47 in a huge one, nah mean?), you come up with these 7 phrases:
nigerian dwarf goat care, raising goats at home, breeding nigerian goats, milking nigerian goats, nigerian goat information, goat parasite remedies, preventing foot rot
Or you know, something that your book discusses, and something that a potential book buyer on that obscure topic might search for.
And that’s about all there is to it. Don’t overthink it or stress about the terms. Just give it a little light research, and make sure that you are thinking things through a little bit before you hurriedly select keyword phrases. A little goes a long way here, and the keyword planner tool is a must for deciding tag titles, post titles, book titles and subtitles, and all kinds of good stuff useful to authors looking to get ahead. Get familiar with it and abuse it!
That’s all Bill Shakespeare! If you have any questions or need some help getting your books published, my partner Rob and I are more than happy to help. Watch our welcome video HERE and fill out the Contact Us form and we’ll be in touch.
Matt Stone is a successful self-published author of more than 15 books and co-founder of Archangel Ink. When he’s not writing, he spends most of his time helping independent authors distribute, market, and successfully sell their books.