In order to sell books on Amazon, your book needs to be here,
on the first page of the search results. And the higher up on that first page,
the better, the more sales your book is going to make.
And one of the biggest factors that can give your books the best chance of being
on that first page is the use of keywords within your book.
And so keyword research to find those keywords becomes very important.
The problem is a lot of publishers find keyword research either too hard,
too boring, or they don't put much value in it,
but nothing could be further from the truth. In fact,
it took me about a year into my publishing business to really appreciate the
importance of the use of keywords,
which led to me selling over 80,000 books on Amazon.
And so this is going to be a beginner's guide for doing KDP keyword
research to find those keywords. And we're going to be using a free chrome
plugin as well. Now,
where does keyword research fit in to the overall book
creation and publication process? Well, the steps that I take,
when publishing a book,
is initial niche research that is basically deciding on what type of book to
create. Then I do the keyword research,
and only after that do I actually get onto the book creation itself.
Now a lot of publishers do those last two steps the other way round.
That is they decide what book they're going to create, they create the book,
and then and only then do they do the keyword research,
which can quite often be a bit of an afterthought. In fact, in many cases,
a lot of publishers don't do any keyword research at all,
which is great for you and I,
becasue it means our book will have an advantage over theirs.
So the first step in doing our keyword research is actually coming up
with a list of keywords. Now what are keywords,
they're basically the search terms that customers type into the search
bar on Amazon.
So if we can find out what search terms customers are typing into the search
bar,
we can then optimize our product around those search terms,
or keywords,
to give our books a best chance of appearing when they do their searches.
So the best place to start is on Amazon itself.
Now a few initial points here.
A lot of people do recommend doing research in the incognito Chrome browser.
The problem with that is that this chrome plugin won't work.
So I just do all my research in the normal chrome browser.
Second thing is I do all my keyword research on amazon.com, the US version,
because that's where you'll find most of the sales are being made.
That's the biggest target market. However,
if you are creating a book targeted to a particular audience in a particular
country, then by all means do your research in the relevant browser.
Now the final thing to note is I do all my research in the All category on
Amazon and not.
The Books category. I have actually done a video on the reason for this,
but one of the main reasons is we want to see what customers are seeing when
they do their searches on Amazon.
And most of the time customers do their searches in the All category.
So what we do is we decide on what book we're gonna create.
In this case it's going to be a word search book.
So I would start with a very broad search term in the search bar,
in this case word search. And you'll find, as we can see on the left here,
Amazon gives us these suggestions.
And these suggestions are very valuable and for two reasons. The first is,
Amazon is actually telling us what customers are searching for.
And so we can tailor our book around these particular search terms.
The second thing is,
customers will tend to click on these suggestions. And so these
are the search terms that will be used a lot more than others.
So what I do is I take these and I put them
into a spreadsheet. So we've got this one here,
it's just a plain old Google spreadsheet and we'll call this word search
keywords. And the first column, as you can see here, we'll call keywords.
So what I do is just take each of these and type them into the first column.
So we'd start with word search, word search for adults,
and so on.
Next you'll notice on the right hand side we have all these other keywords or
search terms as well.
And these are from a free plugin I've got called AMZ Suggestion
Expander, which is a free chrome plugin.
And these are also search terms that customers are typing into the search bar on
Amazon.
So I would write all these onto that spreadsheet as well. So as we
type in all our keywords, we end up with a list that looks something like this.
Now the second stage in our research process is that we need to
determine the level of competition for each keyword. You see,
some search terms are gonna be very competitive.
That is a lot of publishers are going to be publishing books
targeted at that particular search term.
And so it's going to be harder for our book to appear in the search terms.
So we want to find those slightly less competitive keywords.
The way we do this is back to Amazon.
So you can see here we've typed in word search. So we just do a search for that.
And on the top left here you'll see the number of search results.
In this case 40,000, which is actually very high.
So what we would do is take that figure, go to our spreadsheet,
create a second column, call this Amazon search results,
and we would put our search results figure here.
And then we would work through each keyword.
So the next one would be word search for adults. So we would type that in,
hit enter. This time it's 10,000.
Now you'll find as you're going through this process,
in this example word search for adults,
you'll find that Amazon starts to suggest even more keywords
related to that one that you've just typed in.
So what I do is I then put those in the spreadsheet as well.
And also those from AMZ suggestion Expander.
So you'll find that as you go through this process, put in a keyword,
looking at the search results, you'll also get more suggestions.
Those are going to the spreadsheet and you'll find a spreadsheet or get bigger
and bigger.
Eventually you'll get to a point where the suggestions are the same as those
that you've already got earlier.
And so at that point you can just stop putting in those further suggestions.
So what you end up with is a spreadsheet that looks like this,
keywords on the left Amazon search results on the right. And so we come to the
third stage and that is actually deciding on what keywords to use in
our books.
And for this I have a very simple rule and that is I target keywords with
1000 search results or less because I've found after
publishing nearly two and a half thousand books, if I do that,
there's a good chance that my book will rank on the first page for that
particular search term.
Now I say good chance because sometimes for whatever reasons a book just
doesn't rank at all,
in which case you just have to accept that move on to the next book.
But if I do use that rule, I found that it does have a good chance of ranking.
Now you may argue that,
well those less competitive keywords won't be searched for as often,
therefore it's not going to make as many sales and therefore you're going to be
tempted to just use those more competitive keywords. But all that happens is,
there's less chance of your book appearing.
But what actually can happen is this,
you target a lesser competitive keyword,
you start to make sales because your book actually has a chance of ranking.
And once you make those sales and your book gets that sales history,
it then starts to rank for those more competitive keywords.
And so more sales start to come in.
Now this can take quite a period of time and sometimes I've published books and
it takes about six, nine months, twelve months,
sometimes longer for a book to actually start to rank for those more competitive
keywords and make those sales.
But it can happen and is well worth it. So once you've found,
or decided on those particular keywords to then use,
it's then a case of using them efficiently and properly within your book in the
places like the titles and subtitles,
which is what I'm actually going to cover in the follow up video to
this.
So I suggest hitting that subscribe button and hitting that notification bell.
So you do get notified when I create that next video because it is very
important.
On where you do use those keywords that you decide to
target. Now over the years,
I've done a lot of research on different niches and actually created lists of
keywords for lots of different niches,
which you can find in my Gumroad shop,
which I'll leave a link to down below in the description.
And here you'll find lots of lists of keywords that are actually free of
charge as well.
And also you'll find some useful tools and templates there to help you create
some books.
Now if you are new to this and actually haven't created any books at all yet,
but are interesting in doing so then what I often suggest is starting with a
very basic lined journal or notebook.
And in fact, I've done a video, which I'll leave a link to here,
on the steps of creating and publishing one of these types of books.
If you are feeling particularly adventurous,
then this video here on using AI to create coloring books.
Thank you very much for your time. It is very much appreciated.
And until the next time, goodbye.