- Keywords, keywords, keywords.
You hear me talkin' a lot about this
over on my Twitch channel as well
as in the Self-Publishing Books Group on Facebook.
I think it's high time that we can kind of
curate all of that information
into one video so I'm gonna share with you
in this Kindle Direct Publishing Tutorial,
a keyword research proven method.
So make sure you stay tuned.
(upbeat music)
This is Self Publishing with Dale,
where you learn to publish books that sell
and build an unstoppable author brand.
What is your preferred way of gathering keywords?
Do you use any kind of online tools or software?
Or, do you just do it the old fashioned way?
Let me know inside the comments.
Also, make sure that you stick around
for my fullest of free and premium
keyword research tools.
I think it's important that before we jump in
to the full tutorial that we address
what exactly keywords are.
A lot of people have a lot of misconceptions
and misunderstandings to when it comes to keywords itself.
A keyword is essentially a way of describing
a particular product of some sort.
And it can be something as simple as one word,
but in most instances it can be two to three words or more,
and sometimes even more than that would be
what's called a long tail keyword.
So if you ever hear me say, or other people say keyword,
don't just limit yourself to a single word.
Those are great but they tend to be a bit broad.
We're gonna wanna make sure that we make
our keywords a little bit longer.
Keywords helps in the function of discovery.
This means that any time someone
is say looking for something, they've got a problem,
and so now they're gonna wanna find a solution.
This goes from everything from non-fiction to fiction.
They got a problem, and hopefully you're their solution.
And those keywords are the bridge
that connect your audience with your book.
But where are keywords used anyways?
Well this is in what's called metadata.
Metadata is your title, subtitle,
series name, description, the seven keyword slots
with 50 characters per slot, and so much more
that just entails the full description
of your entire product.
Now I know quite a few of you inside the fiction realm
not necessarily are gonna be able to load up
a lot of heavy keywords, and long tail keywords
into your title, or subtitle, or your series name,
so that's why keywords function
probably best behind the dashboard
inside those seven keyword slots
or within your actual book description itself.
Those of you in the non-fiction realm,
well you've got a little bit of an advantage
in that you can actually utilize
some of those keywords within most, if not all,
of your book's metadata.
Okay so now that we know that keywords help in discovery,
how do we find the right ones?
What are the right ones we need to be lookin' for?
I'm gonna be brief, this is just a quick plug
on one of the products that I particularly enjoy.
It's called Publisher Rocket,
also formerly known as KDP Rocket
and this is my preferred research tool
because it saves me a ton of time and heartache,
I would rather just be spending binge watching Netflix
or watching Wrestling on television.
Okay, so now that I've got all that information
out the way let's go old school methodology.
Step number one, install DS Amazon Quick View.
DS Amazon Quick View essentially shows
the bestseller rank of particular books
on the Amazon platform so if you happen to go inside
the Kindle store and you scroll through the selections
underneath the keyword, you'll be able to see
very quickly what the bestseller rank
is for a particular book.
This means that, where does this place
in the number of sales compared to other
number of sales of all the other books?
So we want to be mindful of that,
but we also don't want to be wasting a bunch of time
clicking on each book, scrolling down to the product details
and looking at the bestseller rank.
Now, it should be noted.
And I'm gonna say this in a little bit,
you're gonna want to make sure that you have
the DS Amazon Quick View enabled for incognito mode.
Now open your browser in incognito mode.
Type in your route keyword, screen capture it.
Search each relevant keyword.
So as it starts to auto populate your selections,
based on your particular keyword
we're going to be mindful of each one of the keywords
that's most relevant to our title.
Don't worry about trying to please everyone,
there's gonna be some that you go ooh that's gotta
be really really profitable it's gonna be pretty awesome.
If it's not applicable to your book,
then don't bother with it.
Once you find the best root keyword that you can,
that means the string of words
that best describes your book,
we're gonna go through the alphabet.
So as a for instance, we could type in
home workout plan A, home workout plan B,
and then we'll go through the entire alphabet
and see if there's any other derivatives
of my particular root keyword that we can work with.
Now that we have this entire list of keywords,
what we're gonna do now is we're gonna search
each one of them now.
We're gonna manually put it on in there,
and we're gonna press enter to see
what comes up in search volume.
So this means in the top left hand corner
of the particular window in Amazon,
you're gonna see a number of products that come up
underneath a given keyword.
Scroll through the actual books that'll pop up here
in the very first page, and the first page alone,
and I want you to be mindful of the best seller ranking.
If it's below a hundred thousand, you're good.
Below 10,000, it's competitive.
Below 1,000, you're in for a fist fight.
This means that this is a keyword
that is going to be really tough
to actually place on the first page placement.
And that's ultimately where we want
to get your publication to.
Wait stop, here we go.
Bonus tip.
What do you do with the keywords anyways?
One, find about seven to 12 good keywords.
Two, organically work it into your metadata,
kinda like what I said before, your title,
your subtitle, your book description,
get it on in there if you can help it.
Three, do use keywords from all your metadata.
This means that anytime that you're finding
some of these particular keywords
and you're working it within say your ad copy
or your book description if you will.
You're gonna wanna make sure that you work
that into say your seven keyword slots
in some capacity if you can help.
Only put in the really invaluable,
the really good keywords that you saw was like,
okay this is not very competitive,
I can definitely win on this one.
Four, don't use the same keywords
for your title, subtitle, or your series name
in those seven keyword slots.
A, you don't need to double down,
in fact Amazon even says this on their section
based on keywords.
They say, you know hey if your title
is already there you don't need to double down
and put it inside the actual seven keyword slots.
It tends to be very wasteful of that space,
and it's already limited as it is.
I mentioned at the beginning of the video
how there's a few free resources online
that you can utilize for keyword research.
But it comes with a bit of a fair warning that listen,
it's free and it's free for a good reason.
So you're gonna probably end up curating
a lot of great keywords,
and in with it you get a lot of not so great keywords.
So this net that's gonna be cast out,
sure you could probably be going after
a certain type of fish but you might end up
getting a bunch of ugly fish, or toad fish if you will,
and you're gonna probably have to toss some of those out
and just use your best discretion.
Here are some of the free resources.
Google AdWords and Google Trends.
Quite possibly one of my favorite overall tools,
they don't cost a dime and sometimes
they get you some stuff
that you didn't otherwise think about.
To set up a Google AdWords accounts,
it's a little bit, kind of, you know wonky.
But for the most part what you're gonna end up doing
is to get a Google AdWords account,
you just go and sign in with your Gmail account.
And you have to set up like an ad campaign of some sort,
and as soon as you get into your dashboard
just pause that ad campaign and you're gonna have access
to the Keyword Planner.
Find that Keyword Planner and you can literally
just look one after the other, after the other.
And say for instance we take my one root keyword
that we had discussed before on home workout plan,
and we can search that up and get a larger
search volume that Google will bring back.
Now, let's just say for instance
we're not really 100% sure.
We've searched some of those keywords
over in the Amazon Marketplace,
and maybe there's like a split between
say home workout plan for men,
and home workout plan for men over 50.
And we're kinda going ah I'm not really sure
which one of these two I wanna shoot for,
which one's gonna make the most sense for my book.
Okay, so just go over to Google Trends.
And what you're gonna do is take those two
particular keywords that are very similar
in makeup and plug it in there and press enter.
And it's gonna show you which one draws in the most traffic.
In the event you see a flat line
or there's not search results then chances are
pretty likely these keywords probably ain't
gonna work out for ya.
The second resource, Keywords Everywhere browser plugin.
This one's a fun one actually,
Kelli showed me some time ago.
And you can get this free plugin,
and essentially anytime you go into anything
that uses a search engine, be it Amazon or Google,
what you'll do is you'll start to type it in.
The auto population comes down,
and you'll get some suggestions
with a search volume as well as sometimes
the cost per click of a particular keyword.
Pay attention to some of those search volumes.
So those words that you're gonna start to see,
you gotta be able to know this one,
oh well it's gonna be pretty good,
this one not so good.
You'll see the search volume,
the number of searches and you're gonna really
measure it out and say,
"Okay this might be worth my time,
"this may not be worth my time."
Keyword Tool Dominator.
I actually reviewed this product
quite some time ago and they've got a free model
as well as premium model.
And all that to say this that you could get the free model,
it's literally worth it.
You can just go into their option
to search on Amazon for a particular keyword
and it'll scrape it and give you different
derivatives of that.
But herein lies the issue,
is, because it's going in Amazon,
and not necessarily the book store or the Kindle book store,
it's going to again, get you a bunch of keywords
that might be completely unrelated to your stuff
and you're just gonna have to go through,
pick out the winners, and remove those losers
and send 'em off into the trash can.
I've got a full review video,
that you're gonna wanna make sure that you check out,
if you just go right on over there
right now and I'll see ya there.
Keyword rank is a value assigned from one to 10,
ranking the popularity of a keyword
based on the position of the keyword suggestion
as returned from the auto complete service.