How to Choose the Best Kindle Keywords for Your Book

by Dave Chesson, @DaveChesson

You’ve probably heard of keyword research by now and how important it is for marketing your books. But did you know that you can do your own keyword research at home using a pen, some paper, your laptop and Amazon’s search bar? 

In this article, we’ll look over how you can get a huge list of potential keywords for your book and narrow them down to the perfect list of keywords you can rank for! 

Part One: Find Your Keywords

Use a Private Browser

The first thing you need to do is simple but absolutely vital–without doing this, everything else will be a waste of time. 

When completing any keyword research, you need to use a private browsing window. If you’re using Chrome, this is called incognito mode. If you’re unsure how to do that, here’s a short video on how to set your browser to private mode. 

Basically, using incognito mode will make sure that any previous searches–or purchases–won’t impact your search results. 

Search on Amazon

Like we said earlier, to manually find keywords, you need to use Amazon’s search bar. Select the ‘Kindle Store’ option from the list of categories. Or, if you want to sell hard copies, select the ‘Books’ option. If you forget to change the category, you’ll get results from the entire Amazon store. 

Now, get out that notepad and pen we spoke about earlier. 

Begin typing in any phrases and potential keywords that readers could use when searching for your book. You’ll find that Amazon will try to guess what your search query is. So, start writing Amazon’s suggestions down. 

You can add a single letter to the end of a potential sentence starter and check out how the auto-fill results will change–see the gif below. 

This process is a long one, but by thoroughly working through all relevant keywords, you can create a list of hundreds of options for your book. If you are unsure about any particular keywords, make sure you check them against Amazon’s Keyword requirements page (it’s under the “Keywords to Avoid” section). 

Part Two: Narrowing Down Your List

By now, you should have a list of well over one hundred potential keywords. Now, you’ll have to start narrowing down your list to the best keywords for your book. 

To make sure you choose the right ones, you’ll have to do a little market and competitor research.

To start your research–again in incognito mode–search one of your favorite phrases from the list you’ve written down on Amazon. From there, you’ll want to check out your top three results. 

In particular, you want to find how well the top-performing books are selling. To do that, write down the ABSR number–the Amazon Best Seller Rank–for each book. Then use this Kindle Calculator to work out how many copies that book sells. Copy the book’s ABSR into the calculator and it’ll do the rest. 

In this example, let’s say the book has an ABSR of 23452. Using the calculator, a book of that ranking sells around 12 copies per day. Note, this includes ‘borrows’ if you’re using Kindle Unlimited.

When manually calculating sales, you should find the average book sales number for the top three results. Ideally, your keyword should be making some sales, but not enough that your book won’t be able to compete. When you find a keyword that doesn’t have high-selling books at the top of the search, one of two things is happening. 

1. Your keyword isn’t popular
2. The best-performing books for that keyword aren’t relevant to the search. Amazon has to put something on its screen when people search, but if the book suggestions don’t help the potential reader, they probably won’t lead to a bunch of sales. 

You should do this process with all of your potential keywords. After that, narrow your list down to a few books you can compete with sales-wise. 

Part Three: Complete Competition Analysis

The third part of finding keywords for your book is going through your competition and seeing who you’re up against for that number one spot. You should have already cut a few options from your list in the previous step, so you’ll only have to analyze what’s left. 

If you think about your own browsing habits, it wouldn’t surprise you to know that 25% of clicks on an Amazon search page are on the top result. From there, the percentages drop with every place on the result page. That means second place gets more clicks than third, third gets more than fourth, and so on. 

So get out your trusty Kindle or other eReader and start searching for keywords and looking at the books that show up. Are their covers professional? Do they have lots of good reviews? Are their blurbs compelling? 

If you find a keyword that sells high but doesn’t seem to have strong books targeting that keyword, you’re onto a winner.

Here are some signs that a competitor’s book can be beaten, even if they’re targeting the same keyword as you:

• The book is new: Competing against new books is always a good strategy as they don’t have too big of a head start. Often, a new book’s sales figures have been inflated by a launch campaign. 
• The book has a poor cover: A professional-looking cover will attract new readers to your title over competitors.
• The book only has a few (or bad) reviews: Readers will choose the best option available. If the book has minimal or poor reviews, there’s an opportunity for you.

Like you did with the previous step, cut any keywords you feel are too competitive and try to reach your final shortlist. 

Final Thoughts

Self-publishing takes a lot of time and a fair amount of money. If you’re like me, you want to make sure the books you write actually get the sales they deserve. 

To help you do that, you now have a manual way to find the best keywords for your next book. If that sounds too difficult, there are also tools like Publisher Rocket you can use to skip the manual work and complete keyword research in minutes. 

Whatever you choose, best of luck in selling more books. 

Cheers! 

Dave Chesson is the creator of Kindlepreneur.com, a website devoted to teaching advanced book Marketing which even Amazon KDP acknowledge as one of the best by telling users to “Gain insight from Kindlepreneur on how you can optimize marketing for your books.” Having worked with such authors as Orson Scott Card, Ted Dekker and more, his tactics help both Fiction and Nonfiction authors of all levels get their books discovered by the right readers.

Photo by Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash