OLD POST ALERT! This is an older post and although you might find some useful tips, any technical or publishing information is likely to be out of date. Please click on Start Here on the menu bar above to find links to my most useful articles, videos and podcast. Thanks and happy writing! – Joanna Penn
Keywords and search engine optimization have been considered important for a long time in the online world, particularly for ranking in the search engines on the first few pages so people can actually find you.
Although I am wary of anecdotes, because they have no statistical value at all, I do want to share the sales figures for my non-fiction book. Written as a labor of love, it has never sold very well (like many first books) and now I focus on fiction, so I barely mention it. As my worst selling title, it is a good example to use. Here's the background.
I spent 13 years as a miserable IT consultant, unhappy with my work for many reasons and so I embarked on a journey to find work I could be passionate about. The journey of how I found it (and how you can too) is encapsulated in my book: Career Change: Stop hating your job, discover what you really want to do with your life and start doing it! That's the title that I adopted in Dec 2012 after I rewrote the book and also updated the cover. The previous title was How to enjoy your job … or get a new one, and was first published in 2008.
At a purely gut level, I hope you can see which title is better 🙂 but as we go through, you will also note the keyword shift.
What is a keyword anyway?
A keyword is a word or phrase that is associated with your book.
It's based on the words that people actually use to search online and this is a crucial aspect, because often the language you use online is not the language customers might use. For example, many of us have claimed ‘indie author' or ‘indie publishing' but to a new author who is not yet in the tribe, they would only recognize ‘publishing' or ‘self-publishing'.
Importantly a keyword is not just one word and that is critical to remember as you go through the following process. For example, my thriller novel Exodus is associated with the keyword “ark of the covenant” and my non-fiction book with “career change”.
(1) Brainstorm words and phrases
First, make a list of all the words and phrases that are associated with your book. For fiction that will include themes, places, things and anything concrete you can hang your book off.
For my non-fiction book Career Change, I tried: career change, what should I do with my life, career help, hate my job, career match, career books, choosing a career
(2) Check the usage of keywords in the search engines
Google has a Keyword Search Tool that you can use to discover what search terms people are using and what is most popular. It is primarily used for people wanting to bid on advertising terms, but we can use it as an indication of interest, as well as a verification of the kind of language people use when searching.
As related to my book on Career Change, I tried the following:
* How to enjoy your job – 5400 global monthly searches
* Changing careers – 27,100 global monthly searches
* I need a career – 60,500 global monthly searches
* Choosing a career – 40,500 global monthly searches
* career change – 165,000 global monthly searches
For each search term, Google will recommend a whole load more options. Look through that list and write down anything else with a high number of searches. (Don’t worry about the Competition column as that is aimed at the advertising crowd.)
(3) Check the usage of keywords on Amazon
Amazon doesn’t have a specific tool to check keywords but it does have an auto-populate tool that enables you to see a drop-down of specific words or phrases. Just start typing something in and you’ll get a drop-down. Make sure you’re in the Books/Kindle store if you want to narrow the search down.
Go into Amazon and start typing in the word/phrase you want to check.
You can see that I typed in ‘career c’ and it came up with everything that fitted with that. This can help you with deciding on topics or titles, particularly again with non-fiction.
But the principle is the same with fiction. You want the most commonly used keywords in your meta-data.
You should find that some of your keywords from Google don’t even show up in the Amazon listing, so discard those and focus on those which appear in both lists.
[I’d like to acknowledge Michael Alvear who featured this technique in ‘Make a Killing on Kindle’ which is a book I can only recommend with a caution as I definitely don’t advocate fake/bought reviews which he also includes in the book.
With any kind of marketing tactic, please be authentic, honest and consider the value to your customer.
Feel free to read his advice, but as with my own advice, please weigh it up against your own situation and don't assume the same things will work. This is a constantly shifting environment.]
(4) Add the keywords into your metadata
Although I don't have a full year for each title, you can see the difference between January 2012 and 2013 (a huge month for career change books). I changed the title mid Dec. I also changed the cover but not the price. Remember, this is basically a ‘write-off' book for me and not something I market in any other way at all, so any sale is a good sale!
My book sales rank rose within days after the key word changes and now the book ranks on the first page of Amazon.com for the keyword ‘career change’.
Changing a fiction title to include keywords is far more unlikely, but there are two more places to include keywords.
Description: You need a description any time you enter information about your book, so make sure it includes some of your keywords, BUT as a primary rule, ensure that it is people-friendly and not just a list of keywords. More on creating a book description that rocks in this interview with Mark Edwards on secrets of Amazon metadata.
Keywords: On every publishing site there is also a place to enter keywords. This is usually 5-7 keywords/phrases that are associated with your book. Just type in the ones you want to use based on your research.
NOTE: if you don't have control of the publishing process you won't be able to access these keywords, but you can do the research and advise your publisher of what you think is the most appropriate.
The most effective usage will be if the keywords resonate between the title, description and keywords box, ticking all three boxes of metadata.
You can also use these keywords for marketing purposes as well, for example, use them in a guest blog post title, or as part of your website.
OK, I know things like meta-data, keywords, search engine optimization, algorithms and stuff can blow people's minds, but it is an important part of being an indie author!
Please do leave any comments or questions below. Have you done keyword research? Has it made a difference to your book?
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1 2 3 … 5 Next »Thanks so much for sharing this. I've been thinking about doing this, but always felt it was too much trouble and wouldn't really make that much difference. Today I've decided to get off my backside and give it a try.
I decided to add a description of my series, hoping this would give me a chance to use phrases like "fantasy book series" more naturally. As you said, it's a fine line between using useful search terms and "keyword stuffing", which reads as forced and search engines eventually punish. I also learned how to add HTML formatting tags beyond what's obvious (like H1 tags). It should be up next week... I just hope I haven't messed it all up! XD
Thanks so much for the article! Gave me the prompting I needed to make a change.
Hi Joanna, This article was very helpful. I tried the GoodleAd search for some keywords for my WWII spy story, The Black Orchestra. The top scoring phrases were "german ww2" and "ww2 german" and "ww2 fiction". I used these in Amazon and discovered that my book is buried under a mountain of others. I'm sure I can use your instructions to good effect.
I also listened to Mark Edwards in your podcast and found that equally helpful. Thank you. JJ
Hi Joanna. Me again. I took a look at Edwards and Voss books on Amazon (US). Couldn't see any obvious keywords in the two blubs, apart from "internet sensation". Also, the covers of the two books are almost identical (?).
These two books don't seem to be selling well in US. One is #500,000, the other is #200,000 in the selling list. My own experience has been the reverse of this. My books sell (small numbers) in US, but my UK sales are close to zero. I've never understood why, as I write in the Queen's English, with no concessions to US spelling or phraseology.
Hi JJ,
Mark & Louise's story is an interesting one :) They self-published and made it to #1 on Amazon UK with their thriller. They sold so well that the books got bought by a big publisher, who then made them take the old page down and now the Amazon page is all controlled by the publisher - Mark no longer has any choice on that :)
In terms of ranking, you also have to remember that rank goes up and down, so a book that hits #1 on Amazon today will be quite different in rank 2 years later. Ranking now is no indication of past success. They also sell better in the UK because they have a primarily UK publisher who pushed the books here in WHSmith, Asda etc.
Hi Joanna and JJ
It's true that our sales in the US have always been very low! Even when we were No.1 on Amazon UK and not doing anything different on .com and .co.uk our sales were pretty terrible in the US. The same is true for many UK authors and I don't know why!
Joanna is right about how we aren't able to choose our own keywords these days - but I strongly advocate following Joanna's advice.
I am going to self-publish a new novel soon (just editing it) and will see if I can make lightning strike twice - in the UK at least :)
Another blinding article, Joanna! I'm taking your advice on board. OK; the book's only been on Amazon a week but I'm alert to all the help I can get.
I checked on Amazon, but with a small publisher in charge, I can't find any reference to keywords. This is a very interesting post, which I'll sahre on fb and twitter.
It's all done in the 'back end' of the KDP upload and Createspace etc so your publisher would do that for you. Try asking them what they have used.
Thank you. One of the most useful blog posts I have come across for a long time.
Thank you, Joanna!
This is a wonderfully clear post on what, for me, has been a murky issue for a long time. While I've always used keywords, I've never felt I was very successful with choosing the best ones or inserting them in the right places. I'm off to experiment. I'll let you know how it goes!
To help Francine out, and those of you who are traditionally published, you can probably figure out what key words that have been used (or not used) for your book, by going to the categories your book is in (listed at the very bottom of the product page under Look for Similar Items by Category). When you get to that list, put in a key word you think (or would like) your book to have. (By doing this with categories rather than the whole Kindle store, you get small enough lists to scan through to see if your book is there.)
For example, I went to mystery-women sleuth-and put in "Victorian Mystery" one of my keywords and my 2 books showed up on this list. I then put in "Gilded Age mystery" (a key word I did not use) and my book did not show up. While this is a slow way to determine your keywords (I would just ask my publisher first), it also helps you determine what keywords you think you might want to use. Since Victorian mystery turned up 34 books, while Gilded Age turned up only 7--all by the same author, this tells me Victorian mystery is a better key word because it produces better results from the readers point of view--so it is one they will probably use more often.
As Amazon has dropped using tags, having the right keywords becomes even more important to ensure that readers who are browsing for certain topics can find your books.
Mary Louisa
such a simple but handy article, and very timely too, since I am pulling together keyword data for a book I'm planning to publish over the weekend. I didn't know about the ability to look up keyword usage on google. That was awesome! Thanks for the tips!
Okay, this is an awesome article. I've been told to look up keywords and look at the Google Analytics site, but nobody has ever told me what I should be doing with them and the site doesn't exactly make sense to the untrained person using it. Is it very similar for blogs or do you incorporate that into the tags?
Hi Heather,
For blogging purposes don't worry about keyword meta-tags, Google no longer uses them. You're better off including the keyword within the headline and content. Also include it in the meta description field, this is used by Google as the snippet under the search result.
The keyword meta tag field, whether filled in or not, will have no impact whatsoever on search results.
Matt Cutts of Google explains why in this video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jK7IPbnmvVU
I tried this. I identified 'WW2 German' and 'German WW2' as 2 key phrases used in Google searches and in Amazon kindle searches. I changed the blurb for my book on Amazon. It now starts with the phrase WW2 Germany. I changed the book title on Amazon, adding the bit in brackets, It now reads The Black Orchestra (A WW2 German spy thriller). I wrote a blog called WW2 Germany - What the German People Knew.
The result? Someone bought a copy of one of my other books!
When I search for my book on Amazon, it's very difficult to find. Searching using the keywords, it doesn't appear at all in 18 pages of books. Even searching under my own name it doesn't show up! I've asked Amazon to do something about this...