Getting Your Keywords Right

A Guide With Examples

When you publish at Amazon KDP or elsewhere they ask you to provide keywords. So, do you simply type in what you think people will enter? A five-minute task? If that's what you settle for then you are setting yourself up for failure.

Are keywords optional?

According to Amazon KDP keywords are optional and 'help readers find your book when they browse the Amazon site'

The term ‘keywords’, or tags as calibre calls them, should really be ‘key-phrases’ because they can be up to 50 characters long. The total length of keywords at Amazon appears to be 400 characters. Prepositions (for, with, from, over, through), articles (a, an, the) and conjunctions (and, or) are optional in the keywords.

You would be foolish to consider keywords as optional. Keywords are essential because they help readers find your book. Specifically, they help readers find your book cover and title. According to Dave Chesson of Kindlepeneur, "66% of all book shoppers on Amazon use Amazon’s search bar to find a book. But more importantly, 89% of all those searches end in a purchase. This means that if you can get your book in front of those shoppers, you’ll make more sales."

Keywords choice

Amazon ask you to use no more than seven generic keywords that describe sub-genre, mood, and location. They advise authors to consider using the following types of keywords:

• Setting (e.g. Colonial Africa)
• Character types (e.g. single mum, divorcee)
• Character roles (e.g. powerful witch)
• Plot themes (e.g. coming of age, revenge)
• Story tone (e.g. dystopian, conspiracy)

Use phrases you think people would use to find your book content as a starting point. There are some words Amazon say you should not use in keywords:

• Information covered elsewhere in your book's metadata (title, contributors, etc.)
• Subjective claims about quality (e.g. ‘best novel ever’)
• Time-sensitive statements (‘new’, ‘on sale’, ‘available now’ and ‘FREE’ – Amazon assumes that such a book will not always be free)
• Information common to most items in the category ("book")
• Deliberate spelling errors. (‘sycology’)
• Variants of spacing, punctuation, capitalization, and pluralization (‘80GB’ and ‘80 GB’, ‘computer’ and ‘computers’, etc.). Exception: Words translated in more than one way (e.g. ‘Mao Zedong’ or ‘Mao Tse-tung’, ‘Hanukkah’ or ‘Chanukah
• Anything misrepresentative like the name of an author not associated with your book. Kindle Direct Publishing has a zero-tolerance policy for metadata that is meant to advertise, promote, or mislead
• Quotation marks in search terms. Single words work better than phrases, and specific words work better than general ones. If you enter “complex suspenseful whodunit”, only people who type all of those words in that order will find your book. For better results, enter this: complex suspenseful whodunit. Customers can search for any of those words and find your book
• Amazon program names such as ‘Kindle Unlimited’ or ‘KDP Select’

People won’t look for words that relate only to your book unless they already know about it. Don’t over use the keywords because this can look like “keyword stuffing,” a spammy practice that can get you dropped in ranks.

At Amazon, find out if your selected book genres have keyword requirements and make sure you use those keywords. You’ll find these at http://bit.ly/keywdcat

Don’t use your book title as a keyword. That would waste the slot since Amazon already searches titles and subtitles. If you would like to have more than seven keywords an easy way of using extra keywords is to use them in subtitles and book descriptions.

Enter your key phrases in a manner that readers would search for. For example, readers are more likely to search for ‘paranormal romance’ than ‘romance paranormal’. If you use them in the wrong order your book may still be found but it will have a lower rank in the search results.

Before you enter one of Amazon's seven keywords, check the keyword by doing a search for it at an Amazon page. You'll get an idea of how popular it is as you enter it because it predicts terms based on what other people have typed.

You can read Amazon's keyword guide at https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/help/topic/G201298500 

Let’s look at two examples of finding keywords.

Example 1 - Raging Storm by Shelia Chapman

Back in 2013 when I first published my wife's book 'Raging Storm' I used the 'five minute task' method. Although it got fantastic five star reviews, its sales were slow. Downloads for this series starter book were not exactly stellar. I decided to return to this book and see what I could do to increase sales by working with its keywords. The keywords I had chosen in 2013 were:

• Paranormal romance.
• A Vested Interest - chosen because this book has a following series of this title.
• Romance - Not a good choice since it is a huge Amazon genre.
• Telepathy – The book features mind reading.
• Native American – A protagonist was a member of a ‘Navajo’ clan.
• Mind-reading
• Romantic suspense

When I looked at these keywords again, I thought first of the genre or theme of the book. I chose Amazon’s genre Fiction >Romance > Paranormal. Amazon tell you not to type in the genre but to type in words in the order people expect. So, I didn’t enter ‘Romance Paranormal’ and instead chose 'Paranormal romance' as my keyword. Here's what happens when I type the first letter in an incognito browser Amazon search window. I use ‘incognito’ because I don’t want the results to be influenced by previous searches I’ve done.

You'll notice as soon as you start typing, Amazon starts making suggestions based on what other people are looking for. Nothing useful so far (I’m curious about the ‘Pepper spray’ though.) I continued typing.

By the time I'd entered five letters I started to get results.

It found ‘paranormal romance’ and ‘paranormal activity’ with ‘paranormal romance’ showing in Kindle and books. That indicates my keyword wasn’t a bad choice and was popular.

You can use the same method to get suggestions from a Google Search. Again, I suggest you do this in an incognito browser window to avoid previous searches influencing the results.

Doing the same with my original keyword choices I got:

A Vested Interest – finally found after typing in ‘A Vested I’. This isn’t a good keyword since few people will use it unless they are looking for another of the books in that series.

Romance – ‘rom’ found ‘romance books’; ‘roma’ found ‘free romance kindle books’(Free and Kindle are forbidden keywords); ‘romanc’ found ‘romance novels’.

Telepathy – ‘telepa’ found ‘telepathy books’, ‘telepathy’ and ‘telepath hive mind’

Native American – ‘native a’ found ‘native American’ and ‘native American books’. Experimenting I also found ‘native American fiction’

Mind-reading – ‘mind-read’ found ‘mind-reading’ and continuing to type I found ‘mind-reading sci-fi’

Romantic suspense – ‘romant’ found ‘romantic suspense kindle books’

That gave me some ‘starter’ keywords to work with:

• Paranormal romance
• Paranormal fiction
• Romance books
• Romance novels
• Telepathy fiction
• Native American fiction
• Mind-reading science fiction

Since the words in keywords are better not repeated and ‘books’ is a keyword to avoid since so many people search for it, these became:

• Paranormal romance
• Romantic stories
• Romance novels
• Telepathy fiction
• Native American ebooks
• Mind-reading sci-fi

That’s only six keywords so I followed Amazon’s advice and added the locations the book was set in and its theme:

• Louisiana and Arizona coming of age

Next, I use two keyword research tools which are free to use online. One searches for Amazon keywords, the other searches for Google keywords. Both sets of results can be used but there’s a big difference how these Internet behemoths do a search. Google uses an intelligent search which tries to interpret the meaning of what you are looking for. If you enter ‘great paranormal romance’ it will look for popular paranormal romance also. Amazon’s search is just plain dumb. What words you enter must appear in the search results.

Step by step guide to finding better keywords

Here's the process I use to update the keywords. I start by using AI. In this case I was looking for keywords for my time travel short stories. I've hilighted the keywordsI selected from the artificial intelligence choices.

Step 1. Use ChatGPT / Gemini

That gives me 21 keywords for a time travel book.

Going back to my wife's paranormal romance book:

Step 2 – I used the Scientific Seller keyword tool at http://app.scientificseller.com/keywordtool and entered my keywords one per line. There is good news and bad news though. The bad news is that the site seems to have stopped functioning in July 2023. The good news is that it's still available and working at the Internet Archive. Using the keyword tool is free. You’ll find it best to do the search during the night. Leave your computer logged on at the page overnight.

Once you click to start the keyword search you wait – it warns you it will be slow.

Scientific Seller will find lots of keywords for your books but it will also find what it calls ‘stuff’ words. Those stuff words can make a huge difference to how readers find your books. Let me explain further. Look at these two keyword searches and notice how many items are found.

As you can see adding the word ‘great’ has a dramatic effect on the number of items found. It changes that 50,000+ to 129. The word ‘great’ is a stuff word. Which group do you think you have a better chance of selling to; the 50,000+ group or the 129? You normally shouldn’t use these words in your keywords but do use them in your titles, subtitles and book description. According to Scientific Seller, Amazon makes little use of the product description when it searches for keywords. However Scientific Seller is designed for non-book retailers. Such products offer a bulleted list of product features which are searched for keywords. Books don’t offer this bulleted list (although you can add one if you know HTML) The descriptions for books are searched for keywords and are a good place to include ‘stuff’ words. Google searches book descriptions too so you should use the ‘stuff’ words there.

Step 3 Use the Moz Keyword Explorer tool. This allows you to enter one of your keywords and it will quickly find up to 1,000 related keywords. Not only that but it will give you an idea of how popular these keyword suggestions are.

Step 4 – Look at the reviews and descriptions of books with a similar theme. See if you can pick out any keywords from these. If your book already has reviews, then go through those too. I picked out:

• unique people, extraordinary situation
• beautiful but sad story
• force of destiny and fate
• endless romance
• laugh, smile, cry and love
• love at first sight
• mystery, love, jealousy, and sadness
• combining romance and paranormal
• adventure, suspense, and romance

That gives me 19 keywords; a lot more than Amazon’s allowance of seven but that’s not a problem.