Chris A. Baird | May 11, 2022
How To Use Keywords On Amazon KDP

Keywords could play an important role in making your books visible on search engines. Learn how to use keywords on Amazon KDP now.

Beth was really proud of the clever title that she had come up with a "Gardening" book except for one problem. This clever title was not being searched and was giving her zero sales. That's the reason why in today's article we're going to discuss how to use keywords on Amazon KDP.

It was about six months ago or so and she's a gardening author. She's been somebody who's been gardening on the side for many many years. In particular, vertical gardening happens to also be popular at the moment. 

So, she figured maybe this was her opportunity to finally use and turn her hobby into something even more. She wanted to get her gardening books out on the market and start getting these books to sell. The problem is she just wasn't seeing any sales for her book coming through. 

It is a huge problem for her. She was tired of her day job and she was looking to see if possibly she could do writing as a full-time thing. She had heard about other people who had gone about this exact route. 

Starting with writing some books, maybe using some affiliate links. Pulling in your hobbies, possibly selling courses on how to do gardening. There was a whole series of ways in which she could make money using the thing that she loved the most, which was gardening.  

The ability to get out of the cubicle where she was spending most of her time during the day. The problem was she wasn't sure if her books or people would even be interested in the books that she was writing. So, she came up with the first idea which was she had seen some fancy ads for some courses. 

She had taken a particular course from one of the fake gurus. The problem was the course was just hitting her with all of these different tools at the same time. With too much information overload, she felt quite burdened. 

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It slowed down her publishing process. It slowed down drastically as a result of one of the fake gurus telling her “You need to do these 50 things and then you need to do these 30 things. You should be doing everything at the same time.” 

It was very confusing. As a result, she ended up not getting her book onto the market for a while. She then decided “Okay fine, what if I just break it down a little bit? And try to at least start getting the title, the cover, and these things in place.” 

That was when she came up with the idea that so many authors came up with. The idea of “What if I come up with a clever title, something about a green thumb and vertical gardening.” It didn't even use any of the keywords related to vertical gardening but it was just really clever. 

Nobody's searching on any of the terms here. So, it wouldn't show up in any search results. But once they found the book, then it would be really impressive. 

She had her affiliate links in the book. So that when people would see certain gardening products that she had used and found great, they would click on the link. They will go to Amazon and she'd get paid 3%-6% based upon the sales of those products that she would be pushing in her book. 

The only problem was nobody was clicking those links. Why not? Well, because nobody was buying the book. But why weren't they buying the book? 

Well, they were not finding the book because as we mentioned, she was using a title and subtitle that were clever but nobody was searching for it. So, it's completely useless when it comes to trying to get her book to sell. 

Using Clever Keywords

The thing was she Googled this whole issue about keywords. Trying to figure out how this works. She came across one of my blogs on this exact subject. 

That is where she discovered in the blog, I was commenting on how keywords are the absolute most important thing. Your cover is the number two thing but without the keywords, nobody's even going to see the cover. You have to keep in mind, how is your audience going to find you in the first place? 

Now if you have ads, then the cover is the most important. Because the cover's goal is to either get the person to click or to read your title. But if we're not running a lot of ads against our book, well then, we're completely dependent upon the enormous, the second or third largest search engine in the world which is Amazon. 

When they type in certain things like vertical gardening, your clever titles are not going to show up. So, we need to make sure that we are avoiding it like a plague. Using clever titles but thinking not in terms of what will be so clever but rather, what benefit will the person get? 

That's what our title is going to be about and it's going to involve multiple keywords that are targeting exactly that. And that's one of the reasons that as she was reading the blog, I was commenting on the tool that I use. 

I recommend it to all of my clients. This is the most powerful tool for helping us to figure out not just which keywords to use but which keywords are going to be profitable for us in the long run. So, there's a balance here because we're specifically looking for keywords for which there is low competition. 

That is, we can type that keyword into the search box in Amazon and it's not going to have that many results. Maybe a couple hundred or under a thousand results for this specific keyword that we're writing our book on. 

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Then the second thing we're going to want to do is to see how many books using KDSpy are ranking in the top basic sales rank, BSR of 100,000. They're selling a copy a day and then simply by taking those two we're able to figure it out. We take the total number so like let's say there were 10 books in the basic sales rank showing up in the top 20 results under 100,000. 

So, there'd be 10 there and then you had 100 books total for that keyword. That would give us 10 divided by 100, it would give you 10. In this case, I would call it the ratio. You can go the opposite direction as well which would be the total number of books divided by how many books are in that basic sales rank.

That's the way I normally do it and that would give us 10. When dealing with non-fiction books, I like to publish books that have a magic ratio of under 30. So, I know for a fact that these keywords are the ones for which people are searching and buying books. 

But there just aren't that many books targeting it. So, this means when they're in your title and subtitle, they're going to come upon this for page one and page two search results on Amazon. This is so important when it comes to your books. 

We want your books to show up there. Then they see your cover which is the second most important aspect of your book at this point. They see the cover if it pops off the page and it looks similar to the best sellers in your genre. 

They're going to go “This book is for me.” So, she could have chosen a fancy book showing some forests or green plants. But no, we want the vertical gardening right on the cover. 

Feeling Motivated Again

Something that shows exactly what the benefit is going to be. “Here's how you can do this vertical gardening for yourself.” The title is going to involve the keyword at minimum vertical gardening if there's some. 

If that is not profitable enough, then we go down a nosh and say vertical gardening for tomatoes or green plants or something like that. We use that as our keyword and remember when we talk about keywords, we're not talking about a word. 

It's a series of words that you start with a keyword or key phrase as you might put it. That's one keyword then we have another one. With Amazon, it allows you to choose seven keywords that you can have associated with your book. 

You're definitely going to want to use up all seven keywords in there using KDSpy. We're spying on our competition because the people who happen to be selling the most books unless they're famous authors, they're using these exact strategies. So, they're telling you already which keywords they're using. 

How to use keywords on Amazon KDP? So, let's take a look, with KDSpy, you can do what's called a ‘word cloud’ where it pulls out all of the most used keywords in the top sellers. We'll put them up in the cloud and then we can just pick from them as we're going through. 

To figure out which keywords they have found and they're telling us which keywords are the profitable ones. The problem that so many authors have just like what Beth was having was that we just ignore this. We don't even know anything about keywords. 

We think that it's not necessary that we can do this keyword game. Actually, we don't even need keywords, just a clever title. Wouldn't that be enough? The answer is they're never going to find you as a new author when you're doing exactly that.

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But what did Beth do then? She went back and she started using KDSpy. She was going through these exact things and keeping in touch with me via email and Volley. 

By going through this, we were able to take a closer look at which keywords. She tried a few and I pointed out that if you're using KDSpy correctly, we'd see that this one was unprofitable. But this is a profitable one, so she changed the title of her book to the eBook version. 

We've discussed this before but you cannot change it on your paperback. Because there's an ISBN associated with it unless you want to do a brand-new paperback. But at least on the eBook version, we were able to get it changed out. 

What happened is that she started seeing the strategy working for her. She started to see sales going up on the eBook and the paperback. The books that she had put on Amazon KDP. 

It was fantastic because as the sales started to rise, she felt that motivation again. She also noticed that people were clicking on the affiliate links that she had put inside of her book. So, a lot of this comes back to just knowing and keeping things easy like we try to do here. 

One of the things is you're going to want to check out KDSpy. It's the tool that I use personally and I recommend it to all of my clients. Grab a copy of this incredibly inexpensive and powerful tool to get your books selling through keywords.

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