Ultimate Guide To Kindle Publishing Keyword Research [Insanely Effective Method]

Last Updated on August 19, 2020 by Jordan Alexo

Choosing the right KEYWORDS! It all starts here… this makes the difference between drowning in a sea of money or being dead broke. So listen carefully… because I am about to share with you my secret method.

Hmm… I’m not sure if this is a good idea… but I feel everyone deserves to know the truth. Anyway, I am expecting to receive some hate mail from experienced publishers, because they don’t want you to know this method. Instead, they want to keep all the money for themselves, crazy!

So let’s see an easy and quick formula you can use to get juicy money-making keywords. The process I am about to show you is something I have used for years, so consider it tested and trusted.

First, understand that keywords and keyword research is an aspect of self-publishing, a very fundamental one at that. No one can launch into the self-publishing business without adequate information on this. With this guide, all of these issues will soon be history as you are about to become a Jedi master in keyword research.

Best Keyword Research Method For Kindle Publishing [Video Guide]

 

What is Keyword Research?

A keyword is one or more significant words used as an index to search for books to purchase in Amazon’s Kindle Store. Examples are yoga, meditation, real estate, yoga for beginners, etc. With the examples, you can see the progression from a single word to a group of two-three words. ‘Keyword’ is a general term, but I am specific about the kindle store because that’s our focus.

Keyword research simply means finding, gathering, and analyzing possible keywords you want to publish a book on. This means that your published book would be centered on your chosen keyword.

Why Do You Need To Do Kindle Keyword Research?

In book publishing, the most important thing is to get keywords (could also be your book titles depending on what you want) that are very profitable. Follow through the post to know how to do this.

Asides profitability, there is another crucial factor you need to put into consideration. This is ‘competition.’ As much as you want a profitable keyword, ensure that the keyword is not very competitive. If you go for a keyword that is too competitive, it would be difficult for your book to make optimum sales. Hence, the profit from that book would be minimal.

This hitch comes from the fact that other authors of books in that niche (your competition) have more influence on Amazon. People mostly purchase their books, and so the books are better-ranked, leaving yours in the shadows. This way, your customers would have a hard time finding your book.

You should use a keyword that is profitable with an average or even low competition. This is one of the most critical tasks for a publisher.

YOU CANNOT OUTSOURCE!!

Honestly, keyword research is the task that takes most of your time in self-publishing because it is not one of these things you can outsource. Imagine, I want to use a platform like Upwork to get this job done; nobody would be dumb enough to give me profitable keywords when they can use it for themselves. I have never tried this before neither do I know anyone who has.

You can always outsource other things like book content, book covers, etc. To get content for my books, I use Urbanwriters.com, check them out. Also, make sure to use my coupon code (JA5) to get a 5% discount. But you cannot escape keyword research.

What Are The Tools You Need For Keyword Research In Kindle Publishing?

1. Goggle Chrome: I would suggest you use this browser. You can try others if you want to, but this is the one I use. I’m not really sure if the other needed applications work well on with other browsers. In chrome, you would be using:

(a) Incognito Window: You are surprised? Why incognito mode? We don’t want the ranking in the Kindle store to be influenced by our search history in our regular chrome and Amazon usage. It is that simple. So, all our research should be done in the incognito mode.

(b) Audible.com: One of the sites you are going to use is audible.com. This is to determine the competitiveness of a particular keyword. We will see how, as we go on.

(c) Amazon Best Sellers: On a new incognito window, search for ’Amazon Best Sellers’. Then you pick your categories – Kindle Store-Kindle eBooks-non-fiction, after which you’d see several categories to select from.

2. KD Spy: This is a browser application that makes keyword analysis easier. It speeds up the overall process of keyword research because you’d be able to determine if a keyword is profitable or not. Kindle Spy comes at a very cheap rate. How it works is by showing the different statistics of the first 20 books displayed on the first search page in Amazon. With this app, you can make a comparison and determine if a book is profitable in the blink of an eye.
3. DS Amazon: This is a free application that you just have to install. When you use the DS Amazon, you get to see the ‘Amount paid in Kindle Store’. Yes, this information is required to determine if a book[s] is selling well. The principle here is the lower the number (paid in Kindle store) of a book, the higher the sales of that book.
4. Blank Notepad: to quickly add your selected keywords.
5. A spreadsheet. I use WPS Spreadsheet, and this particular spreadsheet is free to download here. The spreadsheet is where you will be adding all of your keywords to analyze their competitiveness and profitability later. So in your spreadsheet,

• 1^stcolumn would be for keywords – the list of scrapped keywords
• 2^ndcolumn for Average BSR – the total average of the sales ranks of the books listed must be between 0 to 300.000
• 3^rdcolumn for *30,000 BSR (+2) –  you should have at least two books or more with 30.000 or lower sales rank
• 4^thcolumn for Audible Search Results (0-300) – the number of search results for a particular keyword in audible.com. This number should be between 0 to 300.
• 5^thcolumn for Audiobooks 100 reviews (0-6) – the number of books with 100 or more reviews for a particular keyword in audible.com. This number should be between 0 to 6 books.

The statistics of the 2^nd and 3^rd columns are what make up the Amazon Profitability test. This test is done with data gotten from Amazon.

The data of the last two columns, on the other hand, is what is needed for the Competitiveness test. This gives us an idea if a keyword is averagely competitive or has low competition. The information for this test is gotten from audible.com

We are going to scrap for keywords in Amazon Best Seller listings. The strategy I use is something called the Sleek Method. I picked it up from Audiobook Income Academy. This is an organized way of researching and finding the right keywords from Amazon. This is a course I highly recommend for self-publishers, so you should check it out here.

3 Steps For Keyword Research and Analysis

 

STEP 1) Scrapping Keywords

The first step is to scrap for keywords. For your keyword listing, you should aim to get at least 100 keywords. When you have 100 keywords, you ultimately have a wide range to make your final selections from.

Now, in the non-fiction category, you can see that there are different themes or better put, fields. They are called niches, the main niches. If you are finding it difficult to choose a niche, you can start with a familiar one. It could be something you enjoy or is even related to your personal life.

However, you should know that some categories are less profitable for self-publishers when compared to other ones. For example, it is going to be difficult for a self-publisher to produce books in the biographies and Memoirs niche.

Top 5 Kindle Publishing Niches

To make things easier for you, I have put together a list of niches that I’ve discovered from experience that is rich with profitable keywords. These categories work well for kindle eBooks, paperbacks, and even audiobooks. That is a maximal profit game. So if you are kind of lost or confused, try these.

1. Business & Investing
2. Computers & Technology
3. Health, Fitness, and Dieting
4. Parenting & Relationship
5. Self-Help

So, how do I search through the books for keywords?

I’d be using the Health, Fitness & Dieting niche as our example. Every niche in the Kindle store has subcategories. It’s usually easier to get profitable keywords from these subcategories. Let’s start with the broader category, though.

The first thing to do is go through the book titles of those bestseller authors and see if you find any keyword that makes sense that you could extract. It might be a search word customers use when they want to buy books, a keyword that catches your eye, etc.  Let me show you some examples.

• The second book on my list here is titled Limitless: ‘Upgrade your brain, Learn anything faster and Unlock your exceptional life’. I’d type in ‘learn faster’ on my notepad. It sure sounds killer. I didn’t add ‘anything’ because that is just a filler word.

• Another book says ‘Bright Line Eating’. This is dicey because as interesting as that line is, it would most likely have copyrights. I’d take it and check later.
•  I can see Ikigai. I don’t think this has copyright issues. It’s probably a philosophy from the Japanese or so. I would check it out later too.

Another thing you can do is to click on a book and check the tab with other suggested books for customers. You can get keywords from that section also.

In addition to the above, you can now check the subcategories because you just want to keep digging till you have 100 keywords. From the ‘Addiction and Recovery’ subcategory, I got sugar detox, codependent, etc.

You should just continue scrapping through all the books in every subcategory till you get to 100. Here, we are not waiting till we get to 100 since we have a handful we can use. Let’s move to the analysis.

1. Paste Your Results in the Spreadsheet You’d be using
2. Analyzing your Keywords for Maximum Profitability

STEP 2) How To Go About Amazon Profitability Test?

As I said earlier, the average BSR should be about 0-300. Average Basic Sales Rank is the sum of the sales ranks for every book (with exception to the ones that are canceled) on the list divided by the total number. You want this number to be between 0-300,000 since a lower Avg. BSR means higher profitability of the books. Above 300,000 is a no-go area cause most books listed aren’t performing well.

If I type ‘learn faster’ in Amazon’s search bar, results will pop up. Next is to click on the Kindle Spy icon.

In the Kindle Spy window, you should start by:

(a) Eliminating the book titles that seem unrelated to the subject e.g. seeing a diet cookbook if I search for ‘yoga’.

You should also,

(b) Cross out books with a figure of 0 on the sales rank column.

Our average for ‘learn faster’ is 182, which is good.

For the column with 30,000 BSR, I want to see if I have two or more books with an BSR value of 30,000 or lower. There are 6 books in total. Therefore, this keyword has a good chance at massive profits.

STEP 3) How to go about the Keyword Competitiveness Test using Audible.com

Audible Search Results means the total number of results you get when you search for that keyword in Audible.com. You can see the number of results right on top. Higher numbers imply greater competition. From our Audible Search Results column, you’d see that we don’t want the search results to be over 300. ‘Learn faster’ keyword has a total of 149, so it passes the search result test.

The last test is the Audiobook 100+ Reviews. Basically, what we want to know is the number of books with 100 reviews or more. You can get a good idea of the competition with this estimate because, as a publisher, it would be difficult to compete with authors, experts in that niche. It is most likely that those folks would have a good number of followers buying their books and leaving reviews. As a publisher, you can’t compete with them. The books with 100 reviews and above would be for authors.

You repeat this process again and again for all of your keywords. I should do the same thing for all of your keywords and then choose the most profitable ones for your books.

Comparison Between ‘Learn Faster’, ‘Ikigai’, And ‘Codependent’ Keywords

• ‘Learn faster’ as we see from our results is a profitable keyword with fair competition. Audible 100+ reviews should be 0-6, and it was on the verge of 6. So it’s a good keyword.
• ‘Ikigai’ doesn’t seem to be very profitable at least in Amazon because it has a value of 1 in the 30,000 BSR column, and this should be 2 or more. The competition is not tight with 21 and 5 in the 4^th and 5^th columns, respectively. You can decide to make an audiobook with this word, and your book would rank decently. Rank might be good, but don’t expect to make much profit from this book.
• ‘Codependent’ is profitable, however, too competitive. The last column result, 15 is more than twice our limit. This keyword is a badass. If it were like 7 books with 100 reviews,  I could have considered it but, now it’s no option.

My winner here is ‘learn faster’ because it has the best potential to make money. The 2^nd runner-up is ‘Ikigai’. This keyword would still make some little profit, especially in audiobook. Although  ‘codependent’ is profitable, the competition is insane.

Extra Tips

• Try to do your keyword research on your own. You can never trust that someone else would deliver the best to you. It’s your book so if you can’t do any other thing, do the keywords research yourself. DON’T OUTSOURCE!
• STAY AWAY FROM COPYRIGHTS. If you are not so sure, forget the keyword. This is what I did with ‘bright line eating’. If you use a book title that has copyrights, the real owner (author) can send a complaint to Amazon. They would remove your book from the market. Obviously, you wasted time and resources getting that book published. You can see that the whole idea is a messy one. You can check http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/ to see if a book title has copyrights.
• If you analyze a keyword and you are satisfied with the test results, you should HIGHLIGHT THE KEYWORD with color for easier identification. This way, you can go back to those keywords and check out other things like the content you could produce and so on.

Last Thoughts

I have thoroughly explained everything about keyword research for kindle publishing because I want your publishing business to thrive. Your self-publishing career all starts here with Keyword Research. Good luck to you, publisher! Wow… and don’t forget to check the next guides…

• How Long Should A Nonfiction Book Be?
• How To Make Free Money With Amazon Ads For Kindle Publishing?