Finding Keywords for Your Amazon Book Description

 

Tools and Tidbits for Writers
#toolsandtidbitsforwriters
by JQ Rose

<Red-faced> this morning when I realized this is Wednesday already! I apologize for being late in posting this article. Anyone else lose track of the week? Labor Day was Monday, a holiday. That is my excuse. It hurried the week along. I hope you'll enjoy this information about Finding Keywords for Amazon Book Descriptions originally published in 2019.

Finding Keywords for your Amazon Book Description

Keywords
Image by Wokandapix from Pixabay 

Keywords are very, very, very, very important for readers to discover your books, blogs, writings and your book descriptions at online booksellers. These words are words people type into the Google search bar to find sites/books related to what they are looking for. These words are the targets used in the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) program.

SEO is a robot (bot) that combs thru every page of every thing online. When it spots a keyword like "cozy mystery" (yes, a keyword can be more than one word and can be a "long-tail" keyword,( a string of words e.g. a cozy mystery located in Michigan), the bot recognizes it when someone types "cozy mystery" into the search box. When your keyword pops up, the SEO bot directs the searcher to your book. 

Hopefully you'll figure out that golden keyword that will bring your audience to your book. However, that is quite unlikely, so you need to have a lot of golden keywords and change them often if you can. With traditional publishing, the publisher has to do that for you. If you're an indie publisher, you can experiment with different words.

When you consider there are 8-9 million books floating around in amazon land, you need a way to let people know one of those books is yours. Keywords do that. If a mom or teacher types in "good books for girls age 12," her search will pull up my non-fiction book, Girls Succeed! Of course, it may be on page 75 of the search because Nancy Drew, the Boxcar Kids, and for some reason books about lawyers show up too. But out of 9 million books, even if you're #212 on the list, at least you have a chance someone will see your book. Reviews help you get noticed and ranked better on amazon, but that's a whole other topic.

The FREE tool I'm sharing today, Keywords Everywhere, helps you know how many folks use that keyword for searching and offers related words too. Besides the volume of people searching globally or in one specific country every month, it also tells you the CPC and the competition data.

KE explains all that jargon below.

Search Volume: This is an average of the total searches that people have performed for this keyword per month over the last 12 months. For e.g. a search volume of 1000 means that people have searched for this keyword an average of 1000 times every month for the last 12 months. 

NOTE: I choose keywords with a volume of about a1000-10000 searches. Below that means it's not used much, but again it could mean you might rank in a small niche with not as much competition. More than 10,000 searches a month means there is a LOT of competition making it more difficult to reach a good ranking.

CPC: The cost per click (CPC) is the amount that advertisers are paying for a single click for this keyword in Google Adwords.

Competition: The competition is a gauge of the number of advertisers that are running ads on Google AdWords for this specific keyword. The number goes from 0 to 1, with lower values signifying less number of advertisers and higher values signifying more advertisers.

Take a peek at how this all shakes out on your computer screen. I searched "life story writing" since I am at the moment putting together a journal for folks interested in writing life stories. 

In the screenshop above, the top left arrow is pointing to the keywords automatically generated when you type a search word(s) into the search box. Notice, next to the keywords is the information about the volume, CPC, and competition for each word.

Keywords and information from the search word box

Not only do we get these keywords, but in the image below notice the arrows on the right side of the page. More keywords that are related to the word in the search box. Plus another bonus, a section for People Also Search For with information for you. These are actually more searches done by readers.

Related keywords and People Also Search For keywords
are also available on the right side of the page!

Keywords Everywhere tool is added as an extension to your Google or Foxfire browser. Click here to discover everything you want to know about Keywords Everywhere in Chrome.

I've seen several reviews of this program and all have been favorable as a good tool for those of us just getting into researching keywords and finding that golden nugget that will put your book in front of readers. 

Do you research keywords for your title, sub-title, and book description? If so, what method do you use? If you've tried KE, please give us your opinion of it. 

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Thanks for stopping.

Indie Publishing with Draft2Digital, Girls Succeed 99 cent Promotion

Hello and welcome to the Focused on Story Blog!

Girls Succeed! by J.Q. Rose
To inspire girls

Today I am sharing my story on distributing my ebook, Girls Succeed! Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women, to readers.

I decided to offer my non-fiction book for Middle Grade girls to a wider audience, so I took it out of the exclusive amazon program KDP Select. I kept the book available at amazon, but uploaded it to a new-to-me distributor, Draft to Digital, also known as D2D. 

Now Girls Succeed! is available in many other online retailers including Apple, Nook, Kobo, Scribd, Indigo, and more. I also like having a Universal Link that allows a reader to click on it and see ALL the places where my ebook is available and not just as a Kindle format. Click here to see what I mean about the universal link.

When the e-book first came out in 2012, I placed it at amazon and Smashwords. I had a "hen" of a time getting SW to accept it because the formatting for the Table of Contents was incorrect. I spent hours and hours of time trying to get it right. I followed Mark Coker's guide book to the tee, I thought, and still had to do the ToC over and over. Finally it was accepted with no guidance from SW.

Later I took it out of SW and did the exclusive amazon plan because of the great opportunities for promotion. When I determined I may be missing many readers by having the amazon only association, I again uploaded my updated manuscript to SW. I received the bad news it wasn't accepted. When I checked the evaluation, there was a bunch of gibberish as to what was wrong. It was way over my head and I could only think about how much time and energy I had spent trying to fix it the first time.

I turned to D2D to see if I could get the ms accepted there. Then the dreaded message came back from D2D--"Apple has rejected Girls Succeed! Stories Behind the Careers of Successful Women." I felt like throwing up my hands and saying "fuhgetaboutit." But along with the message D2D who formats your manuscript for free, added this 

"Incomplete/Inaccurate iBooks-Generated Table of Contents

- Please provide a complete, accurate listing of all chapters or sections in the iBooks-generated table of contents.

Please let us know if you have any questions.

Questions? They actually wanted me to ask questions? So I sent the listing of the chapters. Crystal from D2D answered me with this information about the ToC format.

Hello,

The reason it's rejected is that when you convert your book with our conversion tool, in order to create a proper ToC within the epub file (which is required by Apple) it has to read the one in your file. I see that you have your own linked Table of Contents (ToC) in the file. However, when you linked the file you did not link the entire list. Our conversion tool will look for the phrase or word Table of Contents or Contents.  Once it sees this it will consider every link after to be part of the ToC.  Once the conversion tool sees unlinked text it sees the list as being done and assumes that the rest is not related to the ToC in the file. 

In order to fix this you simply need to link the entire line for each entry instead of only a partial line or remove the unlinked text altogether. 

After a few more messages between Crystal and me, I sent her what I wanted the ToC to look like, not just Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, but to include the woman's name and her career in the title of the chapter about her. Crystal offered to format it for me. I asked what the charge would be and she said no charge. I would've hugged her if I could have!! 

Big hugs for Crystal of Draft 2 Digital

What a relief to have her do it for me. And she did! then sent the complete ms with the new formatting for the ToC to me so I could upload the corrected ebook file. Now when the reader clicks on the Universal Link, they can order a copy from Apple too!

So I must say, D2D's customer service is top rated in my estimation. And I want to add, all these messages flying back and forth between Crystal and me were done in just a few days. Crystal promptly responded with the solution each time.

If you are an indie publisher, what distributor do you use? Are you exclusively in amazon to use their promotions? Aren't I full of questions? Now you know how Crystal must've felt. LOL. 

****

If you have the time or the curiosity, you're invited to pop on over to the Girls Succeed Blog. Click here to visit.

99 Cent Book promotion

With my new opportunities to offer the Girls Succeed book to a wider audience, I ran a 99 cent promotion Sept 28-October 9. Originally the ebook including a reader's guide sold for $3.99. I'll report on the success or non-success of that experience once I get all my info together.

BTW--the ebook is available now at $2.99 and you can take a look at it and even purchase it to inspire a girl in your life here. Or if you would consider leaving a review, I would be happy to send you the PDF copy of the book FREE!

Thank you for stopping by.