Establishing and refining the right keyword targeting helps your titles appear in shopping results for the right readers. It’s a surprisingly simple and powerful tool to sell more books.
Select the right keywords
There are five keyword types to consider, which range from broad to specific. It’s important to initially select words from all types and then optimize according to performance. Here we’ve used Emily Brontë’s classic, Wuthering Heights, as an example to show the types of keywords you’ll need for your books.
| Category | General | Competitive | Relevant niche genres | Author or publisher | Title-specific |
| What is it? | Select broad terms describing books and your overall category. | List titles and ASINs1 of similar books to attract likeminded readers. | Choose all genre descriptions that could apply to your books. | Engage readers interested in similar authors or publishers. | Include any terms, themes, or ASINs that are relevant to your books. |
| Examples | eBook Best Sellers, Great Authors | Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and George Eliot’s Middlemarch | 19th-Century Authors, Women Authors, Classics | Emily Brontë, Penguin Classics | Heathcliff, Catherine Earnshaw, ASIN 0141439556, the moors, jealousy |
1 Amazon Standard ID Numbers
Keep your winning keyword strategy going
Once your keywords have been running in a campaign for two weeks, check which words are performing best and which terms generate the most traffic and clicks. You’ll also want to discontinue using your lowest-performing terms.
Start with a minimum of 100 keywords for best performance.
Add new campaigns using terms related to successful keywords.
Test different keyword combinations.
Increase budget on keywords that do well