SEO keyword research for your book

Lesson Details:

Video Transcription:  With this video, I want to start talking to you about SEO for Amazon this video is brought to you by Appy Pie Academy and which is basically when people search like a book or something like this and SEO has three parts to it there is the part of identifying the right keywords that your book should rank for that's called keyword research then there's the part of actually adding those keywords to your book listing and the third part is making sure that the book ranks number one when you first launch your book or the first day your target the keywords probably the book is gonna rank very low and what's gonna happen is over time you're gonna need to make your book rank higher and I'll give you a couple of examples from my books I'm not trying to promote my books these are just examples I know well so let's take a look at this mobile app marketing book as an example it's a reasonably good example because there are somewhat of a few keywords in mobile apps this is a mobile app marketing book the easiest thing to do is Amazon tells you in the article rack you can use some fancy tools we'll get to it in a second but the simplest thing to do is we can go to like mobile app and Amazon will actually tell you what people are searching you see so my app is a mobile app business book and mobile app marketing book and so mobile app development that's not a good match for me because I don't talk about development mobile app marketing that's an amazing keyword for me again development application development that's not for me a design that's not for me appraising that's not for me either marketing is for me so in my case I'm ranking number one because this is my book and this book is here because it's promoted as an ad you see this author is paying for ads right here's it's a sponsored so my book is the first organic listing and ironically you'll see that actually there's somebody who copied my book they literally took my book they even copied how the layout is for the title and the cover but I don't really care about it because they get no sales and this is essentially the de-facto book in this category but what you can also see is I kind of overdid it with the key you see in the book title mobile app marketing a modernization that's the title and that's what appears right here I have a really long subtitle for my book too long way too long it somehow works in my case but it's a little too long if I was if I was to redo it it's a little too long I would do it shorter but look at the other keywords that I'm using how do you see promote mobile apps so if anybody searches for how to promote mobile apps I'll rank and I also have the word monetization I also have the word Android and iPhone and by the way the search engines if you say monetize and monetization they will take the root word and you don't have to use every version of that word monetize monetization Amazon will know to target every variation of that word it's called stemming so see I'm targeting the word Android iPhone how to get downloads you see and it's also for business you see grow your app business so I'm targeting a lot of keywords but the truth is mobile app marketing is the main keyword and probably gets me of all the combinations of keywords it probably gets me most of the sales I also have another book which is about event marketing I want to show you that one as well because that one is a good example too if I search for event marketing my hope is that I'll be number one this is a sponsored result my result is also sponsored result this is my book but I'm advertising it and I'm second in the organic ranking and in this case it's an event book it's about putting on good events okay I used to have a event serious long time ago so I wrote a book about how to do this now in the event space there are generally three main keywords that everybody searches its event planning is one event management is one see how I have the word event and I also had the word management and the word marketing and all the other keywords are nice to have but these three keywords they generate almost all the sales so in your case how do you find more keywords or the right keywords the first thing is you just have to put yourself into the shoes of a potential person trying to discover your book try to think what would a potential satisfied happy reader what kind of things would they search now let's use the same book, for example, would they search for the word conference well if they search for the word conference or the word even if the word event the word event itself if I just put that into Kindle it's just too broad and too general we don't know what they want do they want to know about great events how their historical events do they want to know how to put on event they're gonna wanna know how to market events we don't really know anything so the specific like keywords event planning all great event planning is good for us because if we have a book about event planning and the person searching for event planning it's a matte and it's really important to have a match because if it's not a match there even if they find your book they're never gonna buy it because they're not looking for that sort of thing so you want to identify keywords and then what you want to do is confirm are these keywords getting enough of search demand how do you do that I'll show you a couple of tools before I do that of course you know that Amazon does recommend you keywords so you know these get some demand off that right off the bat so these are good now there's other ways so there's a tool called Jungle Scout this is jungle scout it is not free but they do have a free trial that you can try and it will tell you approximately how much money you can make for certain categories it's pretty helpful it's one of the industry-standard tools for researching things on Amazon and this is this goes beyond books this goes for all kinds of products if you do not want to play around with this what I actually use myself is the Google Keyword Planner and it's part of Adwords but you don't have to pay I'll show you how to use that essentially you go to google.com slash Adwords I'm just gonna search for it to make the navigation so easy for you you go here it's Google Ads and then you go sign in all Google sign-ins are from the same account so you already have a Google account you'll be able to sign in here without having to make a new account now the only word of caution is if you've never used Adwords even though the tool is going to be free that I'll show you for new users they do require that you run an ad you can literally run an ad and set up an ad for like a penny and then you'll be a user here and then you'll have no problem using this tool so here I use this tools planning and keyword planner sometimes they switch around pretty often I've seen that they switch around how to navigate to this but essentially wrench planning keyword planner you want to get to this keyword planner and the keyword planner the way I'd use it this is for Google search so even though we're researching Amazon and the searches are obviously different that way people search is different and the numbers and the volumes of searches are different but what I'm looking for is the variation of keywords and a confirmation that the keywords I am thinking about are in demand and I can most of the time correctly project that if people are searching for something on Google they're likely going to be searching for that if it's a product on Amazon for example if I search event planning or marketing let's say event marketing it's going to show on this is on Google 14,000 almost 15,000 people are searching this per month and then a lot of other searches that are related there's this experiential marketing event marketing plan okay and you can see the volume here what I'm looking for don't look at competition don't look at ad impression don't look at any of the columns to the right that pertains to Google AdWords even even competition that's not the kind of competition you might be thinking the only thing I'm looking for is the variation of keywords like event promotion actually is a good keyword you see I'm not targeting that just yet enough so what I'm looking for is variation of keywords and I can pick up some interesting longtail keywords for example event promotion was a good one and really what I'm looking for on the right side I'm looking for volume you'll ask what's an acceptable volume and I'll say well if it's sizable enough like for example this marketing conference is 2016 I don't really know even why it's 2016 because I'm recording this in 2019 so you see it's 20 so nobody is searching this an event marketing plan it's kind of like you see there's a big drop-off there are some keywords that are really we big in this field event marketing is big in this field event promotion is big in this field it's it's smaller you see it's smaller than event marketing it's secondary but it's still pretty sizable and then there's like event marketing companies the drop-off is so steep that we don't really want that and some keywords don't even make sense for us like event advertisement that's not something that people would search on Amazon marketing conference that's people looking for a marketing conference they don't need an event marketing book so some keywords the intent is just not matching our book so we ignore them but a keyword like this experiential marketing some people don't know exactly what that is I'll explain what that is the thing that makes it attractive is this big volume of search but experiential marketing really means it's a different kind of marketing it's by creating experiences for people and through those experiences promoting some products this is not event marketing invent marketing pertains to how to promote the event itself expiration marketing is how to put on an event that gives people some experience and exposure to product so this is not relevant from my niche for my book this is not a match I wouldn't target this but if I go down let's see marketing software to general doesn't even mention events so this is two general product marketing event marketing agency this is people looking for an agency not a a book so we don't need that event promotion websites you see it could be possibly a match but it's such a low volume that we don't need it so in your case what you do is you would go through this tool and you'd look up certain a number of variations notice that event planning is not something that this tool associated this with so if I do planning it will give me a whole set of other keywords so a event planner now I've an event planner can mean a little event planning notebook an event planner can mean a job like a person who plans the event so this is too broad and this is something people search on Google not necessarily on Amazon but you see event management is a huge one much bigger than event marketing was and then you've got the secondary keywords like party planner and coordinators people deserve these are searches looking for a professional event coordinator is a person a lot of these are searches for a person we don't need that so some of the keywords here will be a match a lot of them are not a match and your job is to go through a lot of ideas that you initially got from your mind and you kind of thought maybe this is a good idea for keyword and you can verify it here if indeed people are searching if not this tool will correct you and it will show you what people are searching and what people are searching and if it is still a match for your book logically if it makes sense that on Amazon people will search for the book like that then you use that you mark it down and you know that and you save it as a potential keyword and then when you're done your keyword research is done if you will have identified the top keywords people will search on Amazon to find the kind of book that you have and then you are ready to use that keep those keywords in your listing so essentially remember if you remember that I explained that SEO it has three parts of keyword research putting the keywords on the on the listing and then ranking higher this is the keyword research this is the the first part of that process this is the first phase and essentially you'll be done with this first phase after you complete this process.