The significance of keyword research in determining your success with Amazon KDP cannot be overstated. Regardless of the excellent books you may produce and publish, without effective targeting of appropriate keywords, you risk squandering a lot of time.
For that, you have to do keyword research, and you have to do it in the right way.
In this article, we are going to demonstrate the best way to find profitable keywords for low-content books by using free tools. We are also going to discuss the best premium keyword research tool at the end of this article.
But before that, let’s discuss what Amazon KDP is and why keyword research is important.
Some Quick Resources:
- Book Bolt – Best All-In-One KDP Tool
- Publisher Rocket – Best Advanced KDP Keyword Research Tool
- Creative Fabrica – Best KDP Interiors & Graphics
What Is Amazon KDP?
Amazon KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) is a platform allowing you to self-publish paperbacks, hardcovers, and ebooks to Amazon’s marketplace.
The great thing about this platform is that it doesn’t charge anything for uploading books, so every artist and creator can start a book publishing business at no cost.
The platform allows creators to easily distribute their books worldwide while taking care of the manufacturing and shipping processes, and that is what makes this business model attractively passive for many entrepreneurs.
Once you publish your paperback books and make a sale, Amazon prints and ships them to your customers, and you will be paid the royalties. As for low-content (paperback) books, Amazon offers 60% royalties of the original sale price, and the rest will go for printing costs.
Why Keyword Research Is Important?
Before we get into keyword research and its importance, let’s talk about what keywords are.
Keywords are the terms that people use on search engines to find what they are looking for. In our scenario, people use keywords on Amazon to find the book they need, and you need to make sure that your book appears for those keywords.
There are general short-tail keywords that typically consist of one or two words, and there are specific long-tail keywords that include 3 or more words.
The general keywords are going to be used more often than the specific keywords, however, they will typically have more competition, and it is going to be harder to rank for them. Therefore, as you start, it’s always better to go for long-tail keywords that are not that popular but have less competition.
The ultimate goal of doing keyword research is to find searchable keywords that you could appear for on the first page of the Amazon search results, and you are more likely to achieve that with long-tail specific keywords.
The importance of keyword research is critical.
As a KDP publisher, your main job taking most of your time and effort is creating the books. But if the customers won’t be able to find them due to incorrectly targeted keywords, then things will get frustrating and you will be very likely to quit.
For this reason, you need to take the time to do the keyword research correctly, and we will show you how it’s done.
How To Do KDP Keyword Research For Low Content Books:
The KDP keyword research process consists of 3 equally important parts – choosing the right niche, getting keyword ideas, and analyzing the keyword competition.
Let’s discuss them all in detail:
1. Choosing A Niche
Every low-content book niche has its own principles, and choosing and sticking to a particular niche not only ensures that you nail those principles but also demonstrate authority as a publisher.
For this reason, you can see many authors on Amazon who only focus on one particular niche, and by that, they are more capable to produce high-quality books. In fact, often these authors even incorporate their niches into their pen names.
While most beginners will choose a niche that requires less effort to produce books in, the real success hides in more difficult niches, like coloring books, activity books, etc. It’s because the more complex the book is, the fewer people are likely to produce them. Also, books that require more work to create can be priced higher, so tapping into more difficult niches is always worth it.
But the most important thing is to choose the niche that most interests you, and by that, you will more likely to be productive and consistent.
Here are examples of the most popular and profitable low-content book niches:
- Journals
- Planners
- Log Books
- Sketch Books
- Math Books
- Handwriting books
- Coloring Books
- Puzzle Books
- Workbooks
There can be plenty of sub-categories of these low-content books and there can be hundreds of other niches too.
See also: 50+ Profitable Low Content Book Niches
2. Getting Keyword Ideas
The books we have just mentioned are general books that reflect general keywords. In this process, the goal is to get plenty of specific keywords relevant to your chosen niche, and the best way to do that is by looking at Amazon’s autosuggest tab.
Let’s say we have picked a coloring book niche and we type that on Amazon.
The autosuggest will populate the most popular keyphrases that are used by customers, but the problem is that it will only display 11 suggestions, and not all of them are even relevant to us.
Luckily there are free tools that could expand this suggestion list and give us way more specific keyword ideas. One of the best tools to use in this process is a Google Chrome extension called the Suggestion Expander Tool by Self Publishing Titans
As you can see the suggestion expander tool provided a way bigger list of searchable long-tail keywords. You can conveniently download these keywords into a spreadsheet, and if you want more ideas you can add the modifier at the end for the low content book type such as the term “for”, color, style, etc.
The main goal of this process is to come up with as many relevant specific keywords as possible so you can later analyze them individually.
While Self-Publishing Titans provides a free opportunity to do keyword research, this tool isn’t perfect and there can be better free & paid options available out there. To find out more KDP keyword research tools, make sure you read our article on the best KDP keyword research tools
3. Keyword Analysis
Keyword analysis will be the most challenging and time-consuming part as you will have to carefully go through each keyword to ensure it has the potential to rank. However, it is definitely a worthy process, which will have a fundamental impact on your success, so make sure to do it right.
The premium tools, like Book Bolt, which we will discuss later, does a fantastic job when it comes to keyword research for low-content books. However, there are also some good free tools, which you can rely on if you don’t have a budget to invest.
The best free KDP keyword research tool you can come across today is another Google Chrome extension by Self Publishing Titans – KDP / Amazon BSR & Keyword Research SEO Tool. While this tool is not perfect, it can fetch some important data that is not visible to the naked eye.
To start, turn on the extension and type in one of the keywords from your list in Amazon’s search bar. Note that we are looking at the results from a customer’s perspective so you want to run a search on ALL Amazon’s departments instead of the book department.
Once you run a search, our keyword research tool will extract the data from the search results, such as an average number of results, BSR, etc, and your goal is to make sure that the keyword matches all criteria.
Here’s what all this data mean, and what metrics you should be aiming for.
- Total Results: The goal is to find specific keywords that do not bring a lot of results. To avoid competitive keywords it’s recommended to focus on keywords that bring less than 2,000 results.
- Best Seller Rank (BSR): This is a very important metric, which indicates the popularity of a niche. Every book that sells on Amazon has a Best Seller Rank, and the more book is selling, the lower the rank will be. The keyword research tool calculates the average best-seller rank of books displayed for each keyword. To make sure that the keyword is searchable enough by the customers, it’s best to focus on an average BSR of lower than 300,000.
- Reviews: If the keyword brings books on the first page with too many reviews, it might be hard to compete with these books. The fewer reviews books will have – the better, and it’s best to focus on keywords that bring listings with under 2,000 reviews on average.
- Price: As mentioned, Amazon will take the printing costs of your sale price, so the higher you will sell a book for, the bigger royalties you will make. Seeing similar books listed at higher prices gives you a good reason to do the same, therefore it’s best to focus on keywords that return an average price of 7$ or more. However, this metric is the least important, and you can still make money from the books priced lower if you manage to pull a higher sales volume.
- Keyword Niche Score: it is the overall score given to the keyword by taking all metrics into account. Since not all the criteria are super important for this tool, the keyword score does not have to be perfect. However, try to aim for a keyword score of 50 or above.
Besides the numbers that you should follow when doing keyword research with this tool, there are a couple of other common sense factors that you should consider:
- Check if there are any recently published books for that keyword on the first page. If you see some new books, it means that you could also rank your book on the first page quickly.
- By typing in your specific keyword, you should also see some books with similar titles. If there’s nothing much similar, it could mean that the keyword is not relevant, and no one is searching for it.
Apart from these two very helpful keyword research extensions, Self Publishing Titans offer some more free useful tools and resources, including:
- Amazon KDP Niche Finder
- BSR Sales Calculator
- Royalty Calculator
- Pen Name Generator
- QR Code Generator
- Book Category Finder
- Free Courses
- and more…
In addition, the platform also gives away over 100 free done-for-you KDP interior packs for all kinds of books. Those you can easily edit and use for your book creation.
See also: Best Sources To Download KDP Interiors
The Better Way To Do Keyword Research:
As mentioned, free keyword research tools are good for a low-budget start, but they are not the most accurate and lack some essential features. The best way to do KDP keyword research is with a premium keyword and niche research tool called Book Bolt.
Book Bolt is a fantastic and very affordable Amazon KDP tool for not only keyword analysis but also book creation. In terms of keyword research, Book Bolt has some powerful features to accurately detect profitable niches, and carefully analyze keywords.
It also allows you to spy on your competitors and steal the keyphrases that generate sales. Basically, this tool has everything that Self Publishing Titans extensions have, plus a lot more.
Here’s all that Book Bolt offers:
- Advanced keyword and competition analysis with in-depth insights
- Product database with 5 million titles and trend hunter to easily find emerging niches
- +100 interior templates that you can export and use in any size or page count
- Book cover & interior design studio with 1000s of free fonts, images & illustrations
- Puzzle book generator to create activity, sudoku, coloring, and many other books
- Listing optimization feature that allows to easily optimize listings for the best search visibility
- AND MORE
If you decide to invest a little bit into the Amazon KDP business, Book Bolt can be the only software you need as it has everything in one place. It is also quite affordable, since the pricing is only $9.99 a month, with a 3-day free trial.
Here’s a full tutorial on how to use Book Bolt: