Amazon Categories and Keywords
If you’ve been reading my recent blog posts you’ll have seen I’m focused on updating and optimizing my Amazon Categories and Keywords.
Before I started this journey I was a bit skeptical about the impact changing a category could have on my book, but I’m going to share a case study of one of my Category and keyword tweaks so that you can see the benefit of spending time and effort to find the most relevant and lucrative categories for your book.
I write travel guides for independent travelers on a budget who want to explore off the beaten path locations, avoid tourist traps, and immerse themselves in the culture and rhythm of daily life. Even though I’d spent time and effort identifying my target audience to compile the content that went into my travel guide, I didn’t put the same amount of effort when it came to choosing my keywords and tags. I was in so much of a rush to get my book published and start writing my next one, that I didn’t pay enough attention to the elements that would help readers discover my book.
A Mailing List is a good start – but not enough
I did do some things right. My Gumusluk guide was the second one in my Turkey Travel Guide series, and I’d been building my mailing list when I started my website, before I’d even published my first guide.
But a mailing list will only take you so far. The list has a limited reach and what I needed to do was to tap into the millions of visitors to Amazon’s website.
Rethinking Budget Travel Category
Up until this point I’d thought that this budget travel category and keywords were my best chance of getting my Gumusluk travel guide into the top ten position of the category, and although I need to be in this category, I realized I had to explore other categories and see if I could find other ones where I had a chance of getting noticed.
The biggest challenge is that I write in a narrow niche. It’s a:
- Travel Guide
- For Turkey
- For Independent Travelers
I’m never going to sell thousands of books—it’s a narrow niche. But my travel guides are just a small (but essential) part of my author brand. It’s time to update this guide and I’ve been wondering if it’s worth the research time to update it.
My US Amazon Categories
You can choose two categories when you set up your book, but you can request to be added to up to ten. When I set up my book I added them to these two popular categories:
They’re both relevant for my travel guide, but they’re extremely broad and competitive.
Budget Travel Category and Keyword Research
Category Search Amazon US: Budget Travel (Publisher Rocket)
As you can see in the overview of the Budget Travel category I’d need to sell three e-books a day to get into the Top 10 and ten books a day to reach #1.
Keyword Search Amazon US: Budget Travel (Publisher Rocket)
Of all the relevant keywords I could use for my book, most of them have less than a 100 searches per month. But the keyword: Budget Travel Guide looks like the best option. It has the highest earning potential ($32k) with a low competitive score (20).
And according Amazon Decoded, the way Amazon keywords work is that if I use Budget Travel Guide Books as one of my categories, it’ll also use that to create a combination of other potential keywords (including Budget Travel, Travel Guide, Budget Guide, Budget Travel Books, etc.). So by choosing this three-word keyword as on of my book’s seven available keywords, I can cover the three keyword categories that I’m targeting.
Keyword Search Amazon US: Budget Travel (KDSpy)
I hopped over over to my browser tool, KDSpy, which is the closest comparable tool to Publisher Rocket, and their analysis of this keyword shows that it isn’t very popular (same as Rocket), has low earning potential, and there’s lots of competition for this keyword.
You can view a word cloud of the top words used in Best Seller titles, and if I hadn’t already published my book and I wanted to try to dominate this niche, this is a useful view of keywords to include in the title.
There’s nothing revolutionary in these results. Budget Travel Guide may be a competitive category, but if you’re writing a budget travel guide you’ll need to include it in your metadata to make sure your target audience is aware of your book’s content. When you have to target a competitive category like this one, it’s vital that you leverage all 10 categories available to you, and don’t just focus on the two you’re able to choose during the title set up process in your KDP dashboard.
It's time to take a look at your Amazon categories to make sure your book is discoverable. #indieauthor #selfpub Click To TweetCheck out this other article about Amazon Categories
I am really impressed that you put together good and useful information on researching the budget travel guide. Thanks, Keep sharing.
This article is quite interesting, in my opinion! It serves as a fantastic reminder of how crucial careful keyword research is for a book’s visibility on Amazon.