Regardless of whether this is your 1st or 101st book, knowing how to make the most out of Kindle Direct Publishing keywords is an absolute must.

These few chosen words will make the difference between your book not coming up at all or your book being presented to thousands of starving readers ready to devour every last word of your story. 

Essentially, keywords are what you will use to help your book get discovered. In terms of marketing, it really is your very best friend.

It means that you won’t have to implement major marketing strategies that are complex and complicated. Instead, it’s nice and easy. 

But just because this can be an effortless marketing strategy doesn’t mean that it isn’t a vital and pivotal one. You will need to select these few chosen words with the utmost care and deep meaningful intentions. 

Want to learn to make the most out of the keywords on KDP? Then keep reading! 

How Many Keywords Do You Have For Amazon KDP? 

Okay, so let’s start off by answering the first question at hand. How many keywords will you need to select? 

The answer is seven. 

When you open up your KDP dashboard, you’ll be given the option to fill out 7 kindle keywords. Each keyword can contain a maximum of 50 characters. 

Now, as I’ve mentioned, you’ll want to choose these keywords pretty carefully. So, to enable you to make the right decision with your keywords, we’re going to delve a little deeper into what these keywords are and how to go about choosing them. 

What Are Kindle Keywords & How Do They Sell Books? 

So, Kindle keywords are essentially the words that any reader might type into the search bar when they are looking for a new title to read. Therefore, authors should see them as words that are going to increase their reach. 

You want to be choosing the words you think best describe your book so that when customers type these words into their search engine your results will show up. 

This is a fierce competition and you’ll need to keep in mind that it is usually the top 3 to 4 results that will have the best chance at a sale. 

As you can see, these seven words will actually be very important. In fact, they can be make or break in terms of your sales. So finding profitable keywords is a must. Let’s look at how you can go about this now. 

How To Find Profitable KDP Keywords

You may be wondering what a profitable keyword actually is. Well, I’ll tell you. A profitable keyword is a word or phrase that: 

• Shoppers actually type into Amazon
• Shoppers are proven to spend money on 
• Doesn’t have an overly competitive or saturated market.

Now that you know what they are, your next question might be how do you find them?  Well, there are three main options to choose from. Let’s check them out now. 

1. Find The Most Searched Amazon Book Words

If you want to choose keywords that customers are regularly searching for, you’re going to have to go out and find them. Otherwise, you might end up choosing words that rarely get searched for and you’ll have near enough no reach at all. 

Thankfully, this isn’t anywhere near as difficult as you’d expect. Amazon has this handy function where their search bar will guess what you are going to type in based on the popularity of particular keywords other shoppers are searching for.

This is known as the autofill function. Taking a look at this function helps you get a great understanding of what readers are regularly searching for. Here’s how to go about using this function for your own benefit. 

1. Incognito – You’ll want to turn on Incognito mode on your browser first. This will ensure that any previous searches of your own don’t affect what Amazon will bring up. 
2. Go To Amazon Books – Next, you’ll want to make your way to the Kindle Store or the Books category on Amazon. This is so everything relates to book sales and you don’t get shown other keywords for different industries. 
3. Start Typing – From there you can start to type in any word and see what Amazon prepopulates in the search box. 
4. Keep Your Eyes Peeled – Play around with a variety of different words and then once you find a phrase that you think applies to your book add a different letter of the alphabet after each word or phrase and see what it generates. 

For example, you could type in ‘Romance Novel’ and then type in ‘Romance Novel a’ then try b, and c, and so on. And let me tell you this, you may be quite surprised at what pops up. 

Please Note – Some keywords may violate Amazon’s Keyword Requirements even if they come up in the search box. So be sure to double-check them against the ‘Keywords to Avoid’ section before committing to your final selection. 

2. Find Key Words That Shoppers Will Actually Pay For

The next thing you need to check is that just because customers are searching for keywords doesn’t automatically mean that they are purchasing them.

Some keywords will have high search numbers but low sale numbers and this is something you’ll want to avoid. Let’s take a look at how you can check if keywords are actually leading to sales. 

• Search – Start off by searching your keyword on Amazon books. Then click on the top three titles that show for that search. 
• ABSR – Next, you’ll need to go to their Amazon Best Seller Rank and copy and paste it into Kindle Calculator where it will estimate the sales of the book for that day. 
• Think – If the top-rated books for that search aren’t generating high sales it is safe to say that either people aren’t searching for that keyword all that often or people have searched the keyword and not found what they were hoping for. 

3. Check The Competition 

You can choose a keyword that people are searching for and purchasing, but if you aren’t showing up in the top results, then it’s unlikely that you’ll make many sales.

People don’t tend to flick through page after page, they’ll find something that takes their attention away pretty quickly. To bump yourself up, you’ll first want to check out the competition and keep the following advice in mind.

• Book Cover – You’ll want a eye-catching cover for your book that draws people in. Try to make it better than the results that are already coming up. 
• Titles & Subtitles – Do they have the keyword in their titles or subtitles? How are they using them to their advantage? Steal what’s working well. 
• Reviews – How many book reviews do they have? Can you match the competition? 
• Book Descriptions – These are super important. How are the competition’s descriptions written and formatted? What style is popular? Implement the positives into your work. 

Final Thoughts 

Amazon KDP allows each author to select seven keywords for their books. And as we have learned from this article, these are incredibly important.

Ensure that you do the necessary research before selection to make sure you reach your maximum potential and sales.