I’ve seen many authors ask about what they should do with the seven keyword boxes that comes up during the publishing process. Dave at Kindlepreneur ran an experiment where he asked for several authors’ keywords lists, ran a search crawl, asked them to change them, then ran the search crawl again.
Here is his published results:
https://kindlepreneur.com/7-kindle-keywords/
Summary:
- Singular or plural doesn’t matter
- Don’t use commas since that will cut off anything past the comma from indexing
- Only use quotes if you want the thing in quotes to be the exact thing someone has to type in
- Don’t repeat words unless they make sense in a key phrase
- You don’t get punished or rewarded for dupes, but they take up space
- Words or phrases by themselves in the box have more weight – so if you have something that really describes your book, give it its own box
- Every word and combination of words in each box will be indexed
- However, Amazon will chuck combinations that make no sense (basically, ones that have never been used)
- A keyword in the title or subtitle has more weight than the words in these boxes
Finding Keywords
Now that you know how to populate the keyword fields, you might next question how to come up with words to put in there.
Have you ever used the Amazon search to find something? If so, then you know it brings up a dropdown of suggested autofill words based on previous search results. You can use that functionality to find keywords.
Type the following and record what appears in the dropdown suggestions:
fantasy
fantasy a
fantasy b
fantasy c
…
fantasy z
By doing this for each letter and then various phrases, you can fill out a spreadsheet list worth of keywords that others have used to find stuff related to fantasy.
This Kindlepreneur article shows a visual on how to do this before Dave Chesson goes into his Rocket sales pitch:
https://kindlepreneur.com/how-to-choose-kindle-keywords/
I’ve purchased his Rocket tool which works very well. However, there is a completely free, no-strings-attached tool you can use to automatically generate these and save yourself from the mind-numbing chore:
https://publishingwithlove.com/amazon-kindle-keyword-research-tool/