Best Practice for Keywords

Keywords and key phrases are terms used by online retailers to better understand and categorize your book. They are also essential for communicating to the marketplace what a title is about. These should be terms and phrases that potential buyers may search for, including things such as: 

• Important topics and themes from the book (e.g. Mediterranean diet, coming of age)
• Important locations or time periods from the book (e.g. Victorian era, American Southwest, War of 1812)
• Story tone, writing style, and/or genre (e.g. psychological thriller, verse novel, heartwarming romance)
• Character types and roles (e.g. strong female protagonist, immigrant kids, working mom, Jewish family)
• Format or audience notes (e.g. baby board books, coloring books, motivational books for women)
• Specific retailer product categories or subcategories that don’t have an equivalent BISAC code and for which you would like your book to rank. (These should be exact match phrases, copied directly from the retailer site.)

Below are some helpful tips on how to create good keywords and apply them to your titles.

-- Make a list of words and short phrases (long-tail keywords) you think your readers might type into a website to find you and your book. Eliminate words like "the", "an", "a", etc. 

-- The more specific the keywords, the more likely the person searching for those specific words will be able to find your book among the search results.

-- Try typing potential search terms, slowly, into Amazon and Google to find auto-complete suggestions that map to your book. Those suggestions are based on real searches by real people and can give you some good insight into what potential buyers might be looking for.  

-- Enter your list of keywords and phrases on online retailer websites to find books like yours and if those words do not return books that are like yours, try again.

-- Use the Google Keyword Search tool to help you think of other keywords for your book. Google Keyword Search will show you how popular those keywords are (volume data) and help you find keywords with lower competition. Work on this task until you have a final list of 10 to 20 words and/or phrases.

-- Return to Google Keyword Search every few months to evaluate new trends, check popularity and volume, and improve your keywords list. 

-- When submitting keywords for a title on your IngramSpark account, enter the most important keywords and phrases first, listing them in descending importance. 

-- These same top keywords and phrases should appear in your book description when possible.

-- We reccomend using at least seven keywords and key phrases, separated by semi-colons. Do not put quotation marks around the keywords.

-- There is no need to include common misspellings or simple deviations in punctuation or capitalization (e.g. You would not need to include both “Caribbean” and “Carribean” or “JK Rowling” and “j.k. Rowling”.) 

-- However, you may wish to include different versions of a word or phrase if they are each used in different contexts by consumers. This is useful for incorporating different acceptable variations of the same word into your metadata. For example, “Hanukah” and “Chanukah,”or 11“MD” and “doctor”. Or, if you have a book on great apps for iOS, you might list different Apple devices and operating systems: iPad, iPad mini, iPhone 6, iPhone 6s, etc.