Is Book Discovery a Next Big Challenge for Publishers? Optimize Your Book on Amazon Search
Did you know that more than 600,000 books are published in the United States every year - and over 99 percent of them never see the light of day?
This is, of course, a bad nightmare for every author who has already spent months or even years in writing a book or a similar publication. Fortunately, every author can prevent this issue from happening - with the use of accurate and powerful keywords. That way, their publications will be properly optimized for the Amazon search. On top of that, the cherry picking of these magic words is proven to decrease the various promotion efforts and increases the sales of your book.
But how the use of accurate keywords can boost your book sales and where exactly do you need to use them?
The Search Algorithm That Amazon Is Using
Just like Google and Yahoo, Amazon is a search engine - however a different from the first two. Basically, people visit Amazon site with the intention of buying something. They search the items using specific keywords they already have in their mind and eventually purchase products.
Still, one of the major factors behind Amazon’s success is that it can place the right product at the right time in front of the right customers if the Amazon product is optimized with correct and relevant keywords.
So, if you have properly optimized your book’s metadata information with relevant keywords, the book description will likely show up on Amazon’s Search Engine Result Page (SERP). The more earlier pages the book appear the better will be for your book’s sales. This strategy helps you win your potential readers and is known as Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) - an online decision-making moment of possible audience who are in the condition of to buy or not to buy the product.
Some Other Tips To Have In Mind When Optimizing Your Publication On Amazon
Aside from the catchy titles and meta descriptions, every great book must have a beautiful cover, gripping description and author bio, and other relevant metadata information that makes readers buy your book. There are five major sections) of your book where you need to use the most relevant and accurate keywords, which you can change and update frequently, including:
the book title
the sub-title
the description
the reviews, and
the author name
In my brief research on Amazon books, I found that many books which are published on Amazon were with incomplete in terms of their book descriptions. Even worse, many authors had no Amazon Author Central Pages though books, making their publications empty and lacking great contents.
Luckily, Amazon allows us to use maximum number of keywords in each section - so that every publication or book becomes more discoverable on both Amazon and Google search.
How Do Readers Search For Books And Publications On Amazon
On Amazon, readers generally find your books (or any other product) in two ways:
by typing keywords in Amazon’s search bar or
by searching on Google
Book description sections on Amazon are indexed at Google, which as you probably know is a place where even 67 percent of the world’s Internet searches take place. Therefore, whenever someone types certain keywords on Google, the search query redirects them to the relevant Amazon page - obviously, if it has been optimized with the proper Amazon keywords.
In the end, there are still times when even the keywords used in the interior text—preferably in the copyright page—of the book influences the Amazon search where the ‘look inside’ feature of your book is active. Since book optimization is generally a marketing effort, collaborating with an expert who is specialized in proper Amazon book optimization and knows the book-ranking algorithm can make your book more discoverable and can bring dramatic sales.
Ram Chandra Khatri is the graduate of Book Publishing. Check his website to know more about him. http://ramchandrabooks.com/
