Let's face it, doing keyword research for your book can be incredibly tedious. But, as all authors know, getting your book's keywords right, is extremely important.
Get them wrong, and no matter how great your book is, Amazon won't know how to show it on their store, and shoppers will miss out.
So, because of this, authors have had to spend time researching what keywords to use: searching for phrases that both describe their book and are actively searched for by shoppers, verifying that they are good ones, and ensuring they aren't too competitive.
All for the sake of trying to find what keywords will work.
Wouldn't it just be nice if you could be told what keywords did work for another book? Which phrases helped a similar book to yours make their sales?
Well now you can. Thanks to a new feature, authors now have the ability to look at another books keywords, and find the best one for their book – taking out the tedious research, and guessing.
So, in this article, I'll help you to understand what Reverse ASIN is, and how authors can effectively us this tactic for their books.
- What impacts your book’s visibility on KDP.
- What Publisher Rocket’s Reverse ASIN Lookup is and how it works.
- The importance of effective keyword research for increasing your book’s visibility and sales.
- How to identify high-performing keywords from competitors using Reverse ASIN Lookup.
- Best practices for choosing the right keywords for your book.
- Step-by-step guidance on optimizing your Amazon ads and metadata using keyword insights.
- Common questions when using the Reverse ASIN Feature.
Table of contents
Before We Discuss Reverse ASIN…
Let's talk about how Amazon looks at your books information (metadata) and decides where to put your book – this will help fully understand how Reverse ASIN works.
Now we all know about our 7 KDP keyword boxes – where we enter in our target phrases or words that we want our book to rank for. However, Amazon doesn't just look at these. They look at things like your title, subtitle, book description, selected categories and author name. While there are other things as well that they look at, those are the major ones.
And once they have all that information, Amazon's search algorithm gets to work coming up with a list of phrases and words they “WILL” show your book for. Sometimes its what you specifically targeted, and sometimes it something else…or more. Basically, Amazon has made ‘their' call and starts ranking and listing books.
Publisher Rocket's Reverse ASIN Explained
So, what's an author to do when trying to find this information?
In the past, authors would have to play a guess and wait game, trying to figure out where Amazon might place their book after it's been published. Doing this looses valuable sales and requires even more time spent on marketing rather then writing.
Now, just by knowing a few of your competitors you can quickly find many relevant keywords to use within your 7 KDP keywords. No longer having to worry about Amazon misunderstanding your book's context.
Let's jump in and see how this works.
How to Choose Keywords with the Reverse ASIN Feature
To get started using Publisher Rocket's Reverse ASIN feature, you will need to know a few similar books to your own. This step is key, as only using books within the same broad genre won't help you find those key keywords to really boost your sales.
You will also want to make sure these books aren't fresh and have a decent amount of reviews, as this will help provide more valuable results. In order for Amazon to have relevant keyword data, the books need to be actively searched for and have had time to be indexed by their algorithm. Otherwise you may notice that Amazon doesn't have much to report and you head back to the drawing board.
Once you've found about 10 different books to fit this criteria, copy their ASINs so as to paste them into Publisher Rocket. Rocket will get to work finding exactly what keywords shoppers have typed into Amazon with that book being shown within the top 10.
You'll then see the average sales per month of all of the top books ranked within this keyword or phrase. The estimated searches per month of shoppers using that keyword. And finally the Competition Score which compiles all of the data above plus more that Rocket has gathered over the years to provide a realistic score on how easy, or hard, it would be to have your book ranked with this keyword. Anything less then a 70 competition score and has over 300 searches per month is going to get added to our list.
You can also go ahead and export this data by choosing to Export All or Export Analyzed. Allowing you to come back and refer to your lists later on as you pick out your 7 kindle keywords.
CaseStudy: (Non-Fiction)
Now that you have a better understanding of why knowing what Amazon sees is important, how to find similar books to your own, and what data you should be referring to, let's go through an example.
Let's first provide some background on the book we are looking to find 7 KDP Keywords for. The book is a NonFiction about learning to write better. The book's target market is aspiring writers, students, and anyone interested in improving their writing skills. Covering the many aspects of writing to include the importance of voice and tone, the value of rewrites and the many challenges that come with different genres and styles of writing.
A few books we are going to analyze, as they are similar in context, are:
On Writing Well by William Zinsser
The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century by Steven Pinker
How to Write Nonfiction & Memoir by Derek Murphy
The first ASIN we are going to input into Publisher Rocket is “On Writing Well” – ASIN B0090RVGW0. Rocket pulled over 250 different keywords this book has ranked for within the top 10 at some point since published. Not all of them are suited for my book but there were a few that are a perfect fit with greater than 300 searches per month and fairly low competitive scores. Saving these, I'm going to keep doing some research on other similar books and see if I can find a few more.
The next book, “The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century” – ASIN B00INIYG74. Although there weren't as many keywords that Amazon has collected over the years, we were still able to find a keyword phrases that was worth saving on our list.
Moving along to “How to Write Clearly” – ASIN B09B1BBK61. Going through this book's keywords was interesting to investigate. As you can see they used their own book title and although the average sales aren't as high as others, the searches and competition score fits within our criteria. Using my strategy on choosing your 7 kindle keywords, I am going to save this phrase for a secondary keyword box and maybe try finding other short relevant keywords to fill up my 50 character limit.
Moving down, we then see the book title for a competitors book and has much better data numbers. Keep in mind using other book titles can be considered against Amazon's guidelines, if done in a misleading way. In this case, these are similar to normal search terms so, we can still use them and avoid having Amazon reject them.
And that is it, after going through many books, checking their keywords, categories and using Rocket's Keyword Feature, I was able to create a list of 7 Kindle Keywords:
Can I use this on my already Published Book?
Yes, and as a matter of fact, I highly recommend it.
By taking your own ASIN and putting it into the Reverse ASIN feature, you can see what Amazon saw.
Remember above where we talked about Amazon looking at all the metadata and making decisions? Well, sometimes they get things wrong. Sometimes they see something weird, and they start making conflicting moves – showing your book in places it shouldn't be.
Conflicting metadata can cause your book to be placed within irrelevant keywords and categories. For example, let's say you have a romance and include phrases like, “giving love a chance” or “like the roll of a dice she left her night up to fate”. Taking chance, dice and fate out of context could give Amazon the impression this book has something to do about gambling. And so, Amazon might start including this book in gambling type places on their store.
See what I'm saying?
Now, if this is you, you may not be getting your book placed in front of the right shoppers. Therefore not making sales or even worse, unhappy reviews from shoppers expecting to read about something different.
That's why, having the ability to see exactly what Amazon sees is ideal to knowing whether or not you are creating the proper metadata.
Now, once you've identified an issue with your book – where it seems to be showing for many keywords in a wrong way, you need to take a deep look into your description, categories, and 7 KDP keywords and make the appropriate changes. By doing this, you will help improve how Amazon looks at your book, and they will show it more strongly in the places you desire.
So, check out your own book's record, and start improving it with key changes. This can really help – even if your book has been published for a long while.
Reverse ASIN FAQ
What exactly are the keywords shown in the Reverse ASIN Feature?
The keywords shown within the Reverse ASIN Feature are keywords that a book has ranked for within the top ten for Amazon, at any time in the past. This could be within the past few days or even currently being ranked for. These are not always the 7 kindle keywords that the author typed into Amazon, as that information is only available to the author. But even better is that these are the exact keywords the book shows up for in the Amazon store and knowing this gives you an inside peek of what keywords are actually doing the work and making the sales.
Why am I seeing keywords that have nothing to do with this book?
You may notice in some cases there are keywords that appear to be very irrelevant to the book itself. Like a cozy coffeehouse romance getting placed within thriller murder mystery keywords and categories…This is because Amazon decides what keywords a book should appear for in their store and it can't always understand what a book is actually about. To figure out where a book should be placed, Amazon's algorithm looks at all the information about your book: your keywords, title, subtitle, author name, book description, categories, etc. From there, it takes a guess at what might fit best. After several rounds of testing there may have been a few instances where they don't get it quite right.
Going back to the cozy romance, if you use words like “she took a shot at love”, “hear racing while waiting for his response”, and “who was this mystery man” – Amazon might think it's related to the keyword “thriller murder mystery” as they took a few words out of context. So, in this case, Amazon really got the keyword wrong – but the book still appeared at one point in the top ten for this.
Keep in mind, just because this happens, doesn't mean the book stayed within the top ten for long. Amazon usually sees that that was a bad move, and most of the time quickly removes the book from the phrase. Seeing shoppers completely ignore and not engage is a quick sign to Amazon something is off.
So, why does Rocket keep those non-relevant words within the search results?
Well, if it's your own book, seeing these results gives you key insights on how Amazon views your metadata. After all, you would want to know if Amazon is promoting your book for the wrong keywords and try to do something about it, right? If it's someone else's book, you can just skip over and ignore those as they are irrelevant to your research.
Why is it that I see a bunch of keywords for the ebook version of my book, but not the paperback? Or vice-versa?
Amazon knows what version of your book sells the best – so when they show your book in search, they actually choose the format that readers are most likely to buy. If that's the ebook version, then they'll show the ebook more within results over the print. Therefore, adding to the keyword list of ebook results rather then the print.
With this data you can tell which format of a book Amazon is actively promoting. And when doing your research within the Reverse ASIN feature, you may want to try the other format and see if the quantity of results varies.
Why are there keywords that go against Amazon's guidelines?
As Publisher Rocket is showing you exactly what shoppers are typing into Amazon, you are going to see words and phrases that Amazon's states we can't use within our 7 kindle keyword boxes. Phrases like “Best-Selling” or “KDP” aren't phrases that we can actively place within our boxes but shoppers are still going to search for them. Amazon chooses what books should and shouldn't appear when phrases like this are searched, therefore expanding upon what keywords you have already chosen.
To ensure you are following Amazon's keyword guidelines, be sure to check out the Help Forum, here.
How come this popular book is only showing for a few keywords?
There are a few factors that can affect how many keywords appear for a book.
- The book is brand new (a few weeks old): The data may still be working through Amazon's systems. So, giving newer books a bit of time will help Rocket gather more data as more keywords trickle in.
- The book is getting sales from outside sources: Some of the more popular books written by authors with a big following, a large mailing list or active socials, might mean users are finding this book by clicking a direct links rather than searching for it. Therefore it's still going to do well in the Amazon store but not provide much valuable keyword data.
- The author is very well known: If the book is by a popular author, readers might be finding it simply by searching for that author's name or specifically the title of that book. Rather then searching for keyword phrases. So, if the author has enough notoriety, it can still be a very popular book without having strong keywords about its subject matter.
And there you have it. Remember, the key to success on Amazon is continuous learning and adaptation. Keep experimenting, tracking your results, and refining your approach. With persistence and the right tools, you can achieve remarkable success in the world of self-publishing.
Happy researching, and even happier selling!