Finding out Which Keywords People Are Searching (Part III: Keywords for Authors Series)
In the last section, Choosing Keywords That Describe Your Book, you brainstormed a list of terms, or keywords, you think people would use to describe your book. I hope you also had a chance to get input from others as well. Now that you have a list, we’re going to spend some time figuring out which terms are searched for more frequently.
There are a few tools online you can use to do this. They’re able to tell how many times keywords are being searched. Here are a couple free places you can check:
A nice tool that gives you results from Wordtracker (they specialize in mining the search engines to see what’s being searched most often) and Overture (a search engine advertising company). Usually, you have to pay to use Wordtracker, but through that link, it’s free.
This is a resource for folks wishing to advertise with Google’s Adwords program, but it’s free, and there’s no reason you can’t use it to an idea which keywords are searched more often. Make sure to select display results by “keyword search volume” in the drop-down box (this is the default setting).
You can use one or both of these sites to type in the keywords on your list. The first site will give you numbers telling you how often the terms are being searched, and the second site will give you a little bar graph and lots of synonyms for your keywords. Google’s site is a little easier to use, in my opinion, and you can also look up all your words at once.
Specific numbers aren’t that important. You really just want to get an idea of which terms are being searched most often.
Here’s the list I came up with on the previous post:
fantasy novel
fantasy book
epic fantasy
swords and sorcery
best fantasy books
fantasy adventure
new fantasy authors
When I entered these keywords into the research tools, I found out “fantasy adventure” is most widely searched, coming in slightly higher than “fantasy book” and “fantasy books.” Next came “fantasy fiction” and “fantasy fiction books” (which weren’t even on my list but would make good keywords). “Best fantasy books” is further down the list as is “epic fantasy.” “Sword and sorcery” is way down (alas, the golden age of swords & sorcery seems to have passed). “New fantasy authors” was almost at the bottom, meaning hardly anyone uses that term to search.
After you’ve noted which of your keywords is most popular, it’s time to choose the best one to target in order to bring traffic to your site and sell your book. (Don’t throw away the list, though, because you can actually target different keywords on different pages of your site. If it were me, I’d build a page on my site for each of the top 10 or 20 relevant keywords, but we’ll talk more about that another day).
You don’t necessarily want to choose a keyword just because it was searched for the most times. Before you commit yourself, it’s a good idea to check out the competition.
Go to Google and type in those keywords yourself. See what kind of websites come up. Are the first few results high-quality pages that are updated frequently? Are they corporate run? Are they loaded with useful information? It can be tough for a one-author operation to dislodge “authority” sites without lots and lots of work. You may get more bang for your luck by targeting the next term on your list, or the one after that.
This is because your ultimate goal is to get your site listed on the first page and within the top few spots on the search engine results for your keyword. Statistics show that most people don’t scroll down much less look to the second and third pages of the results. If they find what they’re looking for before they get to the link to your site, you’re out of luck.
I was pleased when I typed in “fantasy adventure” because there wasn’t very stiff competition at the top. The first result was some one-page site on a free server that hadn’t been updated since 2001. The second result was a link to an obscure product on Amazon. I could get my site to number 1 for “fantasy adventure” almost without trying. There’s something to consider before I start frothing at the mouth though.
“Fantasy adventure” is a little ambiguous. Remember, in this example, I’m trying to promote my fantasy novel. People typing in “fantasy adventure” might be looking for some kind of exotic adventure vacation, or they might be looking for a fantasy video game, a movie, etc. These folks might click on the link to my site, but they probably won’t convert (become buyers) as frequently as folks who are using book or novel in the keyword phrases they search.
Still, since I would be doing my website marketing myself, and it doesn’t cost me anything to add pages to my site and write copy, I’d probably go ahead and use “fantasy adventure” for one of the sub-pages of my site and work on getting that page to come in #1 for that position.
But because of the therm’s ambiguity, I wouldn’t make it my primary emphasis. I’d go after the second most popular term in my list: fantasy book.
When I type “fantasy book” into Google, I see there’s more competition. At the time of this writing (keep in mind, search engine results can change monthly or even daily), there is a pretty well-established fantasy book review site on the top. They’re posting new reviews almost daily, which means they have lots of pages of content on their site. Search engines love content, and they love it when you update your site frequently too. It can be hard to dislodge those folks.
If I go further down the top 10, though, I see that there is one spam site (it has fantasy and book in the domain name, but there are only ads for the site content), and there are some sites that, while popular and well known, aren’t using “fantasy book” in the title, so they’re probably not trying to optimize (or make their site rank) for that keyword. In other words, with some work on keywords and other forms of search engine optimization (a topic we’ll cover more in future posts), I could probably get the site on my fantasy book up within the top few results.
So, at the end of the day, I’d choose “fantasy book” for my primary keyword (the one I would emphasize on the main home page of my site). I’d keep “fantasy adventure” and maybe a couple of the other ones to work on later (linking them to other pages on my site).
I hope that my hypothetical walkthrough has helped you with your keyword research. I know this can be a confusing topic in the beginning, but fortunately it’s something you only need to do once. Once you know the keywords that will bring visitors to your site, you probably won’t need to change them.
What you will need to do is figure out how to use them. When you’re ready, head onto the next post: Part IV: Using Keywords on Your Website.
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