3 Ways to Optimise Your Kindle Listing For More Traffic And Sales.

When thinking about ways to optimise their Kindle listing, authors often become overwhelmed, and understandably so. There are countless so called gurus out there all claiming they know the tweaks to turn our Kindle listing page into a money making machine.

I, however, have broken down the main three broad elements you can optimise on your listing page in order to convert more of your Kindle book listing page visitors into customers and have explained the elements in simple, plain English.

1. Book Cover

They say you shouldn’t judge a book by it’s cover, but, unfortunately, even in 2020, a lot of people still do. But having a professional cover designed will only take you part the way there.

As well as the cover being well designed, you need to ensure you have a super sharp and high-resolution image of the cover for your Kindle listing, in order to give your book the best chance of standing out in the listing pages of Amazon among a sea of other books.

2.  Keywords

It’s useful to consider Amazon as a search engine, just like Google, but for products only, as the Amazon site, including the Kindle section, functions much like a conventional search engine. Which means keyword selection is incredibly important when it comes to optimising your listings.

The keywords you use in your Kindle listing title and description is partly what Amazon uses to decide what search terms your book will appear for when visitors are searching and how high up the search results page you will appear.

There are many ways you can find out which keywords to use to optimise your listings. You can use Amazon’s search bar itself, as putting in a letter into the search bar will show you which phrases people are typing in most that start with that specific letter. You can also look at which keywords well performing competitors are using in their Amazon listings, or you can use professional Amazon Kindle keyword research tools.

3.  Categories.

Category selection is incredibly important when it comes to optimising your Amazon Kindle listings. A little known tip from Amazon themselves is that you should select down to the sub category that most accurately describes your book and not try and deliberately select a broad category in a bid to give your book more exposure.

As, even if you select down a few levels to get to a narrow sub category, Amazon will also have your book appear for the category levels before/above the final subcategory you have selected. So, for example, if the subcategory you decide on is “FICTION > Fantasy > Historical”, you will appear in the Historical, Fantasy and Fiction categories. This is actually a superior strategy than placing your book in a broad end category, as a lot of authors do.

We highly recommend you check out the listings of well performing competitors and see which categories they have decided on, thankfully, Amazon displays this information publicly on all listing pages so you don’t have to work hard to find them.