As many authors will tell you, the key to a book’s success is not just great writing, but also a great book marketing plan. I’m in the midst of creating one of my own for my new book, Photography: A 21st Century Practice.
A book or author website can be the linch-pin for your book’s marketing effort. It’s a place where you can offer useful things like testimonials, sneak previews, extended resources, ways to connect with you personally, and, ultimately, convince people that they need your book. While your publisher’s book page or a retailer’s website might have some of this info, your book webpage is a way for you to create your own personal home on the web for your work and help people find you, and your book, more effectively.
The key to helping the general public find your website is keywords.
These are the words and phrases that people type into search engines when they are looking for something — say, a new book about a particular subject.
These keywords can also be implemented across your website and other online content to help the chances that your content will appear in a given person’s search results. How exactly keywords improve your visibility in search engines is a whole field of knowledge called Search Engine Optimization — SEO. There are a TON of great resources on this topic out there (I highly recommend starting with Google’s Digital Marketing course and their videos on SEO if you’re starting fresh), so I won’t get into the weeds here. Just know that keywords = power. They are the pathways that lead people to great content — like your book — online, and so you need to learn to use them effectively.
I’m going to write a follow up article on how exactly to implement keywords on your book site, but for now, let’s start with a simple question: what keywords should I be using?
Take my book for example: it’s a photography textbook. I had a hunch that
“photography textbook” was going to be crucial keyword for me. As it turns out, doing some research into effective keywords has completely changed my mind and unearthed some really useful new and even surprising keywords I plan to use moving forward.
So let’s dive in. To do this analysis, I’m using a free keyword analysis tool called Keyword Generator: this is a service that estimates how many people per month search for a given keyword or phrase on a given search engine. It also shows related searches, which can be helpful in identifying related keywords. There is a paid version of this service, but the free version works pretty great.
The examples below are based on Google search users. The volume is the estimated # number of searches per month. The KD (or keyword difficulty indicator) is an interesting number that essentially ranks how difficult a given keyword is in terms of helping you in search rankings. Green is good; yellow and red indicate that a keyword might require other factors like extensive backlinks to help your site appear in search results. I’m not going to worry about it too much, but I will be aiming for mostly green KD keywords for our site. Another thing to note is that the generator provides keywords in both phrases and questions — we’ll look at that in a bit.
One of the first possible keywords I typed into the generator was “photography textbook” — after all, that’s what the book is! I was surprised to see that this keyword scores very low: its estimated volume is only 100, meaning that only about 100 people/month are searching Google for this phrase.
“Photography book” does a little better, but not by much!
The search volume for “photography book” is still only 600 people/month. However, those 600 people are likely my book’s target demographic: people looking for books about photography. So, too, are those 100 people looking for a “photography textbook.” I will keep these both in my keyword bucket, but I also need to find some keywords that have a higher volume.
“Teach photography” and “How to teach photography” also score very low — just 100 and 150 searches / month, respectively. This is interesting: to me, this indicates that not many people see teaching photography as a skill they are trying to learn. However, those 150 people are still important as they are our book’s true target audience, likely photo educators and possibly new ones in need of a new textbook, too. I’ll keep these in the mix, but like “photography textbook”, may not use them as extensively as some higher volume keywords.
Interestingly, the volume numbers start to increase on the student side of the equation:
“Learn photography” has a much improved # of searches per month (1,200).
Another promising one: I found “How to become a photographer” by searching for keywords related to “photographer.” “How to become a photographer” is fairly high (3,000), especially compared to numbers above.
This indicates to me that while thousands of people / month are looking for advice about how to become a photographer, they may not be thinking to look for a photography textbook as a source for that information, or even a photography book more broadly.
As it turns out, a good deal of our book’s content involves how to become a photographer — how to hone skills and develop ideas in order to make it as an artist — so “how to become a photographer” is a keyword we could think about using in website’s content to attract more general-audience visitors.
One unique aspect of our book is its focus on photography as a fine art, rather than say advertising or journalism. “Fine art photography” does very well compared to the other keywords we’ve look at so far (5,300). I do wonder, though, who is searching for this: People looking for photography to buy? People who want to become a photographer? Either way, it’s interesting and a sufficiently high number to keep in our keyword toolbox.
Doing a more basic keyword search for just “Photography” yields results for lots of different genres — I imagine these are people looking for how-tos (though, in the case of “nude photography” they might just be looking for nudes!):
Note that while “photography” itself has a very high volume number, its KD is red: there is a lot of competition on this keyword and it’s not going to greatly benefit us to focus on it.
However, the high volumes for these genres of photography — portrait, macro, real estate, still life — indicate that there are people out there with an interest in learning more about specifics. This suggests that we could repurpose content from the book into “how to” articles using these keywords to try to capture some of these searchers. Another keyword of interest is “photography jobs”: even at the bottom of this list, it’s getting 13,000 searches/month. This is a great number for us!
The related question-form keywords for “photography” are also interesting, indicating that some basic technical questions are frequently searched — like “what is ISO in photography” — and that career advice is also of interest to many people — “how to start a photography business” and “how to get into photography” for example.
Overall, I’m seeing some interesting through-lines between our book’s content and frequent Google searches: while photography educators are an important audience for us, the more general audience of search engine users are typically looking for advice, be that on career development or on technique. The good news is that our book offers both and can therefore be uniquely situated to pique the interest of the general “photography” searching audience.
Our success in driving some of this search engine traffic to our site, though, will be determined by how well we use these keywords on the site, and how we generate more keyword-driven content to steer folks to us.
Ideas include repurposing some of the book’s how-to and career advice content into blog posts and pitching ideas for such articles to online photography magazines that would then link to our site, further boosting its search rankings (this is another SEO trick, FYI).
In my next post, I’ll get into specifics of how we’re using these keywords to update our site and its content.
Have you investigated keywords for your website? Any surprises? I’d love to hear about how it’s going!