Keyword Research: Part 1

“We need to optimize our product pages for keywords. But how do we know which keywords to optimize for?”

This or similar questions are common, so here is the answer.
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Guide to Finding Keywords on Amazon

In this post, I will guide you on how to find keywords that you can then use to optimize product pages and use in ads on Amazon. I have tried to be as pedagogical as possible and have divided the entire process into the following steps:

• Step 0: What Are Keywords and Why Care?
• Step 1: Preparations
• Step 2: Know Your Niche
• Step 3: Use Amazon
• Step 4: Use Your Competitors
• Step 5: Google Ads and Google Trends
• Step 6: Third-Party Tools (Helium 10, Jungle Scout, Viral Launch, etc.)
• Step 7: Advertising on Amazon
• Step 8: Conclusion – What to Do with All the Keywords?

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So, let's get started.

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But before we begin, if you find this guide useful after reading it, I would greatly appreciate it if you could share it on social media or recommend it to a friend who might find it useful. Thank you in advance!

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Now, let's go!
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Step 0: What Are Keywords and Why Care?

So, before we start hunting for keywords, it's good to know what a keyword is. If you already know this, skip to “Step 1: Preparations.”

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So, what is a keyword?

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Keywords are the words or phrases that potential customers search for on Amazon. For example, if a customer is looking for a new yoga mat, they might type “Yoga mat” on Amazon. Then “Yoga mat” is the keyword/phrase. But maybe the customer is not just looking for a regular yoga mat but an extra-thick yoga mat. Then they might type in “yoga mat 3cm thick” in the search field. Then this is the keyword/phrase. So why do we need to care about this?

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It's because Amazon shows results after every search. The results consist of thousands of products that appear in an order. Place 1 all the way to the last place. This order is determined by Amazon's algorithms. Since the chances that customers buy our product become significantly higher if we appear high in the search result (i.e., place 1 or nearby), this is something we want to do as often as possible. But how do we do it?

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We optimize our product page and our ads for the keywords that the customer searches for. But before we optimize, we need to find out which keywords the customer searches for, right? And that's what we're going to go through in this post.

(How we optimize will come in later blog posts)
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Step 1: Preparations

No major preparations are needed. But one thing is required: some form of spreadsheet or writing program where you can easily paste the keywords you find. I prefer a spreadsheet because it's easy to categorize where the keywords come from, the data that comes with the keywords, etc. Nothing advanced is needed. All we are going to do is write down keywords. But if you are going to do this on a larger scale for many products, you should have something more organized.

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I usually divide my spreadsheet into different columns depending on where I found the keywords (you will understand when you go through the following steps). With some of these sources, we will also be able to get data on the number of searches, for these I have also created a column next to it titled “Number of Searches.” Here is an incredibly simple design of such a spreadsheet with some examples of keywords.

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After each of the following steps, you analyze the keywords you found and paste them into the spreadsheet. A small note here is that many of the third-party programs available for finding keywords have built-in lists that you can fill with your keywords, these can be very convenient to use if you primarily use one tool.

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Step 2: Know Your Niche

There are many tools and tactics for finding keywords out there. But the most important and best way to start is by knowing the niche and using the keywords you already know. Many times, the tools we will go through later will be able to confirm that these keywords are good. You can do this by, for example, thinking about what your product is about and what the target group is. But you can also find good keywords earlier in the process, for example during the entire product development process.

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Do you talk to the customer?

As an example, let's say you sell yoga mats. If you talk to active practitioners and they all explain that they want a thicker yoga mat, then this is a keyword (along with its synonyms) that you should focus on. Regardless of what the tools then spit out for data. The tools work by looking at the data available on Amazon and other platforms today. Not on what customers say. This can of course also be very useful, but by doing it this way you can give customers what they want and on the way you also get the best keywords.

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Tools have a hard time understanding the target group, this is something you have to do yourself. This also applies when you retrieve the data from the tools, filter out what does not appeal to your target group, etc.

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TIP – Either you can ask the customer or you can do as in “#3 – Use Amazon” to find out what customers are actually searching for. Or both ways of course...

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Step 3: Use Amazon

The customers who come to Amazon, how do you know what they want? How do you know what they actually search for? Amazon can actually tell us, completely FREE. When you go to Amazon and start doing a search, Amazon gives suggestions on what you can search for. This is based on what other customers have searched for. So simple is it to find out what customers are searching for.

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We don't get numbers on how many searches are made, but it is still a very simple and powerful tool! Example: By typing in “Yoga mat” new suggestions pop up on what we can search for. This is what others have searched for. The suggestions are not many and quite general. But, we can go further into the keyword jungle by continuing to type. Below I typed an additional “t” and got suggestions for longer search phrases that all start with “yoga mat t.”

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This way we can use Amazon to get data on what customers are searching for. The best part is that this data is retrieved directly from Amazon and not from any third party that we then have to trust. But, there are more ways to use Amazon, for example by utilizing all our competitors' hard work and “stealing” keywords directly from them. How do you do that?

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Step 4: Use Your Competitors

By searching for your competitors' similar products and clicking on their product pages, you can find which keywords your competitors are using. Many of the competitors have probably spent a lot of time optimizing their product pages and have gathered a lot of data. When looking for competitors' keywords, it's of course important to choose the competitors whose product pages are optimized and have been selling for a while. It's easy to see which these products are. Some simple signs of this (not related to the keywords themselves) are ranking, reviews, product photos.

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In any case, search for the product you want to sell or competitors you already know. Then click on one of the results. You can easily find keywords in, for example, the title, bullet points, or in the product description further down the same page. Here is an example after a search for “Yoga Mat.” I have marked potential keywords in the title and also marked the entire bullet list.

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We can see that almost the entire title consists of potential keywords. The bullet points consist of much more common text but there are keywords here too. For example “premium,” “slip resistant,” “comfortably,” “high density,” etc. These are keywords and phrases that are easy to find and free to use!

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Thank your competitors! But don't forget to follow “#2 Know Your Niche” and filter out keywords that do not appeal to your target group or fit your product! So now that we've found some keywords, how do we know which ones to use and are there more ways to find keywords?

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Step 5: Google Ads and Google Trends

Google has an immense amount of data. So why not use it to our advantage? There are many potential ways to use Google, but here I will go through the two I think are best: Google Ads (Keyword Planner) and Google Trends.

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Google Ads (Keyword Planner)

Google's Ads platform allows you as a business to advertise on Google. Google therefore collects vast amounts of data from searches made and can give you data on what people are searching for and in what quantities. Potential customers likely search a little differently on Google and Amazon, but the data we can extract is still very useful, especially for finding individual keywords. We can also use Google to see how many searches are made on different keywords in comparison to others. You do not have to pay anything to get the data, and it is completely free to create a Google Ads account (which is needed).

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When you have logged into Google Ads, you find the tool "Keyword Planner" by clicking on "Tools and Settings" in the top right corner and then on "Keyword Planner." Once there, click on "Discover new keywords" and then enter a keyword (preferably the product).

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Don't forget to set the country and language to the marketplace where you plan to sell the products. For example, "USA" and "English."

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After a search, a plethora of keyword suggestions will come up. For example, with a search on "Yoga Mat":

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As we can see, Google suggests many keywords and also shows an estimate of how many searches are made per month (we can disregard the rest of the columns). This screenshot shows only a few keywords, but the actual result was a total of 1478 keywords and phrases (as we can see at the top of the image). Keyword Planner is an excellent tool for finding and analyzing keywords!

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Google Trends

Another tool I recommend is Google Trends. It is not only good for comparing different keywords but also useful for discovering long-term trends and finding seasonal trends (some searches are made more often in summer than in winter, for example).

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Go to Google Trends and search for a keyword. You will then get a curve with an index of 0-100 for this search term. 0-100 does not show the number of searches but rather a comparison between different time points. You can now see if the trend has perhaps been down or up long-term (indicating whether more and more people are searching for this term or not). You can add even more keywords to compare all of them. Here is an example search on "yoga mat thick" and "yoga mat thin" – which can be a very relevant comparison!

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As we can see, searches for "yoga mat thick" are significantly higher but also more stable. In this way, we can compare not only two but also several keywords and phrases. Both Google Trends and Ads are fantastic ways to measure and extract keywords. But this is, as mentioned, data from Google and not Amazon. Is there any way to get search volumes and keywords from Amazon?

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Step 6: Third-Party Tools

There are many third-party tools for Amazon keywords and even more for general keywords. These can be very useful for supplementing with more keywords and getting data on search volumes on Amazon. But, since:

• There are so many such services
• Almost all of these have their own guides

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I will not go through how to use them here. Some I will certainly make my own blog posts and YouTube clips about in the future, and then I will hopefully remember to link these here. But for now, I will just recommend a few that can be useful (I now primarily use Keyword Scout):

• Keyword Scout
• Keyword Tool
• Viral Launch
• Helium 10
• Sonar
• AMZ Tracker
• SellerApp
• Keyword Tool Dominator

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Okay, we have keywords and data on search volumes. This is a great start and enough to begin optimizing our product pages. But which keywords work for us? Which keywords actually generate sales?

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Step 7: Advertising on Amazon

(Note: This step is a follow-up step and requires that the product you searched for keywords is already up on Amazon).

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Now we have lots of keywords, and we can start putting them on our product page. But, we can also add them to our advertising campaigns on Amazon. How can it help our keyword research to use advertising? In addition to ads on Amazon being extremely successful and profitable, they help us actually find and analyze keywords.

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By running ads (which we partly want and can create with the keywords we found in steps 1-5), we can get a report from Amazon on which keywords sell and convert well and which do not. We can then use that information to prioritize which keywords we should focus on and which we might completely remove from the product page.

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To be able to do such an analysis, it is important that the ads are structured in a good way. To analyze and optimize ads from

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Step 8: Conclusion – What to Do with All the Keywords?

Now you hopefully know where and how to find all the keywords, but what should you do with them? How should you optimize the product pages or ads for the keywords? That will come in later blog posts, so remember to come back to SellWave to find out more (bookmark it if you tend to forget).

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But before you choose to use the keywords for optimization, we need to choose which ones to use…. Which ones should you choose to use and which ones should you not use? As I have tried to comment, this does not solely depend on the keyword volumes, etc. It depends on your product and your target audience. Who are you trying to target? Who do you want to benefit from the product?

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If you use keywords that a completely different target group uses, it does not matter if you appear in the search results, they will still not buy your product. Because the product is not for them. With the help of Google Trends, you can easily see how different keywords compare to each other, but perhaps especially how they compare to (or with) time. There are many “Amazon Gurus” out there who would say that you should only use the keywords with the most volume, or you should only do X or Y. It doesn't work that way.

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Yes, now you have keywords, and if you know your target audience, you can make an educated guess about which ones will appeal to your customers or not. You hopefully also know if your product is so different that those looking for a general product will not buy this one. It is worth remembering when choosing keywords.

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With, for example, Google Ads or third-party tools, you can get data on how many searches are made (very approximate numbers). Again, it does not mean that you should automatically choose the keywords that get the most searches, those that have 10,000 or 100,000+ per month. It also does not mean that you should automatically abandon those words. But if a keyword gets many searches, you can expect that there is tough competition for that word, and if you have the resources (money, followers, time, product quality) to measure up to the competitors, go for it!

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If not, choose less competitive words and then work your way up. We all want our products to appear highest in the search results for all keywords, but that is not possible. Especially not if you are not ready to invest. So use all the data you get and make qualified decisions and TEST! Test if it works, test if it doesn't work. Use ads to see if your product converts for keyword “A.” If not, move on to “B.” And on Amazon, you can use ads for very many keywords, so just test and go.

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Thank you for taking the time to read, and I hope you learned something from it.

Good luck with your keyword research!

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