SEO For Ebooks And Books Helps You Sell More Books

SEO for ebooks, books, and authors is a term that probably makes most writers shudder at the thought.

Isn’t SEO technical and complicated? No, it isn’t, and it’s an indispensable part of book marketing.

SEO for authors is quite a straightforward content marketing strategy.

With a bit of time spent improving your SEO, you can increase your book’s discoverability and exposure in the long term.

What does SEO for ebooks mean?

SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, simply means making small adjustments to your website pages, social media profiles, blog posts, and book sales pages.

These changes will encourage Search Engines like Google, Bing, and Yahoo to index your pages in search results.

However, the best part about good SEO and online marketing is that once your pages are indexed, they will remain there for a very long time.

It will ensure that your book or books, as well as your author name, will be available to be discovered by Internet Search and on Amazon for years to come.

What is SEO for authors?

Simply put, SEO is about finding the answer to this question.

What words and phrases will potential book buyers use to find my books?

If you think your book title and author name are enough, you will be 100% wrong. It is highly unlikely that anyone knows you or your book title, so why would they search using these words?

What you need are keywords and short phrases that people WILL use when searching for subjects that are of interest to them.

It begins with keyword research and is the starting point for any form of Internet marketing.

Finding SEO keywords

I will use one of my books to give you a real example.

Louis by Derek Haines

My name and a one-word title will not get me any results.

What I need for SEO are words and phrases that are key elements of the subject and story. After a little research, I made this quick list of possible keywords.

Cold War, MI6, espionage and spy thrillers, espionage, war, world war II, true spy stories, military and spies, secret agents, MI6 spy, wartime espionage, double agents, famous spies, real spy.

Writing and editing for SEO

My next step was to rewrite my book description by including my keywords that would hopefully be searchable, which are in bold.

Louis is a gripping story of the life of a professional wartime spy. From his boyhood education in Egypt in the early 1900s, he was being prepared to serve in the newly formed British Secret Service Bureau on the orders of Abbas II Hilmi, the Khedive of Egypt and Sudan, as part of a secret arrangement with the British government to supply young operatives for the newly formed bureau.

In his early teens, he is separated from his foster mother to make the dangerous journey to England in the middle of the First World War to complete his education and training as a British wartime spy. From Dulwich College to Oxford University, he is meticulously prepared for his life as a British undercover war operative.

From his first dangerous mission in Port Said through to his last in South Africa in the 1960s, Louis is the story of a professional chameleon who survived wars and conflicts on his instincts, cunning, and ruthlessness. Louis was a quiet, heroic man who lived an extraordinary life – a life of service that should never be forgotten.

My last SEO addition was to give the book a subtitle.

Yes, subtitles are very important for SEO. So my book title became “Louis, The Life of a Real Spy.”

You can see from the words I have highlighted in bold that they all relate to the theme, setting, story, and main character of the book.

They are much more likely to be used by people searching online.  When or if they do, it will help attract them to my book.

Where do you start with SEO for ebooks and authors?

After you have prepared your list of possible SEO keywords and phrases, you can update your book on Amazon.

When you publish an ebook or book with KDP, Amazon adds basic SEO for ebooks and books immediately.

From this, most Search Engines will index the bare-bones details of your book.

However, you can improve and add to your Amazon SEO very easily.

All you need to do is edit or add your subtitle, book description, and keywords in your book’s KDP details.

Even better is to use Amazon Author Central, where you will find more SEO elements to add to your book.

You can also add editorial reviews and back and front flap blurbs.

Next, if you publish anywhere else, do the same again on your other publishing platforms.

Use your keywords and phrases in your new book description, which is now rich in SEO keywords.

Update your blog and social media

Another beneficial way to use your keywords is to incorporate them into your social media profiles and descriptions where possible.

Most important, however, is how you use your SEO keywords on your author’s blog or website.

If you use WordPress, I can highly recommend the Yoast SEO plugin.

I have no affiliation with Yoast. But I love this plugin, as it makes it easy to get my SEO almost perfect for my sites, pages, and posts.

As in the case of my book example above, every time I write a post about this particular book, I use a few of my focus keywords again.

Say I write ten posts over a couple of years about this book.

Anytime someone searches for, say, spy thrillers or British Secret Service, they might find three or four indexed entries for my book on Google or Bing Search on the first page or two.

Conclusion

An SEO strategy for authors and books is not technical at all.

All it takes is some research and making sure you use your specific keywords and key phrases whenever you publish anything about your book.

One example of SEO you may never have thought about is posting links to your book.

Links are vitally important to search engines, so never post a bland link.

This is a very bad link for SEO – You can buy my book here.

But this is an excellent link for SEO – Available now – A spy thriller – Louis, the life of a real British Secret Service wartime spy.

Of course, there are many more advanced methods of using and exploiting SEO for ebooks.

But with these few ideas above, you can quickly improve your SEO for your author name and books.

Would you like to know more about SEO for books on Amazon? You can read this article about using metadata to increase book discoverability on Amazon.

SEO isn’t all that complicated, and it will certainly help you sell more books in the long term.

Related reading: What Are SEO Stop Words And How To Avoid Using Them