When you publish a book on KDP, you get seven keyword boxes. Each one holds 50 characters. Many authors fill them with guesses. A better place to start is the search box itself, with the words readers already type into Amazon. SuggestScope is a free Chrome extension that collects those phrases and helps you fit them into the seven slots.

It costs nothing. You don’t need an account, there is no subscription and there are no ads. It works in Chrome and on Chromebooks.

Start with a few seed words

  1. Add SuggestScope to Chrome.
  2. Go to Amazon and start typing a word that describes your book, such as “cozy mystery”. A longer list of keywords shows up right under the search box. SuggestScope gets Amazon’s suggestions for every letter before and after your keyword, so you see more than the usual short list.
  3. Click any phrase to search it. Look at the books that come up. If they are nothing like yours, skip that phrase.

Build the list on the research page

The research page is where you build the list properly.

  1. Enter several seed keywords at once. Genre, setting, character type and the problem the book solves are all good starting points.
  2. Set the department filter to Books or Kindle. That keeps clothing and other products out of your results.
  3. Choose standard or deep expansion. Deep expansion gives you more phrases to sort through.
  4. Pick your marketplace. SuggestScope covers 20 of them: US, CA, MX, BR, UK, DE, FR, IT, ES, NL, SE, PL, BE, TR, IN, JP, AU, SG, AE and SA. If you sell in more than one store, check each one on its own.
  5. Use exclude words to hide author names, series titles or any terms that don’t fit your book.

Every phrase gets a “strength” score. Use it to compare phrases, not as a count of searches. The score is relative and comes from where the phrase ranks in Amazon’s suggestions.

Fill the seven slots

  1. Open the KDP helper.
  2. It fills the 7 keyword slots, 50 characters each, using the phrases you kept.
  3. Read every slot before you use it. Ask yourself one question: would a reader who typed this phrase be glad to find your book? If the answer is no, replace it.
  4. Copy the slots into KDP. You can also export the list as a CSV file and keep it for your next book or a later update.

Where it falls short

SuggestScope does not show search volume. It can’t tell you how many people type a phrase or how many copies a keyword might sell. If you need volume numbers or sales estimates to choose between two niches, this is the wrong tool. What you get is a list of phrases real shoppers type, ranked roughly the way Amazon suggests them. For picking seven honest keywords, that is often enough.

Where the data comes from

The phrases come from the same suggestion data that Amazon’s own search box loads. The extension requests that data at a gentle pace from your browser. SuggestScope is an independent tool and is not affiliated with, endorsed or sponsored by Amazon.

Add SuggestScope to Chrome