In my Analytics and Consumer Insights class at NYU’s Center for Publishing, Writing, and Media every year, I put up a simple slide on the projector and wait patiently for the students to figure out the connection between three companies:
- Google
- YouTube
- Amazon
The answer, rarely guessed, is that these, in order, are the three most popular starting points for online product searches in the United States. The fact that Amazon is No. 3 normally comes as a surprise—an e-commerce giant is not what most people associate with being a massively powerful search engine. But it is. And since Amazon makes up about 40%‑50% of US print book sales and roughly 80% of e-book sales, this fact has enormous ramifications for our businesses.
If you’ve worked with a distributor, you’ve undoubtedly heard, time and time again, that metadata is very, very important. What most distributors I’ve worked with tend to omit is how your title’s metadata ties directly to search engine optimization (SEO) on the No. 3 most‑used product‑search platforms in the country.
How a Crawler Crawls: The Basics of SEO
When Amazon’s web crawlers catalog a book page for its search engine, they don’t see your beautiful cover or care about the positive Kirkus review your book received. Crawlers are scanning your page’s HyperText Markup Language (HTML), searching for keywords that Amazon’s search results will use to attempt to match what a customer is looking for.
In SEO, there is a hierarchy to the power of each “tag” added to a page. In SEO, the main header tag (commonly called the H1) is given top billing. Search Google for something simple like “How to cook spinach,” and the leading organic results often have some form of search term right in the main header. bbcgoodfood.com went right to the point with its top‑ranking article, “How to Cook Spinach.”
On Amazon, search operates the same way, and the H1 tag for your book is its title/subtitle. It’s the most critical piece of SEO on an Amazon book page—and, often, one of the most ignored SEO opportunities in publishing. The publishers who do, however, master the art of weaving keywords into their titles and subtitles end up with the ultimate arbitrage opportunity: enhanced discoverability with absolutely no cost.
On Amazon, the next most valuable piece of SEO real estate is the list of “feature bullets” under the price box, followed closely by the book description, with SEO strength slowly diminishing the further you go into the paragraph. That means that the first 100‑or‑so characters of your description hold the most weight in the crawler’s cataloging. This is the reason so many distributors focus on the “strapline” or “keynote”—the first sentence, often in bold, that leads off the book description.
This means that if you lead off your award‑winning Mediterranean diet cookbook description with something like “Winner of the BookyBook Award for Cookbooks,” you’ve wasted the second most valuable piece of SEO real estate on the page. You should be leading off with a clever call to action that not only entices the consumer to read on but signals to the search engine that this book is worthy of the top position for customers looking for Mediterranean diet cookbooks: “Discover the award‑winning Mediterranean diet cookbook from acclaimed chef Gianna Do that YumYumFood magazine calls ‘the best collection of healthy recipes for 2025.’”
Off‑Page Keywords: Not the Loophole You Think
If you took a journey back in time to the early 2000s and browsed one of those famous clickbait news articles, you would see a zoo of keywords crammed into the bottom of the page (sometimes hidden from view in white font). You don’t see that practice anymore because almost all search engines have done away with off‑page keywords and now heavily ding pages and websites for “keyword stuffing.”
I mention this because, throughout my career, the off‑page keywords (delivered through ONIX) have been treated as discoverability gold by most publishers I’ve encountered. I assure you, they are most definitely not. On Amazon, off‑page keywords rank near the bottom of the SEO hierarchy, with all visible metadata being much more important, and are used to help the Amazon search engine refine its categorization of a title (similar to BISAC codes), not necessarily surface your title in a search of “best fiction books 2025.”
Additional Content: Product Visuals and A+
Don’t stop at your description when building out the Amazon page for next season’s “A” title. Through Vendor Central (and KDP), Amazon offers you the opportunity to add product images, videos, and, critically, A+ content to your search optimization. This is the webpage block that exists between “About the Author” and “Editorial Reviews” that allows you to dominate a good portion of the book page with custom content.
A+ modules allow you to mix text and images (avoid embedding text in images) as well as comparison modules to add critical content for readers and crawlers alike. Remember that the alt‑image tags you assign to the images you include are a great opportunity to add additional strong keywords. This is really your only remaining opportunity to control how well you can sell your book to both a human and a computer. The rest is out of your control.
The Rest Is Out of Your Control: Product Views to the Rise of SGE
Like other search engines that measure aspects of a website, such as time on site, traffic, incoming links, and bounce rate (which feed into a site’s domain‑authority ranking), Amazon’s algorithm uses similar measurements to determine how high up in a search result your book will land. These measurements are, unfortunately, almost entirely out of your control. They include customer reviews (both ranking and text), product page views, product return rate, and conversions to sales. Remember that your incentive as a publisher is to make every title sell, which is not aligned with Amazon’s. They want to push what sells best. This is why a book that gains traction on Amazon tends to maintain its sales momentum—the algorithm continually elevates it. So, use all your marketing creative power to optimize that metadata and try to get the flywheel turning.
Finally, I do have some bad news. All that metadata work you’ve done over the last 20 years? Get ready to do it again. Amazon is sunsetting its A9 search algorithm (primarily keyword‑ and natural‑language‑processing‑based) and introducing an AI‑enhanced update that SEO practitioners call “A10” (Amazon hasn’t used that name publicly). A10 will be better at reading descriptions, so write them well. It will also be able to catalog everything from image quality to how customers really feel about what you’re selling.
Over the years to come, success in publishing will continue to be heavily influenced by Amazon, which means that success will depend on understanding the platform not just as a retailer, but as a search engine. Great books deserve to be found—and metadata (SEO) is how you get them there. Learn to speak Amazon’s language, and you’ll gain discoverability that no ad budget can buy.
Keith Riegert is the president of The Stable Book Group, which includes Ulysses Press, She Writes Press, VeloPress Books, Trafalgar Square Books, and Skybox Press. He is also CEO of Perfect Bound Technologies Corporation and a co-founder of the book publicity and digital marketing firm, Pacific & Court.