After pouring your blood, sweat, and tears into a novel until it’s as awesome as it can be, the thought of marketing your work can feel daunting, tiresome, and/or frustrating as a self-published author without a whole marketing team available for support.
Luckily, there are several low-cost strategies for marketing your book that could increase your sales – one such strategy is using SEO to your advantage.
Discover what SEO is and how it impacts your work as a writer, before exploring a few of the clever ways you may be able to utilise SEO as part of your book’s marketing plan…
What is SEO?
Simply put, SEO stands for ‘Search Engine Optimisation’, which involves taking steps to rank as highly as possible in search engine results, so your website can enjoy greater traffic (i.e. reach more readers).
Examples of search engines include Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft Edge.
Top tip: Keywords play a crucial role in SEO – these are words or phrases that are associated with the information people type into search engines in order to find what they’re looking for (e.g. “cosy mystery books” or “fantasy books for adults”).
How does SEO impact writers?
It doesn’t matter how incredible your book is, if readers can’t find it, they aren’t going to buy it! By improving the SEO of your book and website listings, there’s an increased chance that visitors to those webpages will purchase it.
But, SEO doesn’t just enhance the potential for book sales – it also offers a fantastic opportunity to introduce more people to your author brand.
For instance, a reader is using a search engine to find an author who’s written an epic fantasy series and you just happen to be the author of an epic fantasy series. As long as your author website appears towards the top of that first page of search results, the reader is far more likely to click the link to explore your website and browse the books available, than if your website didn’t appear until the tenth page of search results.
Ways to improve SEO as a writer
Due to the science of SEO being so nuanced and complex, we won’t delve into the details of it within this article. Instead, we’ll share with you a few steps you could take to help improve your book’s SEO ranking, to ensure it reaches as many readers as possible:
Step 1 – Do your research to determine exactly which categories your book fits into (e.g. romance, fantasy, sci-fi, etc.). Understanding your target audience can go a long way towards preparing to find the right keywords you’ll need to use in Step 2.
Step 2 – Find keywords that tend to rank highly in search engines when potential readers are searching for books in the same category as yours. You can then include those keywords and phrases in marketing copy for your book, whether that’s on your website, in your social media posts, or even in your book’s description. That way, you’re improving your book’s visibility in search engines, without having to pay for advertising!
Top tip: There are helpful articles available from Semrush and The Creative Penn about researching keywords and choosing the correct categories for your book.
Step 3 – Write blog posts for your website that contain plenty of keywords relating to your book, especially in the title, making sure you include the sorts of terms you know readers use when searching for books like yours (subtly, of course – you don’t want to put readers off by including keywords that don’t quite fit the narrative of your blog post!).
For further advice about SEO strategies for self-published authors, you can visit this article by Kristin Overly.
Do you have an SEO success story to share? Has your book’s marketing strategy benefitted from SEO? Please let us know, by commenting below! Thanks for reading.
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