Your Amazon affiliate keyword research can make or break the success of your Amazon affiliate business.

Do this wrong, and you’ll see very little to no sales at all.

Here’s the thing: While the opportunity to earn wads of cash through Amazon Affiliates is as real as can be, you can’t just wing it if you want to win it.

You need to align the crucial elements that will ascertain your success.

What “crucial elements” am I talking about?

Two words…

Golden keywords.

You need to uncover your golden keywords if you want to rake in truckloads of sales out of your Amazon Affiliate business.

Know that for people who succeed in this type of business model, finding the ideal affiliate marketing keywords takes about 80%-90% of the process, while the rest of the process only accounts for 10%-20%.

That is why, if you want to succeed in your Amazon Affiliate business, you need to do your affiliate marketing keyword research right.

But first…

What Is Amazon Affiliates And How Does It Work, Anyway?

From a 30,000 ft. perspective, here’s how the business model works.

You’d have to go to Amazon.com and sign up for their Amazon Affiliate Program — also known as Amazon Associates.

Get approved.

Obtain your unique affiliate link from Amazon.com.

Add the affiliate link to your niche site.

When someone clicks the affiliate link from your site and makes a purchase, you get a commission.
Pretty straightforward, huh?

And because it’s an affiliate program, then that means you won’t have to create your own product. You won’t have to do stock inventory. You won’t have to handle shipping or any kind of logistics. And you won’t even have to deal with product returns — among other tedious things.

That’s how convenient the life of an Amazon Affiliate is — at least, that’s what happens when the stars are aligned.

Where Things Get Tricky: Affiliate Marketing Keyword Research

At this point, everything we’ve written about the Amazon affiliate program sounded all sunshine and rainbows.

Sadly, you can hardly call this business model “easy.”

To be a successful Amazon affiliate, you’d need to have the perseverance, mindfulness, and the patience to uncover the golden keywords for your niche site, that is.

Why Keywords Are Important

As mentioned previously, what will take up much of your time is finding the right keywords to pursue.

Because depending on the keywords you’ll target, in general, you’ll either end up with results:

a.) Get website traffic from the search engines that aren’t interested to make a purchase.

b.) Get website traffic that is itching to buy the product you’re promoting.

What you want are keywords that will bring in the latter, of course.

And you can only accomplish this if you manage to uncover your golden keywords.

(Side note: I haven’t mentioned this but there’s a third result that you need to be aware of. And that is, you’ll get very little to no website traffic at all. And yes, that can happen if you’re targeting the wrong keywords.)

How Does A Golden Keyword Look?

While you’ll get varying definitions of what golden keywords are, I’d like to keep it simple by highlighting these crucial points:

• These are keywords that are feasible to target in terms of ranking in the search results — meaning, they aren’t THAT difficult to rank in the search engines’ first page (ideally in the top three).
• These are keywords that can bring in a decent amount of monthly traffic.
• These are keywords that bring in traffic with a strong buying intent.
• These keywords are evergreen and will bring you long-term traffic.

That’s about it.

Again, there are going to be varying definitions of what a golden keyword might be but these are the crucial things you need to remember when coming up with keywords to target for your Amazon Affiliate business.

How To Do Amazon Affiliate Keyword Research (The Right Way)

Now that you know how the Amazon Affiliate works and what a golden keyword looks like, it’s time to talk about the actual steps on how to do keyword research for your niche sites.

Here’s a simplified overview of the process:

1. Round up your seed keywords.
2. Generate longer keyword strings (with buying intent) from your seed keywords.
3. Determine how feasible your keywords are — if you can rank your pages.

Let’s get to the nitty-gritty.

1. Round Up Your Seed Keywords

To come up with your seed keywords, go to Amazon’s site directory.

Look for your niche and its subcategories.

Supposing you’re in the baby niche.

In Amazon’s directory, you can head over to “Baby.” From there, you can choose from the myriad of subcategories available.

In this example, we’ll choose “Car Seat & Accessories.”

After clicking the subcategory, you’ll come across several nice looking items.

In this phase of your Amazon affiliate keyword research, you’ll have to use a bit of your intuition to look for a product type. (Notice how we’re supposed to be looking for a product type, and not a specific product from a specific brand.)

Put yourself in your audience’s shoes and see if the product is something they might be interested in.

The more you know about your audience, the sharper your mental/emotional compass is when guessing (for the lack of a better word) whether your audience will be interested in the product or not.

Together with your intuition, also look into the product’s ratings and the number of reviews (among other things).

The numbers you’ll see will validate if people have been buying the product and if they’re happy with it.

While there are several products we can look into, for this guide’s example, we’ll choose the product type baby car mirror.

We’ve now just uncovered one of your seed keywords — baby car mirror.

All you need to do is to rinse and repeat the process to come up with more seed keywords.

Remember that we looked into “Car Seats & Accessories” under the “Baby” category. If you go back to Amazon.com’s site directory, there are a couple more you can look into. (Let alone each subcategory have bajillions of product pages you can look into.)

Now that you know how to uncover your seed keywords, it’s time to proceed to the next phase.

2. Generate Longer Keyword Strings (With Buying Intent) From Your Seed Keywords

As you can probably imagine, trying to rank your pages based on your seed keywords alone isn’t going to be a good idea.

For one thing, you’ll often find yourself competing with ginormous companies; therefore, you won’t be able to rank your pages on the SERPs.

And if you do manage to rank your pages in the first page of Google’s search results, you’ll only get a mish-mash of site visitors — most of them have no intention of buying anything.

In both scenarios, you lose.

Instead of using your seed keyword, you need to come up with longer keyword strings with a strong buying intent.

If you can pull that off, you’ll be able to enjoy these two benefits:

• You’ll have a better chance of ranking your pages — if you’re pursuing long tail keywords.
• The traffic you’ll get is often more targeted, with a strong buying intent, at that.

To come up with longer keywords with buying intent, you can head over to LongTailPro.com.

Once you’re in the platform, create a new project then enter your seed keyword/s in the empty “Related Keywords” field.

(Side note: If you are new to our platform and you aren’t sure what the headers of each column mean, you can hover your cursor over the headers to view their description.)

I typed in “Baby Car Mirror,” set the “Suggestions Per Keyword” to 400, set the advanced option to show keyword suggestions with 800-3,000 search volume, then clicked “Retrieve.” This is the result that came up.

Since we’re looking to generate longer keyword strings with buying intent, I set the filter to include keyword suggestions containing the word “best.”

The word “best” connotes buying intent along with “affordable,” “top,” etc. For this example, however, I just went with “best” — since it almost always brings the best results.

(Note: I also set the filter to exclude keyword suggestions with KC that’s greater than 30. I’ll share more about this later.)

This is now how the results look after applying the filters.

Notice how the Avg. KCs (Average Keyword Competitiveness) are now less than 30, and the keyword suggestions contain the word “best?”

Both of these are crucial because the keyword suggestions now have a strong buying intent (because of the word “best”), and the Avg. KC are now within the ideal range.

Basically, the Avg. KC tells you how difficult (or easy) it is to rank for certain keywords. The higher the number, the harder it is to rank.

A keyword with an Avg. KC that’s 30 and above are those that are difficult to rank (that’s why I excluded them in the filters). Those with an Avg. KC of 29 and below are considered relatively easier to rank.

That means you ought to consider targeting keyword suggestions with an Avg. KC of 29 or below.

By following the process above, you should now be able to come up with:

• Long tail keywords
• Keywords with a strong buying intent
• Keywords that are supposed to be relatively easier to rank for in the search engines

We now have to screen the set of keywords that you came up to further validate if we can, in fact, rank our pages in the SERPs with them.

3. Determine How Feasible Your Keywords Are — If You Can Rank Your Pages

While the Avg. KC is a good metric to look into to determine if the suggested keyword/s is far too difficult to dominate in the search engines, you need to do a bit more digging to validate the information.

In the previous screenshot, we’ve managed to come up with several keyword suggestions with an Avg. KC that’s less than 30.

To further validate if it is, in fact, a good idea to target the keywords, you need to click the keyword suggestion so you can see Google’s top 10 results when searching for that keyword.

In this case, I’ll choose “best baby car mirror” since it has a search volume of 800+.

(The range 800-3,000 volume is the sweet spot for me.)

As you can see from the screenshot, Google’s top 10 results for the keyword “best baby car mirror” has seven pages with a KC that’s 30 and below.

Not only that, if you check out the External Backlinks section of the pages, most of them barely have any backlinks.

Since you already know about the importance of making sure that the page’s KC is 30 or below, I’ll explain to you the importance of the External Backlinks.

When it comes to ranking pages in Google, backlinks are important. After all, a site’s backlink profile is a major ranking factor.

Because we’re trying to determine if we can rank our pages for certain keywords, it makes sense for us to determine if we can “out-SEO” our competitor. And by “out-SEO,” I’m talking about whether we can come up with better and more backlinks.

If you can pull that off, you’ll have a good chance of outranking your competitors’ pages — provided you did your on-page SEO correctly, of course.

Quick Disclaimer: There is no one-size-fits-all rule when doing a competitor analysis. After all, the metrics you see in our platform are very important. (e.g., Site Age, Domain KC, Citation Flow, etc.) However, at the very least, I’d like you to pay very close attention to the page’s KC (which shouldn’t exceed 30), and the External Backlinks (to see if you can come up with more and better links).

That’s about it…

By following the steps that we’ve detailed in this guide, you’ll be able to come up with feasible and rank-worthy affiliate marketing keywords.

You’ll be able to come up with:

• Keywords with a strong buying intent.
• Keywords with a decent amount of monthly search volume.
• Keywords that you can rank for in the search engines (that are fairly easy to pull off).

With this, what’s left for you to do is to optimize your pages for the keywords you came up with, create ample amount of content for your site, and start building inbound links.

Key Takeaways

As you can see, there are a lot of hoops and hurdles that go into doing an Amazon affiliate keyword research.

It is by no means a simple matter.

However, if you’ll give it your due diligence, if you’ll do it right, you are bound to reap the hundreds (even thousands) of sales that you need to leave your 9-to-5 job and have a sustainable and thriving business.

These are the key takeaways that you need to remember on how to do keyword research for your niche sites:

• To succeed in running an Amazon affiliate business, you need the right keywords — without them, you’ll only hear crickets no matter how professional-looking your site is.
• To find the right keywords, you need to: Round up your seed keywords, generate longer string keywords with buying intent, and validate how feasible the keyword is.
• You can use Long Tail Pro to come up with longer keywords with buying intent and to determine how fierce the competition is if you’ll choose certain keywords.
• There is no silver-bullet to doing competitor research. But, for the most part, you’d do well if you check out your competitor’s KC and External Backlinks.
• If you feel and think (based on the data) that you can’t outrank your competitors, don’t target the keyword.

Do you want to start your journey to uncovering profitable affiliate marketing keywords? Sign up to Long Tail Pro’s 7-day free trial now.