Amazon keyword research: how to find the searches worth paying for

Most Amazon keyword research starts and ends with search volume: find the biggest searches and get the product in front of them. It is an understandable instinct and an expensive one. The biggest searches tend to be the broadest, the most contested and the least likely to convert for any one product, so they cost the most to win and return the least when you do.

This guide is part of our Amazon SEO series, which explains how Amazon ranks products. Here we cover the step before: which searches to aim for. We start with the data Amazon gives you, then the third-party tools, then the method we use to rank every term by the profit it can bring. Where those terms go once you have chosen them is covered in our guides to listing optimisation and backend search terms.

What a keyword is worth

A search term is worth what it brings in after the cost of getting it. For any term, two numbers do most of the work: how often a click turns into an order, and how much you keep from that order.

A product that converts 12% of the clicks from a search and keeps £5.00 an order earns 60p for each click from that search. Organically, that 60p is profit. In advertising, any click that costs more than 60p loses money, however many sales it brings. Amazon Ads reports attributed sales without VAT⁸, so work the margin out on the ex-VAT price; our break-even ACoS guide shows how.

That is why volume on its own is the wrong ranking. A term with 50,000 searches and a 3% conversion rate can be worth less to you, per click and in total, than one with 2,000 searches and a 15% conversion rate.

Start with Amazon’s own data

Amazon gives sellers and brands more first-party search data than most realise. Each report answers a different question, and not every seller can see all of them.

The search term report

If you advertise, this is the most valuable keyword list you have, because it shows what real shoppers typed before they clicked and, within the attribution window, bought. It includes only searches that produced at least one click, and it also lists ASINs where your ad appeared on another product’s page¹. Sales and orders in the seller version are counted within seven days of the click¹.

Automatic and broad-match campaigns act as a research tool here: they show you searches you would never have thought of. In the accounts we manage, we review the report weekly, move converting searches into exact-match targeting, and add the ones that spend without converting as negative keywords.

Search Query Performance

For brand owners this is the closest thing to Amazon’s own view of your search funnel. It covers the top searches associated with your brand, including organic and Sponsored Products results from the search page, and shows query volume, impressions, clicks, basket adds and purchases³. The Query Detail view compares your ASIN with the top 10 ASINs for that search³. Our guide to Amazon Brand Analytics shows how to read its funnel share.

Two columns matter most for keyword research. Your purchases divided by your clicks for a query is your conversion rate on that search, which feeds straight into the formula above. And your share of impressions against your share of purchases tells you whether a term is under-exploited: a search where you win purchases whenever you are seen, but are rarely seen, is usually the best opportunity on the page.

Top Search Terms

The Amazon Search Terms report shows the most popular searches in the store with their search frequency rank, plus the three products shoppers clicked most after searching and each one’s click share and conversion share⁴. You can also look up an ASIN to see which terms drive clicks to it⁴. It gives a rank, not a volume, so use it to compare searches and to see how concentrated a search is: if three products take most of the clicks and conversions, it will be expensive to break into.

Brand Analytics data is generally available within 72 hours of the end of each period⁵.

Product Opportunity Explorer

Product Opportunity Explorer groups related searches into “niches” based on the products shoppers view or buy after searching, and its search terms tab shows search volume, click share, search conversion and the top three clicked products for each term⁶. It is built for choosing new products, but it is also the quickest way to see Amazon’s own grouping of the searches around a product type, and how demand moves over 90 and 360 days⁶.

Third-party Amazon keyword tools

Third-party tools fill two gaps in Amazon’s data. They estimate search volumes for terms Amazon doesn’t report to you, and they offer “reverse ASIN” lookups that estimate which searches a competitor’s product ranks for. Amazon’s own seller guide is clear that its tools won’t show you competitor keywords⁷, which is why these features are popular.

Treat the output as estimates. The tools model volumes and rankings from their own data collection, and different tools give different numbers for the same term. We use them for discovery, then make decisions with Amazon’s figures. Two of the best-known tools, as their own pricing pages showed on 1 October 2026 (prices in US dollars):

Other tools exist, and we don’t recommend one over another. For a brand with Brand Registry and an advertising history, Amazon’s own reports usually answer more of the important questions than any paid tool. The tools earn their keep when you are researching a product you don’t sell yet, or a market where you have no data of your own.

Build the long list

Before you rank anything, you need a list. This is the order we follow, and it rarely takes more than a morning per product family.

Rank keywords by profit potential, not volume

Now give every term on the shortlist a number for what it could earn. For organic search, a simple estimate is enough:

Here it is for an insulated water bottle at £19.99, which is £16.66 without VAT and keeps £5.00 an order before advertising. The searches, shares, conversion rates and click costs are illustrative.

Three things stand out. The biggest search is not the most valuable: “water bottle” has 25 times the searches of “insulated water bottle 1 litre” and less than half the profit potential, because the product wins a small share of a broad search and converts poorly on it. The specific term wins because it describes exactly what this product is, so the shoppers who search it buy.

The paid picture is starker. Compare the value of a click with what a click costs. On “water bottle”, every paid click loses 65p (a 20p click value against an 85p cost); on “insulated water bottle” it loses 25p. On the three specific terms, every paid click makes 15p to 20p. Bid on the first two and the advertising report will show plenty of sales while the P&L shows a loss.

And the small terms add up. The bottom three have only 4,600 searches a month between them, but together they offer more profit potential than the head term, and they are the searches where advertising pays for itself.

This doesn’t mean ignoring big searches. A broad term can be worth winning organically for its volume once your listing converts well, and worth advertising on if your conversion rate rises enough to cover the click. It means you decide with the arithmetic in front of you, product by product.

Turn the shortlist into a plan

Each term then goes to the place where it does the most good.

• Title and item highlights: the two or three terms with the highest profit potential that describe the product exactly. The title now has 75 characters, and item highlights add 125 characters of searchable text below it¹⁰. Check them in the listing checker.
• Bullets and description: supporting terms, used naturally in sentences that sell.
• Backend search terms: synonyms, abbreviations and alternative names that don’t fit on the page, within the 250-byte limit⁹. Our backend search terms guide has worked examples.
• Exact-match advertising: terms whose value per click is above the cost per click, with bids set from that value. Our PPC strategy guide covers structure and bidding.
• Negative keywords: terms that are irrelevant, or that cost more per click than they earn. Our negative keywords guide covers the weekly routine.

Keep the research current

Keyword research is not a one-off job. Searches change with the seasons, competitors change their listings, and your own conversion rate moves as reviews accumulate. In the accounts we manage, we review the search term report every week for negatives and new exact-match terms, review Search Query Performance every month for searches where our share of impressions lags our share of purchases, and redo the full long list for each product family once a quarter or before peak.

The question to bring to each review is the same as the one this guide started with: not “where is the volume?” but “which searches make us money, and are we winning enough of them?” For how those searches turn into rank, go back to our Amazon SEO guide.