Find the Niche for Your Product on Amazon using Keyword Research

Using InfraNodus, you can compare what people search for when they look for your product (demand) to what they actually find (supply).

You may discover that there are certain things people look for that they don't yet find. Or that the picture of supply is too dispersed and does not address some combinations of people's needs. 

Using a knowledge graph for this task is much more effective than spreadsheets offered by standard SEO / Amazon tools. The reason is that using a knowledge graph, you can see how the words are used in context and can reveal patterns of search term co-occurrences in both the demand and supply. This helps you uncover the relations between the search terms in your customers' demand that do not yet exist in the current market supply. Targeting these relations can help you serve the unfulfilled customer needs and acquire potentially interesting product niches.

Below, we explain how you can do that step by step using a real example: "The Conversation Book" published by Circadian Press (disclosure: one of the authors is a co-founder of InfraNodus).

Video Tutorial on Amazon Keyword Research

Step 1: Perform Keyword Research for Your Product

First, you can study the current demand around a product using InfraNodus keyword research tool. We explain this process step by step in our article on Explore the Market using Keyword Research through a Knowledge Graph.

As a result, you will get a knowledge graph that will represent recurrent demand patterns for your customers:

AI-generated names for the clusters of keywords that tend to be used together in your customers' searches will give you a better idea of the picture of this demand and what segments you should target in your marketing campaigns. 

For our particular use case, we identified the following keyword niches that can be interesting for our product, "The Conversation Book": 

• conversation book
• conversational practice
• conversation topics for friends / family / couples / in a relationship
• having difficult conversations
• conversation topics for learning a language (English)
• potential product: conversation and question card games and apps

Step 2: Study the Current Supply for Your Product

In order to understand the current supply for your product, you need to conduct a search for similar products on the marketplace where you're going to sell. 

In our case, it's a book, so we will be searching on Amazon.Com, however, you could also perform a similar search on Google. Your main objective here is to see what people find when they search for your product category, so you have a better picture of the supply.

Most of the tools for Amazon marketplace analysis, such as Jungle Scout and Helium 10 will just show you the products available for your search query. This is a useful insight, but as there are 1000s of products you just want to find patterns. So your task here is to discover what terms and concepts people use when they describe their products and services. 

Luckily, InfraNodus offers analysis of Amazon search results. To perform this search, open the InfraNodus > Amazon Keyword research app. Then type in your search query. You can start from the title of your product (e.g. "The Conversation Book" in our case), but then you can follow up this research by adding some additional search terms related to your product (e.g. "Conversation Game", "Question Book", etc.) 

As a result, you will have a graph that will look something like this image below. It will show which terms tend to be used most often in describing the products found for the search query you provided, what clusters they form (i.e. which words are used in the same titles / descriptions), and which terms are the most influential ones (i.e. both most frequent and also important connectors between the clusters of products): 

As you can see, the most prominent topics for the books about conversations are

• conversation starters (especially card and question games for couples and family)
• books for relationships
• books to develop social skills
• books for language learning

Now, let's compare the supply and demand and see if there are any interesting discrepancies to target. 

Step 3: Your Product = Current Demand — Current Supply

The most effective niche to address is the difference between demand and supply. You need to answer the question: what my customers are looking for that they haven't yet found?

For example, using the data above we can see that both the demand and supply are generally aligned: when people search for the conversation books, they want something that will teach them social skills and language skills, encouraging playful interactions. They want to practice it with their families and in their relationships.

However, there are some important differences between the demand and supply graphs:

• There are not so many results on Amazon for practicing English (mostly for Spanish – see the screenshot above), even though people are searching for it (see the image in Step 1). This could be an interesting niche to explore. Conversation books for learning English.
  
  
• There is a cluster of conversational card games for couples on Amazon but only a small subset of conversational books for couples. What if there's a book for couples that can be played just like cards? This would make the product stand out from the rest (the book vs card games) while also addressing the needs of the customers (finding an interesting conversational activity in their relationship). 

• We identify that both "conversation book" and "conversation cards" are related to couples — so that's saturated. But what about "friends"? It's related to the notion of "game" but more of a card game, so what about marketing a book that friends can read and play together? This can be an interesting and unorthodox way to market the product. 

Actionable insight:

Therefore, our "Conversation Book" will be marketed as a "question game to play with friends", which produces meaningful conversations about hypothetical life scenarios, helps you meet people, learn more about them and yourself, and even practice your English speaking skills if you're learning a language.  

A Note on Using Other Tools: Helium 10, Jungle Scout, and Seller App

There are of course other tools you can use to perform keyword research on Amazon: the most popular among them are Helium 10, Jungle Scout, and Seller App. 

The main difference between those tools and InfraNodus is that they just offer long lists of keywords without revealing the patterns. So, for instance, in our case, we will see that when people search for "conversation books" they also search for "conversation books for couples", but we don't understand what are the recurring patterns of demand. For instance, we will miss out the fact that many of long-tail keywords use the term "difficult" or that people also search for the terms such as "friends".

Most of the users will just get the top 10 words, so if your competitor is using the same tool, you'll target your customer in a similar way increasing the competition.

Moreover, most of these tools don't give you insights about the terms used in the market's supply. You can get a list of the books available for a certain search query, but you'll have to understand the patterns manually, reading the book titles one by one, trying to piece together the terms that top sellers use. 

InfraNodus, on the other hand, will show you not only the books that you can find for a search query, but also which patterns of words tend to be used most often, revealing the patterns of search and helping you understand how most people describe their products. You can then look for the gaps in those descriptions, trying to write your marketing copy in a way that spans across the existing offers on the market while addressing the customers' demand patterns.

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