AM When a shopper starts typing in the Amazon search box, Amazon suggests completions based on what people search for. Those suggestions are the most direct public signal of the words buyers use. This tool collects them for your seed keyword, expands them letter by letter, and helps you turn the useful ones into backend search terms that fit Amazon's byte limit.
You get 20 free lookups per day. No Amazon account or Seller Central login is needed.
How to use the Amazon Keyword Tool
- Enter a seed keyword that describes the product plainly, such as
yoga matordog water bottle. - Choose the marketplace you sell on: amazon.com, .co.uk, .ca, .de, .fr, .it, .es, .in, .ae, .com.au, .co.jp or .com.mx.
- Run the lookup. The tool pulls the suggestions for the seed itself, then for the seed followed by each letter from A to Z, and lists every unique suggestion.
- Scan the list and mark the phrases that match your product. Ignore the ones that describe a different product.
- Export the list as CSV to sort and tag it in a spreadsheet.
- Open the backend search terms builder, paste the words you want to target, and trim until the byte counter is under the limit.
What the results mean
Each row is a phrase Amazon suggested to shoppers on that marketplace. A phrase appearing means enough people search it for Amazon to offer it as a completion. That is useful, but it is not a volume number.
Warning: This tool shows what shoppers type, not how many of them type it. There are no search volume, click or conversion numbers here, and the order of suggestions is not a ranking by volume. For volume, use the Search Query Performance and Brand Analytics reports in Seller Central if you are brand registered, or a paid research tool.
How to read the list
- Attribute words (thick, non slip, extra long, for women) tell you which features buyers filter by. Put the ones that apply in your title and bullets.
- Use-case words (for hot yoga, for travel, for kids) show situations buyers shop for. They are good candidates for bullets and backend terms.
- Brand names in suggestions show which brands dominate. Do not use other brands' names in your listing or backend terms.
- Different products that share a word (a "yoga mat bag" when you sell mats) should be dropped, not stuffed in.
How it works
The tool sends your seed keyword to Amazon's public search suggestion service for the marketplace you picked, the same service that fills the dropdown under the search box. A to Z expansion repeats the request with your seed plus each letter ("yoga mat a", "yoga mat b" and so on), which surfaces long-tail phrases the first request does not show. Duplicates are removed and the results are listed in the order found.
Each marketplace has its own suggestions in its own language, so run a separate lookup for each country you sell in. A German listing needs German terms from amazon.de, not translations of US phrases.
The backend search terms builder
Amazon gives each listing a hidden Search Terms field (called generic keywords in some flat files) for words that do not fit naturally in the title and bullets. Amazon's Seller Central help limits this field to less than 250 bytes, so 249 bytes is the most you can use, and terms beyond the limit may not be indexed. Paste your words into the builder and it will:
- remove repeated words, since Amazon only needs each word once;
- join words with single spaces, which is all the separation Amazon needs;
- count bytes, not characters, and warn you when you pass 249.
Bytes and characters differ outside plain English. Letters a to z, digits and spaces take 1 byte each. Accented letters such as é or ü take 2 bytes, and Japanese characters take 3, so a German or Japanese field fills up faster than it looks. The limit shown in Seller Central for your marketplace and category is the final word, so check it there before you save.
| Include in search terms | Leave out |
|---|---|
| Synonyms and alternate names (mat, pad) | Words already in your title or bullets |
| Use cases and audiences | Other brands' names and ASINs |
| Abbreviations and alternate spellings | Temporary claims like "new" or "on sale" |
| Local language variants for your marketplace | Subjective claims like "best" or "amazing" |
Best practices
- Title first, backend last. Put the most important phrases where shoppers can read them: title, bullets and description. Backend terms are for the leftovers.
- Build one listing at a time. Run a lookup per product and per marketplace instead of reusing one keyword list for a whole catalog.
- Check relevance by searching. Type a candidate phrase into Amazon and look at the results. If they are not products like yours, the phrase will not convert.
- Cross-check other channels. If you also sell on Etsy or your own store, the Etsy tag generator and Niche Research (which mines Google autocomplete) show how the same buyers search elsewhere.
For bigger jobs, Marketplace Research in AM Jarvis mines Amazon suggestions across marketplaces and turns them into a full listing: title, bullets, description and backend search terms. Before you commit to a product, run its price and costs through the profit margin calculator.
Common mistakes
- Treating suggestions as volume. A suggestion proves demand exists, not how much.
- Counting characters instead of bytes. A field that shows 245 characters can be well over 249 bytes if it contains accented letters.
- Adding commas. Commas and other punctuation use bytes and add nothing. Spaces are enough.
- Stuffing unrelated terms. Irrelevant terms bring clicks that do not convert, which does not help the listing.