Metadata intelligence for publishers
Books succeed when readers can find them.
Kadaxis is an independent metadata intelligence firm. For fifteen years we have worked with the world's largest publishing houses, and the most distinctive independent presses, on one discipline: the keyword and metadata work that determines whether a book is found on Amazon.
Begin a conversation →- Fifteen years.
- More than thirty-five publishing houses.
- Hundreds of thousands of titles.
Approach
A single discipline, refined.
Readers search for books in language that is rarely the same as the language in publisher catalogs. For fifteen years we have specialized in closing that gap, combining retailer search data, editorial judgment, and proprietary research methods developed across hundreds of thousands of titles. Each engagement is list-specific. Nothing we deliver is templated.
Read about our methodology →Notes from the Field
Occasional writing on metadata, discoverability, and the economics of publishing online. Sent a few times a year. Read on site, or have it sent to you.
RESEARCH Your book description is a search surface
Descriptions are written for readers who already found the book. New Kadaxis research shows Amazon also indexes them: phrases appearing nowhere else on a listing surface the book in organic search about 1.6% of the time, roughly 260 times the matched-control rate. The effect is real, small, and strongest for distinctive language.
RESEARCH Amazon keywords work. Most keywords that publishers create don't.
Plenty of people in publishing suspect keywords do not work. Recent Kadaxis research shows why: only about eight percent of publisher-assigned keywords rank in Amazon search. Keywords built for 2,000 books from a recent Kadaxis client ranked forty-two percent of the time.
METHOD When to put "book" in a keyword
The old advice was simple. Never spend keyword space on product descriptors, because the retailer already knows the product is a book. That rule is too crude. Product descriptors carry real retrieval value when they tell the search system what kind of object the shopper wants. They turn into waste only when they repeat what the catalog already supplies or force an unnatural phrase.
METHOD Keyword portfolio ordering
A keyword portfolio is an ordered coverage system. The first keyword is measured against the book's visible metadata. The second, against that metadata plus the first keyword. Every position is judged by what it adds over everything above it, so a lower-scoring keyword can outrank a higher-scoring one when it reaches readers the rest of the portfolio has missed.
Kadaxis was founded in 2010 and named BookTech Company of the Year at the FutureBook Awards in 2016. We contributed to the Book Industry Study Group's 2018 keywords best-practices standard. After several years operating with a smaller list, we are taking on new publishing partners again, with refined methodology and proprietary tooling developed across hundreds of thousands of titles.
If you are a publisher considering metadata work, we would like to hear from you.
Contact Kadaxis →