Children's books online: how parents search, and what each book page should answer

A parent who has read the same story ten nights running types "books for 4 year old in Hindi". A grandparent searches "gift book for 7 year old who likes animals". Both want three answers before the price: is it right for this age, is it in our language, and what happens in it. Many book pages show only a cover, a price and the publisher's blurb. File every book by a narrow age band and a reading level. State the language plainly. Then write two or three lines of your own on what happens in it.

What parents actually type

Parents search for children's books in a handful of patterns. Each one needs a filter, a page or a line of text to land on.

These phrases are typical, not measured. Replace them with your own: open the queries report in Search Console and sort for words like "year old", "Hindi" or "bedtime", and scroll back through the WhatsApp enquiries your counter has had since the last school term. The wording parents actually used is the wording for your titles and filters. Read the right-hand column too. Almost nothing on it is a better cover photograph. Parents need information you already have and have not written down.

Age band is not enough: say who holds the book

The age printed on a book is a wide range set by the publisher, such as "3 to 8". A filter built on that range puts half the store under every age. Narrow it yourself to two or three years, then add a reading level, which answers the question an age cannot: who holds the book.

• Read to me: an adult reads, the child listens and looks. Board books and most picture books.
• Read with me: the child joins in with some words. Large print, short lines, repetition.
• I can read it: early readers the child manages alone.
• Chapter books: longer stories read alone over several sittings.

Two more facts settle most doubts. The format, because a two-year-old chews and needs a board book. And the time it takes to read aloud. A parent picking a bedtime book wants to know whether it is a five-minute story or a twenty-minute one before they agree to "just one more".

Toy sellers face the same age problem, and our note on structuring a toy catalogue by age sets out the filters in more detail.

The book note: what to write and what to leave out

The publisher's blurb appears word for word on every site that sells the book. It gives search engines no reason to prefer your page, and it tells the parent nothing new. Write your own note, short, in the same order for every book. Here is one for an imaginary picture book.

What happens: a child in Madurai loses a grandmother's brass bell in the temple crowd and retraces her steps through the flower market to find it.

Good for: ages 4 to 6, read to me.

Language: English, with Tamil words explained in the pictures.

Read-aloud time: about eight minutes.

Parents should know: a short scene where the child is lost and frightened, resolved quickly.

As a gift: hardback, sturdy enough to pass on to a younger cousin.

"Parents should know" is the line that earns trust. A note saying a pet dies, that a retelling of an epic includes a battle, or that a new-sibling story shows a jealous child, lets a parent choose with open eyes. A mythology book needs the same treatment. For example: "Retells one episode of the Ramayana in short rhyming lines, for ages 5 to 7. Gentle: the battle is hinted at, not drawn. A children's retelling, not a temple text." Leave out the adjectives (delightful, magical, a must-read). Leave out claims about what the book will do for vocabulary or confidence too. You cannot know that, and parents can tell.

Collection pages that match the searches

Every row in the table that says "collection" is a page worth building: "Books for 4 year olds", "Hindi picture books", "Books about starting school". Give each a title that matches the phrase, two opening sentences that answer the search directly, and your picks with one line each on why.

Build a collection only when at least eight books genuinely fit it and parents search for the phrase.

For example: a Pune bookshop with three languages

Take an invented case: an online children's bookshop in Pune carrying Marathi, Hindi and English titles from small publishers. The catalogue was arranged by publisher, and the age filter used the printed ranges. A parent filtering for a four-year-old saw most of the store. The Marathi books drew almost no search traffic, because no page said "Marathi" anywhere a search could read it.

The mistake was trusting the publisher's metadata to do the selling. Undoing it took one person a few weeks, and the shop's best-selling English titles slipped down the menu while it did. Every book was re-tagged with a two-year band and a reading level, and the Marathi titles got their notes first, because nobody else was writing them. Three collection pages went up: Marathi picture books, bilingual books for 3 to 5, and books about starting school. The publisher pages stayed in the menu, lower down, for the teachers who shop that way.

What to do next

A bestseller every marketplace carries will not be won by a better note, so start with the books a marketplace does not stock well: your regional-language titles and the small publishers' picture books. Write the note for five of them, in the order above, and show the five to a parent you know. Which would they order, and why? Choosing and writing the collection pages is on-page SEO work, and children's books sit in our e-commerce sales and marketing section. For a hand with the filters, notes and pages, tell us what you need.