When customers are looking for your products, can they find your shop?

Are you getting found quickly in Etsy search results?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) can be a confusing topic to maneuver, but it's so important to get straight for making Etsy sales.

Richie Peplin, the co-founder of Marmalead, an Etsy SEO and market research tool, shares with us The Top Five Ways To Get Your Shop Seen On Etsy With SEO!

Etsy has grown a lot over the years and became a competitive place.

It’s no longer enough to just list it and have buyers knocking down your door.

With over 30 million listings, you need to work both hard and smart.

1.  Compete in markets where you can be found!

Far too frequently we see shops trying to compete only in huge markets with broad keywords. This poses at least three main problems:

Buyers are people and people are weird

Yes, we searched for “gift for her”, but then we get overwhelmed by the results.

There are so many and we’re just not good at filtering through that much data.

Unless you have a very stand out item like one of our customers that makes hilarious greeting cards and coffee mugs, which I can spot anywhere, you’re likely to be ignored in the overwhelming barrage of jewelry and t-shirts.

The next move? We search something more specific and that’s where you want to be found.

When you compete with 500,000 listings, that’s a lot of competition constantly moving around

They’re selling, re-listing, tweaking.

You’re trying to get your one grain of sand to stand out from the whole beach.

Yes, it’s possible to rank highly for broad keywords, it happens everyday.

It’s just more challenging to stay there.

Buyers searching for broad keywords don’t know what they’re buying yet

Etsy knows this and actually programmed against it.

Today when I search “gift for her”, I’m not presented with results at the top but instead suggestions to make my search more specific.

Etsy wants to steer me down the path to Jewelry, Accessories, Home & Living, Clothing, or Bags & Purses.

Why? Because they know I’ll burn out shopping and end up leaving without buying anything.

2.  Title and Tag match

Etsy search needs some help understanding what your listing is all about.

A little hack to help it along is to include a keyword in both your Tags and Title of the listing.

This provides a stronger match because it sees the same exact phrase in both places so it must be more relevant.

Another lesser known fact is that Etsy weighs the front of your title heavier in search than the end of the title.

Again, this assumes the most important words comes first.

Tag order however is irrelevant.

3.  Keeping listings fresh (renewing more than your competition)

Newness does matter.

We like to call it a tie breaker.

When Etsy sees a lot of well optimized listings for given search, it has to decide which to put on top.

How do they handle such a dilemma when several are excellent matches?

Newer ones win. Newer means either a fresh new listing or a renewed listing.

How new your listing needs to be depends on the market you’re in.

If it’s an incredibly highly competitive and active market like “gift for her”, where listings are added and renewed constantly (because there are 626,000 listings), you’ll need to renew more often than a market with 20,000 listings to compete with.

4.  Choosing the best keywords

It’s all about identifying the keywords that get the most attention and are also the best fit for your products.

Attention means views and favorites on Etsy; not Google or anywhere else.

Etsy is a unique place. If I’m looking for handmade, Etsy is the only option.

It all starts with views.

Until a shopper views your listing, you don’t even have a shot at closing the sale. At Marmalead, we use views per week (views/wk) and like to see keywords with views/wk over 60.

An even better sign of engagement is favoriting. Shoppers favorite the items they really like, those items pop up on their home screen so they better like them.

We like to see 8 or more favs/wk on average for a good keyword.

60 views and 8 favorites don’t sound big on their own but that’s per listing. When you have over 100 listings, we’re talking 6,000+ views and 800+ favorites per week.

5.  Implementing the buckets strategy to maximize views

I’ve been playing around with ways to organize the chaos of managing 100’s of listings all targeting specific keywords.

I landed on a framework I’ve coined the Buckets Strategy.

The Bucket Strategy:

The idea is to have one of your listings on each of the first 12 pages of Etsy search.

This way you maximize time in front of shoppers.

All you need to get started are the keywords you want to be found with, and your listings.

Each keyword becomes a “bucket”.

Listings go in the buckets.

Single listings can go in multiple buckets, especially if you make two listings for the same product in Etsy.

This is probably best illustrated with an example:

Bucket #1 could be “Silver Starfish”.

I’ll then look at my products and decide which 12 are the best fit for “silver starfish”.

Once I have my 12, I’ll either make new listings or edit existing ones to target the keyword.

I’ll put “silver starfish” in the very front of my title, and use it as a tag so that I have title and tag match as explained in #2 above.

This is a guest post by Richie Peplin from Marmalead.com.

Marmalead is the best Etsy SEO and Market Research tool for serious sellers.
Richie and Gordon built Marmalead because they couldn’t find a decent way to figure out the best keywords for their laser etched wooden coasters.