Again about Etsy. Correct tags as a path to the knowledge of Nirvana
She travels around Italy and she does not always have Wi-Fi, then I will publish this post on her behalf. She will be back very soon and will be able to answer all your questions :)
Foreword: ax porridge.
As usual, in such matters, a preface is indispensable, which would explain to you, dear readers, why I advise with such confidence in such a controversial area as promotion of a store on ETSY. Why is everyone who is not lazy talking about this topic at all? Why do I think that I will do it better than others?
A lot of people have been asking me lately what is the best way to promote a store on ETSY. I honestly tried to express my opinion to people and gave more or less specific advice. Following my recommendations, some people got good results, but often, after trying to change something and not getting immediate feedback, I was told something like this: it does not work because ... And then an impressive list of reasons followed, in the first place in which usually flaunts high competition: they say, you have a unique product that is sold by itself in the absence of rivals. Believe me: the work I did was enormous, and it depended little on the presence or absence of competitors. I tirelessly experimented with my store, starting with the style of photos, product descriptions, tags, achieving optimal results that would correspond to my concept of promoting a store on ETSY, until I reached an acceptable level. And I had to do the biggest and hardest work on myself.
Looking at those who fail along the way, most often I get the impression that these people do not take their job seriously enough. No offense, friends, but the promotion of a store on ETSY is by no means reduced to compiling trades, an online store is a serious, rather specific business, the construction of which must be thoughtfully and consistently. I am sometimes cited as an example of successful salespeople who seem to have done nothing special to succeed to this extent. Why, I myself have a couple of acquaintances who are owners of very successful stores who claim that they were just lucky. Just some kind of mysticism, only a leprechaun and a rabbit's foot are missing. By the way, these are jewelry stores (ah-ah-ah, save me, help me, this is fierce competition!) Smiling skeptically, I allow myself to think that luck may have a place to be to one degree or another, but the essence of the success of these comrades is in that they managed to build the brand right purely intuitively, without realizing why they are so successful.
I followed a different path, a thorny path of experiments, analysis, theoretical research, trial and error. Describing my system, I am unlikely to reveal something fundamentally new to you. Almost everything that you read below can be found in one form or another from other advisers, completely free or for a lot of money. Having succeeded on ETSY, I made an important (albeit obvious) conclusion for myself about the need for a systematic approach. You see, there are two troubles with information: it is either too little or too much. The porridge that is boiled in the head of a novice Etsian often consists of very controversial ingredients. Everything that is in the house is thrown into this dish, like into an Irish stew: advice from the ETSY administration, rumors, instructions from friends, own (often unfounded) ideas...
To build a successful store on ETSY, first of all, you need to put things in order in your own head - usually you don’t reach this thought right away. My store lay dead for a long time, bringing nothing but a headache: I had no idea which side to approach it from. The fact is that opening a store on ETSY is easy: adding a product, uploading photos, and everything else can be understood on an intuitive level, a basic knowledge of English is enough, and you can do without it. I shoveled a lot of material in search of useful information, but it was extremely difficult to put it together and put it into practice. In this confusion, in addition to outright nonsense, most often I ran into unconditionally reasonable, but completely obvious platitudes. Yes, for sure, you yourself have seen thousands of times aphorisms like: "Your photos must be beautiful, and your product must be unique!" Thanks a lot, damn it... And on your behalf too.
Dismantling the boiling porridge in my head, I patiently singled out individual useful elements of this brew from forums, manuals, communities, teams and other sources. These hand-picked ingredients for success stacked up on their own: tips for writing tags and titles, tips for engaging outside audiences with blogs, and social networks, insistent demands for an active social life on ETSY itself in the form of participating in teams, compiling a huge number of treasures, adding other stores to favorites and a bunch of other information.
Unfortunately, all these recommendations (written, moreover, as a rule, to put it mildly, in a naive style intended "for blondes") did not answer my questions: how the system works, and why it works the way it does. All of the above, of course, has the right to life, I do all this myself and it really helps in attracting new customers, but the development of third-party resources and social activity are rather secondary in relation to the promotion of the store on the ETSY portal itself, and the absence of all this is not at all dooms your store to failure.
Shopping simulation.
Gradually, I realized that in my quest to believe harmony with algebra, I would have to thoroughly clear my brain with sulfuric acid and get out of the seller's skin for a while in order to look at ETSY through the eyes of a buyer. I shook my head and magically flew out of it all my "knowledge" about ETSY, all my thoughts about business, all my ideas about how to properly build a store. Having repeated the mantra "I'm a customer, I'm just looking for a gift, I'm a customer" a dozen times, I went shopping. I opened home page ETSY to buy... well, jewelry. Earrings. I want earrings. Earrings. But give me those earrings of yours... (Of course, the inner businessman did not fall asleep completely and commented on what he saw from somewhere in the subconscious. For convenience, I will quote these remarks in brackets - they are the whole point, IMHO.)
ETSY has helpfully handed me these earrings of yours in the amount of almost one and a half million. 250 pages of unique product with beautiful photos. (Well, not without exception, but even if one tenth of this goodness is not made with your feet and is normally photographed ... This is the abyss, somewhere in which your magic needlework is also floundering, dear reader, if you suddenly trade with earrings.)
I am a buyer. I came for pretty earrings, I don't care if they're 250 pages. I start reviewing a product by flipping through page after page and putting aside the product I like. I am a very patient buyer, I am looking for a good thing for a dear person, maybe even for myself. That's why I break right down to the fifteenth page. (This is not just a patient buyer, this is some kind of angel. For an ordinary buyer, the choice will happen much faster. Everything that we have observed so far is a kind of competition for search engine optimization. Those who won it are on the first pages in the search. The rest are in the abyss, where only the most meticulous and, perhaps, not the easiest client will descend.)
By this time, I had already put aside a few little things that looked to me, there is a choice. Now I will examine the product closely. (Come on, come on, and what got into the favorites? Oh, yes, these are just pretty photos. She didn’t really look at the damn thing on the general page, she just took away what caught her appearance. In a word, if on the previous stage was a competition in search engine optimization, now you got into the competition of artistic photography.I hope you got it, but more on that later.)
And only now, having examined the photos, I read the description of the goods, I am interested in the timing and cost of delivery, and so on. If something does not suit me, I throw it out without regret - I have five more pieces open in other tabs. You can read reviews from previous clients. I choose the item I like best and pull out my overstuffed purse. (That's great... You mean, the handicraft competition is just about to start? I'm shocked...)
Work on mistakes.
This is where my inner businessman can get out of the brackets to sum up the exercise. We got quite interesting, I would even say non-trivial results. By simulating the process of shopping (if you enjoy it, you can also simulate it as well), I found that overall success on ETSY is made up of winning in three separate sports disciplines. Simplifying everything to the very essence, we can say that your product should be:
And now we will analyze in detail these three elephants on which the flat Earth of your future success rests; let's look at them under a microscope, so to speak, to understand what is hidden under their thick gray skin.
Elephant first.
The first elephant is called "search engine optimization". Do not be afraid of this animal: translated into our, girlish, it means a set of measures (here, for sure, the most girlish girls with a sigh put off reading :-)) to raise the positions of your product in the results of the ETSY search engine for certain user requests.
No matter how good your earrings are, they need to be seen by the user who typed in the word "earrings" in the search box, and not somewhere in the combs near Baghdad, but on the first pages. I am not a mathematician, but the chances of your earrings being seen by the client are melting on each subsequent page almost exponentially. The first page is great. The second one is very good. The third one is acceptable. From the fourth to the tenth - lousy, but you can live. After the tenth, "pages of despair" begin, which only include maniacs who are difficult to please at all, private detectives looking for you personally, users with stuck mouse buttons, and you yourself - with eyes wide with horror.
At this point, you should squint severely and begin the search engine optimization process. This is a very broad and, at the same time, very specific activity in which professionals earn a lot of money. But you don't need to be a professional who knows this business from cover to cover, you need to master the tools used on a specific site - on ETSY. And, first of all, it is the tags and the title.
Naturally, the above search exercise is rather sketchy - climbing to the first page of a search for such a general tag as "earrings" is not easy. At the same time, you are probably making not just earrings, but special earrings that are somehow different from the rest. You need to make sure that your tags reveal the essence of your product on the one hand, and that users search for products using such tags in general - on the other hand. That is, your tags should fall somewhere between "earrings" (which are searched by millions of users, but thousands of sellers have this tag, which leads to fierce competition) and "orange-purple earrings with the image of the Viceroy of India" (which are produced only by you and the younger wife of the viceroy of India, but which are wanted by about ... no one).
By trial and error, you need to decide on the tags that will take you to the first pages of the search - and not just any search, but a fairly common one. I know it looks like a difficult task, because it is not an easy task, but from my experience I know for sure that it is possible. I've redone the tags and titles so many times I can't count until I get the result I'm happy with. But how to understand that the result is good? This is where statistics come to the rescue.
Here the standard question usually pops up: what, in fact, is considered good statistics? Good statistics are relative, not absolute, in our case, the most important indicator is the increase in views of your store compared to what it was before the changes.
In general, statistics is a complex and multifaceted science, and again, professionals make a lot of money on it. But you don't need it. You have ETSY's internal tools - I mean ETSY Stats - and external ones like Google Analyticscs. But you don't really need it right now. All that is required of you is manual monitoring: you need to check daily after writing tags and names on which page your product is in the search for the keyword. If you have achieved the rise of your product from the "pages of despair" at least to the pages "it is possible to live" or "acceptable" - this is a step towards victory.
So, having tamed the first elephant, we tie it by its trunk so that it does not run away - in the sense that monitoring must continue in order to separate accidents from patterns. For example, you may enjoy the good statistics of your four-leaf clover earrings, but if it turns out that you monitored the statistics on the eve of St. Patrick's Day, then your joy will be short-lived.
Elephant second.
The second elephant is closely related to the third. Both of them belong to the branding family. Girly girls can skip the next paragraph, because in it I will say a few general words (long and foreign) about this capacious concept.
Brand(English) brand- "brand") - a term in marketing, symbolizing a set of information about a company, product or service. The terms "brand" and "branding" are extensive, they include such concepts as a logo, name, visual elements - photos, banner, and much, much more. If you search for literature on the topic of "branding", you can find a large number of thematic books. Of course, we are not interested in personality branding or territorial branding, but there is enough information on the topic of online branding.
Girls, come back! I'll get to the point. The careful training of the previous elephant brought your products by the tail to the first pages of the search. It seems to me that in my "purchase simulation" I have shown quite clearly what is happening at this stage. The competition of amateur and professional photographers begins. Here I'm afraid to seem banal, but there's nothing to be done: your photos must still be of high quality. Moreover, on the one hand, they should not hurt the eye with a discrepancy with the general "Etsian" aesthetics, and on the other hand, they should stand out from the general mass of competitors.
It is clear that everyone has their own ideas about beauty and their own understanding of what photos can be considered high-quality. Everyone takes pictures to the best of their ability. If you have the opportunity to hire a professional photographer or take professional pictures yourself - great! There is no such possibility - look for a way to do it nice photos with minimal investment. Just try to do the best you can. After the photos are uploaded to the site, find them in the search and evaluate how they look against the general background, whether they stand out enough. Often, professional shots have to be redone, because they are lost in the general mass of the same high-quality, but stylistically the same type of photographs.
And, of course, we have to admit that this elephant will not give up without a fight: the task before you is not an easy one, moreover, it is complicated by the human factor. As they say, everyone thinks they have taste, but not everyone can have taste... You may need to rethink your ideas or, for example, resort to the help of people whose taste you trust. You can ask your husband to say (only honestly!), How does he like your latest photos. And make him a scandal afterward with breaking dishes, because this savage does not understand photography at all if there is not a single boob on it! :-)
In general, discussions in the aesthetic field are one of the bloodiest and most merciless types of showdowns that can only be seen among our colleagues. Therefore, you will have to periodically remind yourself that you are fighting for the result: only an improvement in the view statistics will show you that you are on the right track. I personally redid my photos ten times. I can’t say that I have achieved perfection, but from a certain moment my statistics began to suit me, and I wish you the same.
So, two elephants are standing in a stall, merrily waving their trunks. You have been seen and noticed. What's next? And only now, oddly enough, the competition of goods begins.
Third elephant.
To be honest, the third bishop is rather mysterious. For it is at this stage that the issue of concluding a deal is decided. It is difficult to say unequivocally why the client will choose your product from five to ten selected from the total mass. Many factors play a role here, some of which are so purely personal that they are at the junction with psychology. Is it worth saying that professionals make good fortunes on this science too? But we do not need to crawl into such a jungle, we will try to catch our third elephant at the edge, where he is still grazing on the lawn of the knowable.
The first, in my opinion, the most important part is still the photos. It's no secret that some photos are more "selling" than others. How they differ is not very important, this understanding comes with experience.
The second factor is the product description. I personally changed product descriptions three times. Again, it seems to me that it is far from perfection, but the purchased books on writing "selling" texts have significantly advanced me. I strongly recommend looking for such literature or information on the Internet. And, of course, the description must be correct, it must not contain factual errors, it must not mislead the client or artificially inflate his expectations - all this can come to you later, when a disappointed client leaves his negative feedback, which at the initial stage can be very hurt you a lot.
Then everything else comes: the adequacy of the price of the goods, Policies of your store, delivery terms, packaging, the ability to find in your store "the same, but with mother-of-pearl buttons" and other more or less important things. Naturally, one of the most attractive factors is that you have a certain number of sales (the more - the easier the buyer will agree to unlock his chests of gold) and positive feedback, the presence of a large number of fans, etc.
Success algorithm: my formula.
So, having sorted out the most important components of success, I will try to arrange your elephants in the form of some kind of magical graphical "road map" to amuse my love of precise wording and make it easier to understand the big picture.
Store building:
-photos
-names
-tags
- descriptions
1
"High" monitoring:
daily check
your statistics
shop
(2 weeks to start)
2
High stats:
most likely your goods are
on the first pages of the search
and your photos are enough
high quality and attractive
3
Low stats:
likely
the problem is
in search engine optimization
or photo quality
4
Low sales:
or lack thereof:
if you have just opened
it's worth waiting a bit.
If not, then you should consider
about the rebranding of the store
change product description
think about pricing
5
High sales:
congratulations to you and your elephants.
Mission Complete
you can safely think
about further development
6
"Low" monitoring:
daily check,
on which search pages
your goods are located
7
problem in product definition,
perhaps too few people
looking for this type of product
for these tags:
change tags and titles
to more popular or
more relevant
8
Your goods are
on the first pages of the search
9
The problem is in the photos
they are not attractive enough
for site visitors:
change photos
10
Your goods are
in the pages of desperation:
you need to work
on search engine optimization
above tags and titles
Tags are a huge topic! As I met her, I never cease to be surprised, learning and understanding more and more. It takes a couple of hours to sit down and write everything I know. I don't have them yet. But right now I'll save a link here, which helps me a lot.
I found it, started using it, and then put it somewhere in the jungle of my bookmark folders. I searched repeatedly, got frustrated because I couldn't find it. My principle of putting things on the shelves failed. And today I found it! Hooray! I’ll post it here right away, without putting it off for the day when I sit down to write a big post about tags.
We go to the main page and in the window that opens, enter the tag we are interested in and start the search. I took one of my "patches" tags because most of the items in my store are patches.
In a few seconds we have the result.
We see the first page of the search with all the results. At the top it is indicated that there are 50,000+ results. In fact, today there are almost 250,000 results. They just don’t show more than 50,000 here. Well, okay) We need the first pages. We will study competitors.
And now about the beauty of the resource.
We see not just a search result and a specific work. We see all the tags of this work. I used to open each store separately and look for these tags in the listings, find new ideas and directions, thinking about what can be applied to my work. Now everything is right in front of your eyes. Just scroll down the page. Study and study... Blind copying of tags is very unwise. More than once I have seen stories when beginners copy all the tags without understanding all the subtleties, and then they get into a mess. In general, this is a completely stupid way. But thinking and deriving general tags, and then small subtags in their categories is very necessary.
This is the first tab - listings.
In the second tags tab, you can see all the main tags and their distribution by popularity in % ratio. 
Here is such a simple but very helpful resource.
Tags are one of the main themes of Etsy shop life. They must be thought through. They need to make time. Dedicate constantly. The other day I was wondering how, in a year from the creation of the store, I just now discovered a couple of tags that I need to use in any way))
Successful testing and use to all.
Keywords are the most important tool for success on Etsy. If you have a great product, good service, but few views and visits to the store - perhaps the fault of poorly chosen key phrases.
I have already had several articles on the blog on the topic. And about that.
However, I am often asked the question, “Why am I not finding my products in the search?” or “Why do I find myself on the front pages for many phrases (and these phrases, by the way, I borrowed from successful stores), but nevertheless, almost no visitors come to me?”
That is why today I am opening a new section on the blog - on a specific topic.
Who will benefit from this
- sellers who have little understanding of how Etsy search works and where to look for “working” keywords
- sellers who want to find unoccupied niches by competitors
- sellers who want to increase the number of visits and views in their store
What the report contains
Collections of phrases, or a report, are Excel files (XLS) that contain several hundred queries on a particular topic.
Each excel file consists of 5 columns:
- key phrase (search query)
- number of competitor listings on Etsy that have the phrase in their title or tags
- the number of searches for this phrase per month on Google (more precisely, Google's forecast for the next 30 days)
- number of characters (you can immediately understand whether the entire phrase will be included in the tag, where the maximum is 20 characters)
- number of words in a phrase (additional information)
Report example.
Since there are no statistics on the number of requests for a particular phrase on Etsy, you have to rely on third-party data. For example, on the statistics of Google - as the main search engine in the world.
That is why it should be borne in mind that if, according to a report in Google, a phrase is searched 6,000 times, this does not mean at all that the same number of searches are made on Etsy. This column rather serves to compare some phrases with others: which of them is more popular and which is less. And which ones are almost never searched even on Google.
What phrases are not in the report
There are no "brand" phrases in the files (with the words "amazon", "ebay", "gucci", "versace", etc.).
Also, they do not contain phrases with the word “pattern” (for example, “knit pattern”), since this is a separate topic, and I plan to make a separate report on it.
What reports are available now
On this moment files on 3 topics are ready:
- requests that contain a word (490 rubles)
- requests with a phrase (490 rubles)
- requests with a phrase (350 rubles)
Why is this report format good?
I believe that just a set of phrases / queries on your subject is useless in itself. Because it's not clear:
- How often do people search for this phrase
- How many competitors are promoting this phrase on Etsy
For example, I sell backpacks. And I saw in the listing of a competitor the phrase multi-leather backpack. I thought it would suit me well, since my backpack is also made of different types of leather.
But in reality, such a request will most likely be useless, since Google data, almost no one is looking for such a phrase. This means that there is essentially no benefit from high positions.
Another case - I sew dresses. And I decided to choose a request for a new listing red dress, since I have a red dress, and this query is searched on Google more than 200,000 times a month.
I add it to the listing - and I can't figure out why I'm not in the Etsy search for this phrase. And the thing is, I didn't take into account the competition.
Now there are more than 16,000 products on Etsy that have this phrase in the title or tags. And this is 335 pages of search results (despite the fact that Etsy only shows 250). Many products have sales, views, favorites - that is, a positive rating has already been gained in the eyes of the site.
Therefore, it is not surprising that according to this very popular phrase it will be difficult for me to compete with “competitors”. And, as a result, it is almost impossible to break through top pages search results.
In general, Etsy shows that 130,000 products match the query "red dress". But only 16,000 of them contain this phrase in the title and/or tags. This means that they are my direct competitors for high positions in the search. And this is the number I take to determine the competition.
What phrases to choose then?
I believe that you need to focus on those phrases and create those products that:
- Searched quite often (albeit not as often as a red dress)
- with few competitors
That is why I decided to make such a report format with key phrases.
With it, you can decide on phrases that will make it easy to break into the first or second page of search results.
For example, the report below shows that although the phrase on line 24 is often searched for, there are a lot of competitors for it. Unlike queries on line 18, 20 and especially 22. Here they should be considered in the first place: write them in the headings and tags of the listings. And if you do not have such goods, then create and see what the demand will be.
What keywords to choose? - Etsy relevant search strategies. beauty spot
wrote on September 5th, 2011
I was already frightened by what title I wrote here :) Well, nothing, we are all creative people, but in almost any creative profession there is a slightly boring (or maybe not?) technical part.
In this article, I have collected my thoughts and doubts on the topic of the same relevant search, namely, determining the main directions in choosing keywords.
Keyword topics
- Manufacturing techniques.
After reviewing a number of stores and changes in their names and tags, I noticed that sellers quite often choose the technique they use for manufacturing as their main key phrase. On the one hand, this is logical, since it is a direct difference from all other things and often says at least something about the design. But "something" is the maximum, unfortunately.
For instance, decoupage- yes, this is a certain principle of work and things with its use have something in common. But still, it doesn't say anything specific about the thing itself, what is it? Well, decoupage, yes. But that's all.
From the buyer side: if I want to buy some thing, I don't think in what technique it is made. Often, I don't even know the names of all the possible techniques. So I won't search felt scarf or polymer clay necklace. I think that the main part of people, far from making things (read, buyers), will not either. They just want something they like.
On a note: if you choose similar terms as keywords, you should take into account that in this way you are counting on people who are familiar with techniques and crafting in the search. Most often, these are exactly the same masters. Or just those who are well versed in a niche. The purchasing power among them is not so high, rather it is a competitive environment.
- Styles.
I see very rarely in the leading keywords of stores. Although in my opinion, these keywords can bring quite working traffic. The catch is that it is difficult to navigate the names of styles in English, where some of them have not even come to the Russian environment yet. But still, market research helps a lot in this.
Buyer side: a more sought-after niche in my opinion, as buyers can often look for something in the key of the style they like. For example, shabby chic home decor or steampunk jewelry. This already says at least something about the external part of the thing, its aesthetics and what it will suit. This is especially true if the buyer does not know what exactly he wants to buy, but knows that he likes this style in principle.
On a note: You can find style hints in the listing edit mode, the Style dropdown menu and of course in the current merch.desk.
Also, you should be careful with styles, I think that you need to pay attention only to those that are now on the wave, the rest can be omitted. It is unlikely that they are actively looking for Barocco in the context of things they want to buy, and not for general educational purposes. But here boho or Geek- certainly.
- Colors.
An important parameter for things that is fairly well represented in the keywords of sellers. I think it's also a good idea to use color combinations if they are presented in the product.
Buyer side: color is often a decisive factor in choosing things and it is likely that it can be repelled as a start. I can easily imagine looking for "purple earrings" or "white sweater". I think that in the minds of etsy buyers, this does not change.
On a note: I think that in this context, only the names of the simplest colors in the broadest sense are relevant. Although sometimes some clarifications can have a positive result. Like wine instead of red, or hot pink instead of just pink. But if you still choose a specific shade, it is important that the thing matches it exactly. Since if people are looking for something more specific, they need it, and not something approximately or nearby.
List of colors with names in English.
- Themes and motifs.
Also a good niche if it is embodied in things. For example, for a brooch in the form of a hare, it is logical to choose a key phrase Rabbit Brooch- a not Decoupage brooch. Of course, formal embodiments and symbols are not relevant for all things, but if your products fall into such formal categories, I think they should definitely be used.
- Appointment and reason.
A very popular and large niche, which, by the way, is often missed by sellers. Very often, the buyer picks up a thing not just like that, but for something. He wants, for example, wedding decorations, or the perfect gift for his mother. But the trouble is that he most often does not know how exactly it should look. In terms of gifts, I think you know, people in general are very often at a loss. That's where all sorts come from. for men, for mom, for dad in the hope that the sellers themselves will offer a good option. So it’s worth thinking seriously about targeting aside not that, a for what and whom.
On a note: I think that this group of keywords should be treated especially creatively. Think in as many different directions as possible, coming up with different groups of people according to hobbies, occupations, occupations, social status.
- Materials.
It may be an important point, or it may not be, by the way. Often materials play a critical role for those who are looking for something natural in an eco theme, or classic materials with characteristic textures and appearance, special qualities. It is worth mentioning here clay, porcelain, wood, leather, wool, silver, gold etc. Most simple words who know everything.
Separately, it is worth highlighting, perhaps, the names for stones: the most famous and basic ones can be very good keywords. But what only experts already know, I think, should be left only at the very end.
Everything is simple here and usually sellers easily determine what type of things their products belong to. But still, in very broad categories, gradations are possible, which are worth paying attention to, and perhaps using combinations of categories and subcategories as a key phrase.
A striking example in this case can be subcategories in earrings: ear posts, hoop earrings or, for example, in brooch: cameo brooch. These are subcategories that describe a specific product format. And it is them that the buyer can look for, without taking into account additional parameters. Can you imagine that you want to buy some kind of stud earrings or cameo, without being tied to other parameters? I definitely can.
On a note: To get good relevance for similar queries, it is not enough just to place the product in the specified categories. It is important to work out the phrase like any other keyword - put it in the title and add a clear phrase in one tag.
And now for the strategies.
*I'm not advocating to choose something specific, rather it is information for reflection and, perhaps, to try out different methods in action on your store.
- Different keywords for different things or one phrase for the whole store?
Most often, almost all items in one store have something in common (manufacturing technique or material, for example) and then the seller selects a couple of key phrases for the entire store and duplicates them for all items. Thus, he densely clogs the search for one or two or three queries, having his products on several first pages at once. A customer can easily miss one item from the store, but several at once are less likely.
In contrast, you can work on a strategy where less extensive, but unique keywords are selected for each product, with the expectation of being displayed in completely different search queries. Thus, store products can appear in in large numbers niche searches, they are less numerous and popular, but there are a lot of them in total. For such a strategy, it is good to use colors, themes, occasions, choosing exactly what suits a particular thing.
It's hard to say which works better. But speaking statistically, I think you can rely on the following considerations: add up the number of requests for all the keywords that you use in your store. If there are two, three, four of them, then we add data on them. And in the same way, add numbers for all queries if you choose different keywords for each listing (even if you have 50 or 200 of them). I think the data will give a rough idea of how many people can potentially see your listings in a month. Views are, of course, not sales, but there is still some relationship between them.
For clarity: jewelry or necklace? tree or oak? Poppy or flower? This refers to more general categories of words and specific names.
On the one hand, more general terms cover a wider audience. In the statistics on Google keywords, I have never seen a private keyword outweigh a broader one in terms of the number of requests. But this is Google, not etsy, and yet they have differences in search terms. How everything happens exactly on etsy is still difficult to say.
On the other hand, focusing on something more specific will result in cleaner targeted traffic. Jewelry includes many different types of products, and necklace- only necklace. Accordingly, people who wanted necklace they will find him.
True, here it is worth carefully balancing on the edge - sometimes you can slide into such particularity that the number of requests for a particular phrase will be too small.
- First what, and then what, or vice versa?
Of course, I would like to use all possible keywords, but alas, the place for the name and in the tags is not rubber and therefore you often have to choose which keywords to give preference to: adjectives or nouns.
For example, let's take my listing with men's cufflinks.
Here, working keywords can be, for example, men cufflinks(what?) and rustic wedding(what, for what?). Both keywords with good performance, high number of results and searches per month. But what to choose? Whether to choose the style to which the item belongs, its purpose, color scheme, or a specific name.
One side, men cufflinks- already something concrete enough to serve as an impetus for the purchase of cufflinks. Those who are looking for men's cufflinks will find them.
On the other hand rustic wedding does not in any way determine the type of thing that a person is looking for, but sets the general direction and characterizes some appearance, which my cufflinks also match. It is likely that when looking through the search results for this query, a person will pay attention to cufflinks too, especially if he had not thought about this detail before.
What works better - it is perhaps impossible to determine in advance :)
Instead of output .
Summarizing all of the above, it seems that mastering relevant search is just some kind of incredible task. In fact, yes, in order for the search to give the maximum return, all strategies and keyword options should be tested in the field on your store, keeping abreast of statistics. Keep a close eye on which keywords people come to your store for, and if there is no return from some keywords for some time, try to pick up something different and new. Searching is a never-ending process, as new trends and topics come with the change of seasons, and it is likely that listings will now have to be edited quite often.
I would like to draw your attention to the fact that you should not use key phrases that only indirectly relate to your thing, but this search query is popular. The meaning of relevance is in accordance search query. And if the buyer is looking for something on a specific parameter, everything that does not match it will go unnoticed, even if you display your product on the first page of search results. It’s better to think again and find queries that will be used to search for exactly your thing.
And yet, despite all the hard work and extra work that relevant search has brought with it, I think it's a good thing. After all, if you work hard, it will become an additional powerful tool to attract new customers to your store.
Some of the buyers on Etsy love to "treasure hunt". They flip through dozens of pages, trivia, activity feed until they find something they like. But others know what they're looking for, like a yellow sweater, a vintage teapot, a 15-inch laptop case. It is they who predominantly use search, and for them it was made relevant. To be found by such buyers, you first need to find keywords and phrases, which they will use to search for your store.
Search for keywords and phrases
What aspect of your product is the most important to the buyer? Whether you're selling a necklace or a hat, that's the beginning of your keyword research.
Start typing what you're selling in the search bar and Etsy will give you suggestions for the most popular searches:
Of these, you can choose the most suitable for you, or perhaps these phrases will come up with suitable synonyms.
Review your description for key phrases. You may have already found them.
Ask your friends for advice on what phrase they would briefly describe your product, what they would put in the search bar if they wanted to find it. Two heads are better than one, and a team is better than two :)
And finally, the Google AdWords tool will help evaluate the effectiveness of the found key phrase, based on the fact that the results of Google searches can be correlated with the results of searches on Etsy.
For example, I'm considering a keyword for my store - "hand embroidered". We enter the expected key phrase and the site, the search for which we are interested in. Remember to select all languages as well, as Google may only pull up searches in the language of your location by default.
So, we have our key phrase, and from the proposed options, I want to consider the phrase "hand embryodery". All other suggested results are not suitable for me, as I sell mainly embroidered decorations, not patterns and not pillows.
Let's look at these two phrases in more detail.
Competitiveness.
Have you noticed that when you search for something on Google, advertisements for that topic are displayed on the right side of the search results? So, high competition means that people place ads on Google for this phrase. This is good, because it means that this phrase is being searched for. If the value is low, then there is no competition for this phrase among Google's paid ads. The competition is slightly higher for the phrase "hand embroidered", but in general they are not very different.
The total number of searches per month.
A high number of searches is, on the one hand, good. This means that this phrase is being typed into the search bar by people. It's hard to be found with a phrase that no one is looking for. On the other hand, you need to compare this value with the search results. Being found among tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of search results is even harder. So, for our chosen key phrase "hand embroidered", 22,200 searches are made every month. This is a pretty big result. The phrase "hand embryodery" is searched many times more - 74,000 times.
Now let's look for our phrases in Google and on Etsy. Let's remember how many search results it offers us, look for search results from Etsy on the first pages. On the second page, I found a link to an Etsy search. And Hand embroidered necklace branch with flowers on green FREE SHIPPING is me :) Although the link itself does not lead to a specific store, but to a search page.
Now let's look for the same thing on Etsy, remember how many search results. Here's what we got:
“hand embroidered”
22,200 searches per month
10,400,000 Google search results
link to etsy search on google page 2
15,106 search results on Etsy
hand embroidery
74,000 searches per month
average Google text ad competition
9,320,000 Google search results
Etsy search link on page 3 of Google
17,615 results on Etsy
Well, it seems to me that both of these phrases should be taken as key. While "hand embroidery" has an edge, it's searched 3.5 times more often, and Etsy's results are only 16% higher.
Do not stop at 1-2 phrases. Try more synonyms, similar options. Each listing can use a different keyword to get noticed in more searches. In my case, I first wanted to refine the key phrase to "hand embroidered necklace", but Google showed that such a phrase was not searched for. So I tried options: embroidered jewelry, embroidered necklace, embroidered pendant. The more options you consider and apply, the better.
Increase ranking in search results
When you have decided on the key phrases, it's time to start placing them in the store so that they appear in the search on the first pages.
I can't say for sure about Etsy search, but to improve search by Google and others search engines, it would be good to take care not only of the keywords for the products, but also for the store as a whole. Place the keyword in the Shop Title and in the Shop Announcement and start there. I will not give myself as an example, I always have a creative crisis when it comes to describing a store. Here, look how good Polina is:
It also does not hurt to name product categories with key phrases. Not just Pendants, but Handmade pendants, Embroidered pendants, etc.
Now let's move on to product names and descriptions. The main rule is that the key phrase should be the first words in the title of the listing. Just as a customer often only reads the first 5 words of a product name, a search will primarily look for keywords at the beginning of a product name.
Not right: Hot air Balloon colorful on white fabric hand embroidered necklace FREE SHIPPING
Right: Hand embroidered necklace Hot air Balloon FREE SHIPPING
The wrong option does not mean that the product will not appear in the search at all, but in the first case, the ranking of the product in the search will be much worse.
There is a very common advice in the community to make titles not very long, not overloaded with keywords. Although I did not see this in the Etsy help articles. Perhaps these are the results of personal experiments of sellers.
In addition to the name, the first paragraph of the product description is of great importance. The first sentences of the description are indexed by Google for future reflection in search results, and experience shows that Etsy search works in a similar way. Your task is to repeat the keywords in the description, but at the same time not repeat the title itself one to one. Etsy admin Daniel gives this advice on describing the Black Leather Bag (these are the keywords):
I designed and constructed this soft, black leather handbag without a pattern - this makes it one of a kind!
Would make a super sweet Valentine's Day gift for the fashionable, tough yet sweet gal.
handbag measures 16 inches wide by 12 inches tall and has a comfortable off the shoulder strap with a 9 inch drape.
I wanted to include a perfect pocket for your cell phone or digital pocket camera, because this is what I look for in a well handbag. The interior is lined with a cotton hearts design and has 4 pockets, a lobster claw for easy access to your keys, and a magnetic snap for security.
The description is full of keywords, the most important in my opinion I have underlined. Daniel also advises to address the buyer on his own behalf, and make the description more personal. Do not write that this is a good gift for any friend, but write for whom: a fashionista, a girl, a mother, a romantic nature ... It is advisable to repeat the key phrase in the description several times, but not too often. Let the sentences look natural, and our phrase occurs every 10-12 words.
Many, if not all, make the same mistake when writing descriptions: copying word for word from another similar listing. The reasons may be different, lack of time, poor knowledge of the language, or just laziness. I myself suffer from it. But this is very bad for search results. The same description looks like a repetition of the same article to Google. And why show the same result several times, it will only annoy the buyer. Thus, the search returns only 1 result, which for some reason seemed the most suitable, and discards the rest as repetitions. To avoid this mistake, change at least 1-2 words in each sentence. You can always replace beautiful / lovely / nice or cozy / soft / warm. Well, you get the idea :)
I looked at several competitive stores that are found on almost every page in the search, and sometimes several times. There really different descriptions even for almost identical products! I won’t say 100% that this is what threw me far beyond the first 10 pages in the search, but I’ll definitely deal with the descriptions first.
And of course tags. They are very important for search results, and often cause the most questions. Along with the change in search, Etsy changed the policy regarding tags and names and now you can use phrases instead of individual words in tags. But provided that the phrase has a logical meaning. Not "red white yellow", but "red necklace", "men's belt". It is very important to increase the ranking in the search results by repeating the key phrase in the tags!
Thus, the key phrase will be present in the title, in the first sentence of the description and in the tags. My necklace got on the first page of the search immediately after I duplicated the key phrase in the tags. Although this action did not help so successfully for other listings, it is still not so easy to unravel the search algorithm.
As I wrote above, in no case should you stop at one key phrase for all products. Never stop experimenting in this direction. But first of all, it is worth trying all sorts of combinations of synonyms and specific style phrases:
cufflinks
cuff links
Steampunk Cufflinks
Wedding Cufflinks
Silver Cufflinks
How many buyers, so many opinions, and you need to try to cover as many search options as possible. At the same time, descriptions will be more diverse :)
Periodically go to Store Statistics, and evaluate the effectiveness of a particular phrase, and keep experimenting!
The novelty of changing the default search method hasn't completely lost its importance. As the admins say, if a search returns 100,000 results, all of them with the correct tags and names, then a certain advantage will be given to newer products.
I've noticed that when my highest search ranking necklace starts to fall down the first page, the relist brings it up again. But don't stop posting new stuff. Again, from personal experience, just posted a new pendant appeared on the first page on the first day. But in 3-4 days it fell by 8, and the relists do not return it to the first one, they only raise it a couple of pages up. This means that there is a certain advantage to "fresh" goods in the algorithm.
And finally, general tips for getting more views from the search.
1. Not all views are the same. Remember that you want to find your buyer, not thousands of disinterested passers-by. Let the key phrases be relevant! No need to use the "scarf" tag for the necklace, and put the "Helloween" tag everywhere, because it is now popular.
2. The better your photos, the more noticeable your product will be among thousands of others. When you change your search, there are many well-described and possibly great products with bad photos on the first pages. !
3. Do not forget about individuality and personal contacts with buyers. Let the description not be dry and full of key phrases, but about you, about your product, inspiration :)
Good luck and sales in the new season!
