Etsy Jam Episode 31: Joanna from EWDMarketing

In this episode, we are joined by Joanna from EWDMarketing. Joanna helps Etsy sellers connect to their target markets by honing in on the best titles, Tags, and Product Descriptions. She also sells Help guides and Shop Reviews through her Etsy shop. Stick around for the end of the show when she shares a special announcement with us!

How did Joanna got started on Etsy?

I started on Etsy doing handmade several years ago. By trade I am a contract seamstress and designer. Everything I’ve had has been online and Etsy has been a fantastic venue for selling my handmade products.

As I was doing contact work for a company based in North Carolina, they approached me at the end of January this year asking for some help with their SEO. By April we got serious about it and she laid out to me their goals that they want to double their sales from the previous year simply using SEO. So I jumped on and started helping them. By the end of July, they hit their sales of what they did last year! I’m sure they’re gonna do more than double their sales by the time they close the books for this year. I’m really happy that it worked and it was simply by doing SEO and by polishing things up and making everything relevant.

That is how EWDMarketing came to be! But I didn’t think anybody else was gonna use the service, I just felt that it was a God-given talent that I was able to discern this information on SEO. Marmalead has been at the core of this and once I was on my own and no longer working for that company, I had to get serious with my business. That’s how it evolved of how I have been able to help and market for other shops as well.

SEO Is Not An Overnight Success!

SEO takes time. It takes time to build this stuff up. It’s not like you’re gonna go a bunch of changes at once and then the next day you’ll see success.

Here’s a story from one of my past customers. I just finished doing some SEO for her. She came back to me and said:

Customer: It’s been 24 hours and I had no views, this didn’t work!”

Joanna: “No, it doesn’t work that way. I gave you some great SEO and you are on multiple first pages of search. You have to now give it time but there’s a lot of other factors as well. The reason that this company X did so great in such a short period of time is because they were well established. They already had a core business. They have people that are coming back for repeat sales. But what we did through SEO is we fine tuned it so we are really going for your target audience (which is what she was missing). And then when we fine tuned it and we were speaking the customer’s language and not our own, that’s when everything turned for them!”

That makes the difference. As we all know, SEO is only one piece of this big puzzle. You can’t depend on your SEO alone. You can have the best SEO, you can be on every first page, you can be in that coveted first spot that everybody wants to be, and still not get a view and not get a sale. There’s more that goes to that. You might not have the product people want. It might not be the color they want; the picture might not be inviting. There’s a lot of variables that go into it.

Etsy is like a Mall

I have this best analogy that I teach to my clients.

You picture your shop in Etsy. Your shop is one in Etsy. And there’s thousand of other shops. So picture the Mall of America. How big that place is and how many stories tall? You are just one shop in that mall. You have thousands of people funneling through but out of those thousands of people that are coming through, maybe only a handful are your customer. So you need to be able to have the advertising, the signage, and everything that’s going to attract them to come browse your store. It does not guarantee a sale, but it does get them there.

It’s the same thing with Etsy. Etsy is the Mall of America, or actually it’s the Mall of the World. We’re all these shops that are in there and what you’re doing with your SEO is by being as relevant as possible and making sure your most important keywords is at the first position of your title and working backwards to the least important ones then supporting it with your tags. Now what you’re doing is you are talking to your actual customer base. You’re filtering out.

The other panic that I always hear is “Oh my gosh, after you did my titles and tags, my views dropped. I used to get 300 views a day, now it’s only 30.” That’s what you want. Because now, you’re talking to your audience! Those may be 30 but those are 30 people that are really interested in your product. The other people weren’t. Those were the window shoppers that walk by your shop and happen to look in the window. They were not your customers, they just pass by and that’s the same thing.

How do you speak your customer’s language?

To speak a customer’s language takes time. It takes a little bit of dedication. I actually like to just get on Etsy and start searching because I sell internationally and that allows me to search in an international level. When you find somebody that’s from England or somebody that’s from Israel; you can go into their shops if they’re selling a similar product and see what they’re calling it. It’s right there and the information is readily available. But you’ll also find that using Marmalead when you use search, you’ll see words come up on the sides and in the Tag Cloud and you’ll discover some terminologies that’s being used some place else that is foreign to you but absolutely natural to them. That’s something you definitely want to be able to incorporate into the title.

The Thing About Renewing

Renewing bumps you back up but you also need to remember that the algorithm works interestingly now. Any new listing does not have a ranking and it takes 30 days for it to rank. Once it’s been ranked, it can take up to 30 days for a new title and tags to re-rank it. I’ve tested it with my own products to see and actually watch the dynamics of it. So no matter how good the titles and tags are, you may not stay on the first page for very long. If it’s been there and nobody has looked at it and it’s got no views or no favorites; it’s not gonna keep it there because Etsy knows that it needs to show customers something that they’re interested in. So if you’re going to be playing with your titles and tags, I always recommend that you just go in and might as well make a brand new listing and give yourself that shot. If it’s a new listing and you just wanna come back up, renew it if it’s within the 30 days. But my philosophy has been to create a new listing after 30 days if you’re not getting where you need to be and it needs an adjustment in the titles and tags.

But Algorithm Changes All The Time!!

People panic when they hear the algorithm is changing. You hear everybody get so upset and I used to be one of them too! Now I’ve learned and I look forward to it because what it does is it cleans everything up. It makes you go back in, you focus, and now you’re targeting your customer. They lay everything out for you and they tell you ahead of time what the changes are going to be. Make sure everything is relevant. Make sure you fill out all your sections in your shop. Make sure you do really good descriptions, don’t leave anything out. When you leave things out that affects your ranking as well. Every bit of your Etsy shop, every bit of your listing all has something assigned to it to get you to that perfect ranking score.

Hack search by putting your shop name as a tag!

I always say to my clients to make sure your shop name is one of your tags. It’s a lot easier to tell somebody to head on to Etsy and type your shop name. That’s it. All your products are gonna come up. You’re on the first page of search and nobody else is there, it’s just you!

---

Joanna’s Special Promo!

I know this time of year money is tight, people are looking to get an advantage; you’re trying to get out there, you’re trying to get some sales, you might have some products that have been invisible for a long time and so what I wanted to offer everybody is a 40% off anything within my EWDMarketing shop. You can use my coupon code MARMALEAD128 and this is good for 40% off for a week. It’s good for anything in the shop, shop reviews, product descriptions, title and tag revisions, any of the downloads that I have in there; it’s all there for 40% off!