Etsy Jam Episode 42: The SEO Secret Hidden in Plain Sight with Joanna from EWDMarketing

In this episode, Joanna joins us from EWD Marketing. This is her SECOND time with Etsy Jam. She joined us in Episode 31. Check it out if you haven’t already. Joanna has been doing some testing and has found some really interesting things that she wanted to share with everybody. But we’ll get to that in a minute. 🙂

A Little Bit of Mythbusting

While helping people with their SEO, Joanna keeps finding that people are following rules which applied three or four years ago. These rules are no longer as relevant because Etsy is constantly tweaking and changing their search algorithms. Etsy is one of those spaces that changes very rapidly compared to other places online. If you’re selling on Etsy you want to make sure you are on top of those changes. Know what those changes are and what you need to do to your shop to position yourself in the best way you possibly can.

Often times, it’s easy to blame Etsy for our shops not getting sales or views. But  behind the scenes, Etsy is working feverishly to help shoppers find the products they are looking for. More sales means more success for Etsy AND its sellers. As sellers, we need to stay flexible and work with the changes. If we don’t, we’ll end up as yesterday’s news and losing our grip on the success of our shops.

Reworking your Listing Titles

People always ask what is wrong with their listings. When you tell them they need to update their tags and titles because these are not relevant and not working, they get frustrated. They feel it’s difficult to find relevant keywords and it’s hard to follow rules they’ve heard about – like avoiding keyword stuffing. Most sellers think they cannot use keywords more than once in their titles – or they will be “stuffing” them. However, it IS possible to re-use keywords in different context. For example: you can use silver starfish necklace, silver starfish bracelet and silver starfish ring and this doesn’t mean you are stuffing your title with the keyword “starfish.”

Another one of Joanna’s firm beliefs is that titles do NOT need to be customer friendly. Titles need to be search algorithm friendly because that is what makes it possible for shoppers to find your products. The only time your title needs to be customer friendly is when it’s on social media and you are trying to bring people back. Otherwise, you need to be writing relevant titles so that the algorithm can show your listings to shoppers who are specifically looking for them.

The SEO Secret in Plain Sight

Our tags and titles aren’t the only way we can help ensure our listings show up in search results. We can also renew our listings to get a nice bump in rank for they keywords we’re targeting. Many people think renewing does not work but it DOES. Joanna has tested this repeatedly with multiple shops to prove it. Check out this screenshot:

Joanna put her shop into vacation mode for a good length of time. Then after taking it out, she didn’t change anything in any of her listings except she started renewing listings frequently. As you can see in her stats graph, the shop lit up with activity as her listings started ranking for relevant keywords. Joanna repeated this with multiple shops to make sure her results were reproducible – and they were! This really illustrates the power of renewing listings which have been set up with relevant keywords.

Joanna makes sure to point out that if you do not have relevant titles and tags, then renewals won’t help  you rank for the best keywords – and you likely won’t see much benefit from renewing. So make sure you have your keyword phrases in ship shape condition!

How to Choose Relevant Keywords Phrases

Relevancy has been misunderstood by a lot of shop owners. What you have to do is go for long tail keywords. Most people limit their keyword phrases to 2 or 3 words. But if you increase your phrases to 4 or even 5 words, and use these long tail keyword phrases right at the beginning of your titles, you will have a much better opportunity to rank on multiple first pages of search.

What you don’t want to do is to use the generic terms (gift, gift for her, etc) and not fine tune them. It’s more important to have a long tail keyword phrase that is relevant to your product – and even more importantly is relevant to how your customer is searching for your product.

Try this Activity

So as an exercise, pick a product that you are struggling to find relevant keywords for. Grab your notebook and jot down some ideas. For our example, let’s use “sweatshirt.” Jot down things about the sweatshirt. It’s pink, it’s got a hood, it has a zipper front, it’s for women and it’s a size medium. Now use Etsy search to try to find 5 competitors that have a product just like yours BUT do not use any of your keyword phrases that you just wrote down. That’s a real eye-opening experience. When you try to look for a sweatshirt and you’re not using pink, or hood, zipper front, size medium but you do know it’s a sweatshirt for her. You have to start thinking differently – and NOW you’re thinking like a customer. Which is exactly how you want to be thinking when you’re picking keywords.

Now take all those new descriptive keywords you just found by thinking like a customer and go to Storm inside Marmalead. See what they generate. Going through the list of keywords in Storm is where you find your actual keywords and come up with the long tail keywords.

Speak Your Customers’ Language

It is important to make sure you are speaking your customers’ language. Just because you are getting views does not mean you have perfect keywords. If you can’t get your views to convert to sales, you could be attracting a lot of people who are just window shopping. Your keywords could be too vague or not great descriptions of your product. Of course there are other factors that go into converting views to sales like your photos, pricing, descriptions, etc. But Just because you’re seeing more views, don’t assume that your SEO is set up with the best keywords. The more you learn to talk your customer’s language the better off it’s going to be for everybody.

The Last Chance Sale

Want to try something fun? Joanna told us about a fun activity she did with one of her Etsy teams. She encourages everyone to try it with one of their groups too.

Go to your Listing Manager in Etsy and open up your Stats. Deactivate anything that has 0 sales and basically no interaction for the last 30 days or 90 days. Those are the items that you will put into your Last Chance Sale. Put a hefty discount on them for the sale – and once the sale is over, pull them from your shop for good. That’s it! They’re out of your shop and you’re done. You have to do this because these items are hurting your conversion sale. Any item that has 0 sales is affecting your conversion rate and it has to go. Pull out all your 0 sales items, set them aside and pick out a date for when you’re going to do your Last Chance Sale.

Now you’re going to go in and use Marmalead to search for a keyword that nobody is using and brings up zero results. Use this keyword at the beginning of your titles and as your first tag for each Last Chance Sale item. Set this up and have your group announce to your audiences on Social Media. On your chosen date, go in Etsy and reactivate these products.

After the sale, make sure you remove all of the listings that didn’t sell. Your conversion rate will go up, sales performance increase and people will be able to find exactly what they are looking for. Conversion rate is as important as relevancy is.

Check it Out Yourself

Head over to Marmalead and type in “EDWMarmalead” then do the same thing at Etsy. Joanna has set up an example to show you how this is working in real time. Keep checking back to see how the views trend as more people search this term on Etsy and Marmalead!

Special Offer from Joanna and EWDMarketing

Anyone who spends $20 or more in Joanna’s shop can use the coupon EWDMarmalead to save 35%!

 

 

Scoops for this Etsy Jam are on the way!