Etsy search can make or break your Etsy listings. But you already know this. What you might not know is that Marmalead is an Etsy SEO tool designed to help your listings appear in search. How does it work? Well, the first step is figuring out how to use Marmalead’s Search Tool. We’re going to jump right in and show you exactly how to use it.
Starting at square one with Marmalead’s Search Tool
The first thing we need to do is, of course, open up Marmalead in your browser. Search is the very first feature you’re going to see whenever you log into Marmalead. This is where you’ll want to start, it’s our square one. One of the things you’re going to be thinking about whenever you’re going to search for keywords, of course, is what are you selling? This is super important.
You want to make sure to use keywords that buyers are searching for and that they’re engaged with. You’ll want to make sure there’s not too much competition. Keywords that are really going to help your listings stand out in search, as opposed to just being lost in the void of all of the thousands and thousands of Esty Listings that are out there.
Marmalead’s search tool is designed to help you figure out which keywords are going to be best for your Esty Listings.
Vague Etsy keyword research
One of the ways we recommend using Marmalead’s search tool is to start vague with your keyword research, then niche down as you go. We’re going to use this as an example today for someone who sells t-shirts. So one of the things that you’re going to think of when adding Etsy tags to your t-shirt listings is, what type of t-shirt are you creating?
Right now we’re heading into the fall season. One of the things you might see on Etsy (more popular nowadays than you would in the other seasons) is fall t-shirts. So let’s start with just that.
Naturally, the first thing we’re going to do is type in, fall t-shirt into Marmalead. You’re then going to analyze that keyword in Marmalead to see how this keyword is going to work in your Etsy shop.
Check your keywords on Etsy
Another place that a lot of people might start their Etsy keyword research is just right on Etsy. If you don’t have Marmalead, you’re not using it to have all of this data (which is extremely helpful). You might just try to go ahead and start on Etsy.
So, let’s see what that looks like.
When looking up keywords on Etsy, it helps to do your research in an incognito tab. That way Etsy search doesn’t skew your results with your previous search history. We’re going to go ahead and see what’s going on with “fall t-shirt” on the Etsy website.
We type in fall t-shirt and what do we see? Obviously, we see fall t-shirts, right? This is exactly what you sell in your shop. So you should use the keyword “fall t-shirt” for all of your fall t-shirt listings, right?
After all, the listings you see are very reflective of what you’re selling, and you just KNOW that fall t-shirt is a popular keyword around the fall season. So if you want your t-shirts to show up on the first page, you’d think you should go ahead and use the same keyword that popped up for all of those listings…
Find out why you’re wrong with Marmalead’s search tool
If you think you should use a vague keyword like “fall t-shirt” for your Etsy listings, here’s why you’re wrong. Jump over to Marmalead and what you’ll see for this particular keyword is that it’s got many things going on for it, some good, some bad.
Let’s analyze this keyword and learn how to use Marmalead’s search tool and analyze even more Etsy keywords!
Etsy SEO Tutorial: How to use Marmalead’s search tool for your Etsy keyword research
One of the first things you’re going to see whenever you do a keyword search in Marmalead is the keyword’s long tail status. This shows whether the keyword is long tail or not. Why is this important to you? Well, we recommend that you use as many long tail keywords as possible for your Etsy tags. So you’ve got 13 tags, as many long tail keywords as you can fit on there as possible, and they’re going to do wonders for your Etsy shop.
What is a long tail keyword?
One of the things you might not know is what a long tail keyword actually is.
It’s a more specific search phrase. It’s a combination of multiple keywords, and it’s more descriptive of what the buyer is actually going to find.
So for instance, rather than just putting in “fall t-shirt,” you could put something like, “it’s fall y’all” It’s a quirky saying and searchers will be looking for exactly what they’re sure to find: your Etsy listing with an “it’s fall y’all” design on the front.
Here’s another thing you can do that could be a long tail keyword as opposed to just, fall t-shirt.” Maybe you sell flannel shirts, so you could use the keyword “fall flannel shirts.” You’re getting into more of a niche market with the flannel as opposed to just t-shirts, which can vary from any type of t-shirt that’s out there. And more importantly, you’re dabbling in long tail keywords which will bring buyers that are serious and ready to make the purchase.
Analyzing Etsy keywords with Marmalead’s search tool
Marmameters: Searches, Engagement, Competition
After you see if your Etsy keyword is long tail, you’re going to see many different Marmameters (that’s what we call them). We’ve got searches, engagement, and competition. Right off the bat, you’ll see that Searches for fall t-shirt isn’t great. It’s at 119. It’s in the orange.
Obviously, you want this Marmameter to be up like Engagement is. You want this to be in the green. At 119 searches, there aren’t too many people searching for fall t-shirt. This keyword may be one of the first things that comes to mind for an Etsy tag, but when it comes to a buyer’s mind, it’s not something that they’re necessarily searching for.
In terms of engagement though (people that are engaging fall t-shirts that are currently listed on Etsy), it’s actually pretty high. That’s a pretty good number there. You’re way in the green at 4000 people engaged. So people are clicking through fall t-shirt designs, trying to find the t-shirt that’s right for them, but they’re not really using the term “fall t-shirt” in search.
How does the average buyer use Etsy search?
Here’s something you want to keep in mind when it comes to searches versus engagement. If people are doing searches with a certain keyword but they’re not engaged with it, then it’s not very helpful. The average buyer uses Etsy search kind of like they would Google.
If people are doing searches with a certain keyword but they’re not engaged with it, then it’s not very helpful. The average buyer uses Etsy search kind of like they would Google.
Here’s an example:
The average buyer goes to Etsy to search for a gift for their friend. Just like we did, they type in the keyword “fall t-shirt”. So there they are, they’re on Etsy looking through the fall t-shirts. They’re trying to find a good shirt for their friend.
Their friend likes fall. But they don’t really know much more than that specifically, so they’re just looking for a cool design that they think their friend might like. A random listing catches their eye and it’s a pumpkin spice t-shirt! They then go back to search to look for pumpkin spice t-shirts.
What does the average buyer do now?
They then go back up and do a search with something like “pumpkin spice t-shirt.” Now, they’ve put in a long-tail keyword phrase in the search bar for Etsy and they’re searching for something that’s more descriptive and more specific. They now know that this is exactly what they want to buy. This is a great example of how buyers use search to try to find items they’d like to purchase.
A popular Etsy keyword in a saturated market
So back over to “fall t-shirt.” Why don’t we like this keyword again? Well, hands down, it’s the competition. Competition is just too high for “fall t-shirt”. It’s got over 50,000 listings on Etsy alone. It’s an extremely saturated market using that tag. We think you can find better tags to put on your listings as opposed to just “fall t-shirt”.
Engagement with Etsy keywords over time
After the Marmameters what you’re going to see is going to be the engagement over time. This graph here is showing you seasonality and forecasts. What’s great about this is you get to see the history of how this keyword has performed in the past and you could see a forecast of what Marmalead expects this keyword is going to perform in the future.
Seasonality is shown in green and shows how the engagement has moved up or down throughout the year. Where did the interest peak? This graph is just super helpful to see the history of the keyword in the past and what it’s forecasted to experience in the future.
Pricing your Etsy listings for the win
After that, you’re going to jump down into the pricing. You can see we’ve analyzed 100 shops and you can increase that to analyze 500 shops or you can decrease it to analyze only 42 shops. You can select if you wanted to analyze only shops that have t-shirts made of cotton, polyester, vinyl, sublimation on their T-shirts, so you can hit those little checkboxes and filter those out. Then you can include categories like unisex-adult, woman’s clothing, art, and collectibles, etc. You can include these categories depending on what you’re selling to narrow down in your search what’s going to be shown here.
Are other Etsy shops offering free shipping?
We’ve analyzed 100 shops. You can see that there are 78 shops competing directly with this keyword and 54% of the shops that we analyzed are offering free shipping. Half of the shops that are out there selling these t-shirts are shipping them for free.
You can weigh the benefits of free shipping for your own shop, just make sure you factor that into your overall price.
A lot of Etsy shops are going to market their listings as free shipping and then they’re going to raise the price of their products to be reflective of the cost of free shipping on their end.
Know your competitor pricing with Marmalead’s search tool
That brings us to the pricing that we have shown here. We’re showing you the bargain price for the fall t-shirts, the mid-range price, and then the premium price.
Your bargain price is a product that would be considered below average. Typically shoppers have lower expectations of listings in this range compared to others simply because of the price. We often use pricing in our shopping as a gauge of quality. Whenever you go to do shopping yourself if you see something that’s below-average price, you’re going to think that the quality of that product is not as good as the mid-range items.
Mid-range is where a product would be considered middle-of-the-road. This is kinda the average price for most of the products like this.
And then of course, you’ve got premium price. This is where a product would be considered above the normal range. These are where shoppers are expecting the highest quality t-shirts out there, especially if you’re going to be paying $75 for a t-shirt. This is helpful because this shows you just the prices that are out there. If you want to stick to that mid-range price, you can do that.
Etsy competitor’s listing photos
Below that we have listing photos. These are real listings so you can actually thumb through them to get an idea of the types of listing photos other sellers have in their shops.
But what about the price spread?
Back to pricing, we’ve got the overall pricing spread listed in Marmalead’s search tool. So you saw the bargain bid, the mid-range, the premium pricing, this is the complete spread for this keyword on Etsy. You can see the mid-range is going to be right around $20 for the average. That’s the middle of the entire spread here, so this middle range. 20 bucks: that’s the average cost of a t-shirt you’re going to find for at least fall t-shirts on Etsy.
Etsy product shipping info for the win
If you jump down, you can see shipping information. This is going to be helpful if you decide not to go with free shipping. You want to add some cost to your shipping the buyer has to pay. You can see that the average shipping cost is going to be $4.40 US dollars. Maximum shipping is $9 and minimum is about $3.
For this keyword, you don’t want to have anything that’s costing more than $9 to ship because no one’s going to buy that product. They’re just going to go to something else that’s either average shipping cost or even free.
Looking at the shipping spread, we’ve got the average price at $4. You can see the entire spread average pricing is going to be $4 as well. That’s in the middle of the spread. Below that you’re going to see that, on average, listings with free shipping are pricing their products $7.75 higher. If you’re one of those shops that wants to offer free shipping to your buyers, Marmalead is going to tell you how much higher you could price your products because of that free shipping.
Sample listings from the competition
We jump further down and we’re going to see some sample listings that are going to be pulled with this keyword in mind. For the samples that are listed, we’re going to give you the photo score. How well do these listing photos score with Marmalead?
This is a pretty nice photo here. This is a real t-shirt, looks like a real design on the T-shirt. You’ve got the whole aesthetic back there with the jean button-up on the hanger. Click through the other product photos and you’ll see they’re using a model in a lifestyle photo. They’ve got their size chart. They also show that they do custom orders. And they’ve put all this in their photos. This is just a very well-presented listing here. Obviously, they’ve got tons of sales, tons of five-star reviews, they’re a star seller.
Looking at these photo scores will give you amazing examples of quality listings.
Diving deeper into Etsy tags with Marmalead’s search tool
You can strive to be like these listings that we show you. You can even do a little more digging to see the tags that these Etsy shops are using for their listings. This can help you do even more keyword research. Keywords that you may find on these other listings include:
- Halloween
- Vintage halloween t-shirt
- Vintage halloween
- Fall apparel
- Witchy clothing.
So go through the different tags shown here to see what the competitors are putting as tags on their Etsy listings.
Should you copy and paste Etsy tags?
This listing has tons of sales. Tons of five-star reviews. So, you should just go through here and copy all these tags for your own Etsy listing, right?
No! You shouldn’t do that. Don’t just blindly copy these random tags. Maybe your t-shirt has nothing to do with “Boho Halloween.” You’re just wasting your tag by using that for your keyword.
If you blindly copy your competitor’s Etsy tags, there’s a good chance your conversions are going to dip. Buyers are going to search for your keyword, they’re going to see your listing in the thumbnail, it’s not going to be reflective of what they searched and they’re going to dip out.
They’re going to find something that matches what they searched for. You don’t want to blindly copy tags on other listings. We actually talked about that in a previous Jam, so you can check that out and see why we recommend you don’t just blindly copy these tags.
Popular tags from Etsy listings that use your target keyword
Scroll further down and you’re going to see popular tags similar to fall t-shirt. If we’re just thinking off the top of our head, we know we sell fall t-shirts, we wanted to start vague, we typed in fall t-shirt into Marmalead, that’s as vague as we can get. You scroll down, you’re going to start to see some popular tags related to fall t-shirt.
Obviously, some of these are going to continue to be vague, but you can niche down further from here. You can get ideas from these tags:
- Pumpkin shirt
- Autumn shirt
- Thanksgiving shirt
These are different ideas that you can start to niche down into. Marmalead is going to give you those examples.
We’re also going to show you how many listings have these tags. How popular this tag is, and of course, you can take these exact tags, type them into the search bar and get even more information on these exact keywords. You’ve got unlimited keyword searches you can perform. So search away.
Similar Etsy shopper searches in Marmalead’s search tool
Scroll further down below that, you’re going to see similar shopper searches. Maybe someone typed in “fall t-shirt” like we did earlier, kind of like a Google search. They got some ideas. They saw some thumbnails on Etsy to give them an example of other types of shirts they want to search for. After that, they realized, “Hey, you know what, I want to purchase a flannel shirt.” So a similar shopper search is going to be “fall flannel shirts,” “fall wreaths for the front door,” “first day of fall,” “fall apparel”.
You’re not just going to be limited to t-shirts. Marmalead is going to show you other stuff that’s related to your target keyword as well.
Keep digging for effective Etsy keywords
If somebody’s searching for fall shirts, they might be searching for fall wreaths. They might be searching for a fall mask, a flannel mask or something that’s going to match the shirt that they’re going to buy. This is just going to help you get an idea of the types of searches that shoppers are performing. And again, these are real shopper searches, so you’ll know how many searches are being performed, the level of engagement for these keywords, the amount of competition for all of these keywords that are listed.
Again, with all the relevant keywords you find while using Marmalead’s search tool, take these keywords and put them back into Marmalead’s search bar. Do some further digging (just like you are now) to find the most effective keywords out there for your Etsy listings.
Marmalead’s search tool shows long tail alternatives for your Etsy keywords
Down below similar shopper searches, you’re going to see long tail alternatives. This is where we’re going to get into the ideas of the different types of t-shirts you can use. Between similar shopper searches and long tail alternatives, we’re going to give you examples of keywords that are long tail that could be related to the keyword you’ve typed here in Marmalead search. Some of them might not necessarily be as related as others, that’s where the Storm tool comes into play, and we’ll show you how to use that in a separate video.
You could take these long tail alternatives, take the similar shopper searches, plug those back into the search bar, do more digging to see the amount of searches, the amount of engagement, and the amount of competition. These are where your brainstorming ideas are going to come into play.
Fall flannel shirts, that’s a long tail keyword. You could punch that in, see what similar shopper searches are to that, see what long tail alternatives come up, and further dig your way into the niche that you want to portray in your listings and in your shop. These numbers are going to help you accomplish this goal.
Brainstrom Etsy keywords with the tag cloud
If you go down to the very bottom, you’ve got a tag cloud. You can see the most popular tags that are out there for the keyword you’ve searched. Obviously, fall t-shirt that’s the keyword we’ve searched, that’s why it’s in the middle. You can see examples of other keywords that are out there. This is going to help you brainstorm. We’ve got all the keywords plugged in brainstorming, pumpkin shirt, autumn shirt, fall shirts, thanksgiving shirt.
Again, take these keywords you see in the tag cloud, put them back up here in the Marmalead search, plug them in, do some more digging. You can look through the searches, engagement, and competition. That’s where the money is at! You need to keep searching through these keywords, take them up, do more searching.
The beauty of creating lists using Marmalead’s search tool
Take the keywords that you’re searching for and add them to your list (we’ll go over lists on a separate video) but, lists are going to be helpful in organizing the keywords that you’re searching (and to keep them separated). Whenever you do a search, you can actually go up to the very top, add it to a list, and you can create new lists. Plugin the list, “fall t-shirts,” and you can create and add keywords directly to your lists from here. Say we want to type in, “pumpkin spice fall t-shirt,” we’re going to let that analyze. What we can do is we can take this pumpkin spice t-shirt, add that to that same list. Another way to do this (which is a little bit quicker) is to do this with the storm tool.
Pumpkin spice pulls up, we’re going to go ahead and add that to our same list, boom, fall t-shirts it’s in there. So take all of the keywords that you’re searching through while you’re doing this, add them to your lists. Go back into your lists, you could check them out and you can see all the different keywords included on your lists, updated in real-time.
So searches, engagement, competition, those are going to continue to stay up-to-date, so you don’t need to take notes and write things down. It’s always going to be up and active for you guys.
Final thoughts on Marmalead’s search tool
That sums up how to use Marmalead’s search tool for your Etsy listings. It’s all about product research, product development, keyword research. The search tool is going to help you out with all of that.
The other tools that we have available to you, all of it is related to keyword research. This is where it’s most important when it comes to researching Etsy tags for your listings. Marmalead is going to do wonders for your shop and it all starts here with the search feature.
We hope this was helpful for your keyword research, and we hope that this helped you understand how to use Marmalead’s search tool for your Etsy listings. If you have any questions related to this information or if you want us to dig in any deeper on any of the search functions, let us know! Put a comment down below.
We’re going to be going through and doing more tutorials similar to this one for all the Marmalead tools so we can help you guys with your Etsy success.
Happy selling, everyone!
Subscribe to ♥ The Jam ♥ at:
