New to Etsy SEO Walkthrough

** For the most RECENT and RELEVANT information about Marmalead and Etsy SEO, head over to Marmalead’s Help site! **

After this little intro, head over to our Getting Started with Marmalead page where you’ll find valuable videos and resources to get you going quickly.

How being found (Etsy SEO) works:

A little background on getting found in Etsy search. Etsy search relevancy while always being tweaked will likely always be consistent on a few key points:

  1. Listing Titles are a strong factor in relevancy. If you want to be highly ranked in search, make sure your Title matches the search phrase as closely as possible. Especially since Tags have a 20 character limit, you want to maximize your Titles for long tail search phrases (search phrases made up of multiple words).
  2. Tags help search understand your product. They’re limited to 20 characters so you’re going to want to maximize meaningful combinations. For example, “crackling wick” and “hand poured candle” are better than “crackling”, “wick”, “hand poured”, “candle” as separate Tags. The more specific the less competition and more likely you are to be found. Tags are your opportunity to expand the relevancy that your Title started.
  3. For best results, in a non-spammy way, try to get your title to incorporate your best 2-3 tags.
  4. The buyer will have variety of shops and listings on each page. You may have heard about the clumping then de-clumping of listings from the same shop. Basically Etsy doesn’t want buyers to feel like their search returned too many listings from one shop even if all of those listings really did match the search better than the others.

Search

  1. Brainstorm phrases buyers would use to search for your product.
    1. Maybe read reviews for other shops selling similar items and see what words buyers use themselves. e.g. “This is a perfect ____________ candle”.  Example, personally if I’m shopping for a candle, I might search for something like “soy blend container candle”.

Why so specific you ask? Because someone that searches this specific is someone with intent to buy. They know what they’re looking for and when they find it they’re buying it.

    1. The Materials section of your listing has some great Tag potential. If you’re mentioning some of these as materials, I’m assuming they’re important to buyers and you should take advantage of that in Tags.
    2. In the Marmalead search bar, enter the first search phrase to evaluate. I’m going to use “soy blend container candle” as the example for this guide.
    3. At the top of the page, you’ll see some key stats about the search results.

Pricing

Price is part of your product. Higher than average price is seen as higher quality, lower than average is seen as lower quality, and average is actually indistinguishable. Buyers typically avoid the middle and justify their purchase as going “cheap” or “premium”. Price accordingly.

Price Spread

Price Spread visually shows you the price ranges that listings fall into. The high points of the graph show that there a larger number of items in that price bracket compared to the others. You can of course price your product outside of this range, however, you should have a very good reason to do so. Otherwise, your product may deserve a different search phrase. Price Spread will give you an idea where your product falls in the existing market, which dictates how buyers will perceive your product.

Marmalead - New Pricing Spread

On the screenshot above, I illustrate that products below the middle are positioned to buyers as lower cost and lower perceived quality. This is all else being equal of course. You may find that the lower cost items are simply smaller versions and still the same quality so use your judgment. Again these set initial impressions or anchors for shoppers.

Word Cloud

The word cloud provides a visual of the most popular tags from the 100 listings. The larger the word, the more frequently the tag was used. It’s a good brainstorming tool. Combinations of short tags can be made into stronger single tags. Example: I see “holiday” and “jar candles”, I may put them together and try “holiday jar candles”.

Marmalead - New Word Cloud

Conclusion

Now I have valuable information for my first search phrase:

  1. How many listings I’ll compete with
  2. The pricing spread
  3. If any price points stand out for views/favs
  4. The number of views per week similar listings receive
  5. Ideas for more phrases and tags

Run through the same process for more search phrases and pick the one that targets your market the best where you can also be a top result.  Use the best as a title, and use the others as tags. At the end you’ll have a listing that attracts the right kind of traffic; the kind that buys your product.

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17 replies on “New to Etsy SEO Walkthrough”

I am not able to register as a dabbler. I have try several times and it always says “There was an error creating your account”. I do not know what to do and I really want to be a member of Marmalead. Can you help me, please. Thank you for responding.

Hi Monique! It looks like your email address was already registered with us on August 23. You should be able to use the “forgot password” link from the login screen to reset your password. If that’s not working for you, shoot me an email at gordon [at] marmalead [dot] com and I can reset it for you!

We don’t recommend going with keywords that have Low and Very Low Engagement, I doubt it would give you enough views per week to get a sale. I would suggest digging through the Other Ideas section, Tag Cloud, and Tag Used section for better keywords. Aim for search terms that have at least Moderate in Engagement (Yellow) and no more than High in Competition (Orange).

Hello! I’m new to this and doing my work on keywords. I’m very confused by one thing. Everyone says that the more specific your long-tail keyword is better, but everytime I seach for more or less specific long-tail keyword, the stats shows me that it’s engagement rate is Very Low. For example, such long-tail keywords as “polka dot scrunchie”, “red hair scrunchie”, “bunny ear scrunchie”, etc… I would think if people already know what they’re looking for, they’d be more willing to buy it. So why engagement rate is very low? On the opposite, the more general keywors like ‘hair accessories’ seem to have higher engagement rate. Can’t figure it out… Does it mean I shouldn’t use all those specific long-tail keywords?

Another question: if I’m registered as a dabbler, is there a time limit for when I can use Marmalead? (like 2 weeks or a month?)

Thank you!!

I believe there’s a fine line between specific, and too specific. You don’t want to go too specific that it’s not something that’s immediately in front of someone’s mind. ‘polka dot scrunchie’ is very specific, that’s good. You’re placing yourself in a market where you are most relevant. But we don’t know the demand for a polka dot scrunchie. The low engagement only indicates that it’s not something that an average Joe would search when she’s looking to buy some hair accessories. Even the word ‘scrunchie’ don’t have much engagement when searched on Etsy. For certain cases like this where the market really just don’t have a strong demand (and you still want to keep making them), I think it’s okay to deviate a little bit and touch on other broader markets like ‘hair accessory’ or ‘ponytail’ where the engagement is more acceptable.

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Dabbler is free to use for as long as you like. It has no time restrictions or anything except of course you can’t use the Entrepreneur tools like Marma-meter, Keyword Comparison etc.

How often does the Etsy SEO change? I am asking because I have been using Keywords but I am not getting the traffic anymore. I know they change it and have found over the last 3-4 months my sales have dropped because of this. Any suggestions??

Hi Karen,
We don’t know when Etsy will next update their algorithms, but we do know that they change it often.

Maybe you mean how long it takes for your SEO tweaks to take effect? When you change SEO, i.e. tweak titles, listings etc. it happens instantly. But you need time for you to see the effects. It might take several weeks before you start seeing an uptick in traffic. If you’re not getting the results you wanted, change keywords and try again. Hope that helps!

Hi,

From what I’ve understood your 3 strongest keywords should be both in your title and in the tags. But how do you tackle this when your strongest terms are long tail words that will work for the title but be too long for the tags?

Thanks in advance.

Best Regards,

Alexandra

Hi Alexandra,
I’ve sent you an email, posting this here too for everyone to reference on. If your best keywords exceed the 20 character limit for tags, we recommend you to divide them into several parts. For example, your main keyword is “large coffee mugs with lids” – you can split them into “large coffee mugs” and “mugs with lids”.

Just remember when parsing them make it so that it is still ‘searchable’ by shoppers. Don’t parse it out like “large coffee mugs” “with lids” because “with lids” on its own don’t make much sense.

Do you offer to fill in all my etsy product with great wording and tags.

I would just send you guys a picture and discription of product. And I

would gladly pay the pros to do the discriptive, sellers side of etsy,

so i could concentrate on production.

RusticStyleofDolores

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