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The Quick and Dirty Guide to Finding Great Etsy Keywords with Marmalead

** This article doesn’t contain the most recent information about Etsy search. For the most relevant info, head over to our Marmalead Help site! **

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We’ve been getting a bunch of questions from our users lately asking;

“How does someone incorporate the data given by Marmalead to their shops?”

AND

“How can I use Marmalead in finding great Etsy keywords?”

Well in this article, we show you how to make Marmalead work for you.

Let’s give you an example:

Coffee Mug

Suppose this mug is one of your items.

The first thing you would want to do is to brainstorm the keywords that you’ll use for this listing.

I would start off by typing in the keyword ‘coffee mug’ to see how popular this tag is.

With 50k results, I know that tag is going to be very competitive. Let’s now look at the two tools available for us to gather more keywords.

Tag Cloud

The Tag Cloud displays the relevant keywords that other sellers use. The larger the word, the more popular it is.

 

The Other Ideas, on the other hand: pulls out search terms that people type in Bing.

You can use both of these to help you build up keywords that you can then use for your listing.

I’ve picked the words ‘best coffee mug’, ‘big coffee mug’, ‘custom coffee mug’, and ‘personalized mug’.

I suggest you to build a list of 15-20 keywords, but for simplicity let’s use those words as an example.

 

 

 

Fire them up with the Keyword Comparison tool (this will save you a lot of time).

kwcompare

Based on this data, I can safely say that it would be worthwhile to experiment with using these keywords as target or lead keywords.

I have just 4k and 2k listings to compete with. Along with a high number of views per week: 49 and 165 respectively.

For higher relevancy in search: I will put my best keywords in the front of my title and tags (hat tip to Michelle).

It should look like this:

Big coffee mug – best coffee mug – custom coffee mug – personalized mug – unique coffee mug – funny coffee mug – quote coffee mug – coffee cup – ceramic coffee mug – gift for him – gift for her – birthday gift

 

"How can I use Marmalead in finding great Etsy keywords?" We've been getting asked that question a lot. Well in this article, we will show you how to make Marmalead work for you.

Related: The Buckets Strategy

Remember, you don’t have to be the best – you only need to be better than your competitors.

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38 replies on “The Quick and Dirty Guide to Finding Great Etsy Keywords with Marmalead”

I don’t understand why you put custom coffee mug and personalized mug in your title when they had over 17 thousand and over 34 thousand results. Why wouldn’t you keep searching for keywords with lower than 5 thousand results?

Hi Mary,
I like to mix my keywords with targeted and broad ones – each play a role in the customer journey (Richie gave an excellent explanation of this in the Aug. 23 webinars).
Basically the idea is to cast a wide net from which your listings can be seen. Putting it in a niche market target buyers that are specific with what they’re buying and the broad ones (not so broad as with 50k+ results) are there to “net” those customers who are not quite sure what they want.

I have one question, after reading this, does it mean we should use the most popular tag for our item? or the less popular. What I understood is more popular tags means more competition to put your tag on first page. Thanks

Hi Tahir,
Yes that is correct, more popular tags usually means more competition. However, there are tags that are popular but also have low competition. A good example would be the phrase ‘big coffee mug’ = only 2k results with 165 avg. views per week. These are the tags that you want to exploit. Use Marmalead to find these hidden gems.

Hello Kevin, can I ask, with regards to your response on “tags that are popular but also have low competition” . Where in marmalead do you see the keyword competition stats or it can be assumed from the avg. views.
Thanks

Hey there!
When I run a Marmalead search, I look at the Total Results to determine how big the competition is. This is the total number of other listings bearing that keyword. And then the Avg. Views/week and Avg. Favs/week are where I gauge engagement. What you should look for are keywords that have a fairly low Total Results but with decent amount of Avg. Views/Favs per week. Hope that helps.

Hi, idk if I should ask you guys in here or somewhere else…

So I notice some people separate the words on their listing titles with “-” in the middle or some put “/” but I just put space like (Custom Iphone 6s Case Personalized Iphone 6 Plus Case) instead of ( Custom Iphone 6s Case-Personlalized Iphone 6 Plus Case).
Plus I have seen somewhere on meta tags that you are supposed to separate your tags with “-“.

So question is: would putting this characters help or not?

Hi Rob,
Michelle of FourLetterWordCards discussed this topic in the Aug. 23 Webinars.
The short answer is No. They don’t help you with search relevancy at all. But putting dashes (-), slashes (/), or commas (,) make your listings pleasing to read. At the end, it all boils down to whether you need those extra characters (without separators) or whether you want to make it easier to read by shoppers (with separators).

And be sure to leave a space before each and every seperator or Etsy reads it as one word. Silver Pendent-Starfish-gift-for girls would get read aas Silver PendentStarfish giftfor girls
With the spce before after, it reads like you hoped, Silver Pendent – Starfish -gift -for girls lousy example but you get my point.

Those

Hi there. I’m a little confused. I think you’re talking specifically about Etsy SEO, right? Then if so, several of your keyword phrases for coffee mugs are over 20 characters long, and they would be bounced out. For example, “coffee mugs with lids” has 21 characters, if I count the spaces. “Personalized coffee mugs” has 23. So how would one fix this? Would I break these down into segments? But wouldn’t that eat up my tags? And should we not use one word tags? (I’m thinking of the personalized coffee mugs broken down into two segments)

Hey Beth,
The Other Ideas section pulls relevant search terms from Bing. They’re not to be taken ‘as is’ but you can definitely make up good keywords out of it. You may come up with ‘mugs with lids’ and ‘personalized mugs’ for it to fit inside the 20 character limit. Be creative! 😉

Hello

I’ve always thought that you’re not supposed to keep repeating the same words in the title? In this example you used ‘coffee mug’ mixed with other words at least 7 times. I’ve always tried not to repeat the same word – should I be repeating myself?

I’ve gotten conflicting advice about this as well. I’m just not sure how etsy looks at titles.., as phrases, or individual words, which it will recombine in different combinations.

@Hayley
I don’t think repeating your words would hurt your relevancy in search. It actually reinforces you in your target category because you are potentially touching all the possible words a buyer would type when he/she is searching for a coffee mug *just an example*.

@Nikki
From my experience, Etsy looks at titles the same way as you type it in search. Type ‘birthday gift’ and it will only show you listings with the phrase ‘birthday gift’ and NOT ‘birthday party gift’ or ‘birthday boy gift’. It will still show you listings with ‘big birthday gift’ or ‘birthday gift for boys’ though because it still contains the exact phrase. Does that make sense?

hi,
wanted to ask something that might be obvious to people in USA.
(but not to me…)
What does the K stand for?
example:you wrote in one of your answers:”only 2k results”
THNK YOU,JUDITH

Hey Judith! Sorry for that confusion – in that context, k represents “thousands” so 2k is 2000. Thanks for asking!

Gordon hi,
1.Is the order of tags in the listing important?
do the first ones in the title have to be the first ones and in the same order,in the tags?
2.If it is so, do I have to rewrite all the tags every time I change a tag or want to put it in front? I didn’t see a way to change their order afer writing them. Do you know if there is a way of doing it?
thanks,
Judith

Gordon hi,
I wanted to ask;
1. Is the order of the tags important? Do the fist key words of the title have to be the first tags and in the same order?
2. If i want to change the order of the tags,add or erase atag is there a way of doing it without rewriting all the tags in the order I want them? I didn’t see a fast and simple way of moving a tag to a different place in line.
THANK YOU FOR YOUR HELP,
JUDITH

I recently heard that Etsy only really puts weight on your first 3 key phrases in your listing title. So there would be no need to put more than 3. Is that right?

Interesting thought Crystal, I’m not sure about the certain number 3 but I do know that the farther they are in the front, the less effective that keyword becomes. But I guess it wouldn’t hurt to add more keywords into it to fit the 160 character limit of listing titles.

Thank you for this article. I tried this process with my own items but admit I’m still very lost. I sell vintage rhinestone jewelry, so what seems logical (and I’ve even asked some of my customers about this) is to search for a phrase like “vintage white rhinestone bracelet” in order to find one of my items. However, that phrase shows very low engagement on Marmalead, as does vintage jewelry, rhinestone jewelry, and the like. Please correct me if I’m wrong, but shouldn’t one of my goals be to strive for all green across the board in the Storm feature section? So that my keywords have high to very high engagement, low to very low competition, and low to very low category risk? If so, how on earth do I make that happen with vintage items? Thank you in advance!

Woah! Really sorry for the late reply. You are right. As much as possible, you want green marma-meter scores for your keywords. Things are always extra tough when it comes to vintage and other OOAK items, though, so going for Moderate Engagement and Moderate Competition might be a smarter move than not having any views at all. As for keyword ideas, consider adding keywords that would describe where your listing can be used. Especially around this time, I feel it would be a good ‘vintage bracelet for moms’, or perhaps a ‘wedding rhinestone bracelet’, or a ‘white wedding bracelet gift’.

Love this article, so easy to understand! Marmalead is genius in general but this is really extra helpful with spelling it all out perfectly each step we need to take!
My only frustration or confusion I guess when I try to carry this out is that our product that we sell – wooden pendant necklaces, is ALWAYS insane with competition. Trying to find golden keywords with anything less than high competition is seeming almost impossible – especially to find one that relates well to our product! HELP! Where to from there? When the type of product that you sell is so highly competitive?!

Hmm. I guess it’s a pretty similar situation with my post above. Think of things where your necklaces can be used. Think of problems that your listings are solving. I’m sure I’ve seen some that are used in aromatherapy, meditation, or as essential oil diffusers so if you offer those, maybe it’s another area worth tapping into. Hope that helps!

This is all lovely, but my products are energy healing tools (vibrational remedy sprays). I’m having a challenging time finding what words to use and what categories work best for my rather different things. I get the whole blue mug, ceramic mug thing – but I’m having a hard time figuring our how to apply to my things. Suggestions?

You’re on a very narrow niche, Nicole. You should start identifying your target audience first and answering to that. Find a group of people online who’s into those kind of stuff that you offer and try to get into their shoes and what they would search for to find your items. Then you can start from there. I am not familiar with your products but folks who practice yoga looks like a good starting point.

We’re still here – alive and kickin! Sorry for the super late reply, though. I have no idea why I wasn’t notified when new comments drop.

I’m new to this! I’ve been playing around with key words for my wedding invitations. “Wedding fete invite” seemed like a good bet high engagment/ low comp/ low risk. I updated one of my listings with this in the title and key words. I searched Etsy and my listing wasn”t among the 52 cards listed – how is this possible?

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