My take on understanding SEO and search ranking comes from my testing, experiments, and experience. I should add here before you do any testing and experiments you should have a base line starting point for your shop. A standard level that your store sits at so that when you do these tests and experiments you can reset everything back to zero. There is nothing worse then tying your store up in knots. Now everyone knows they can always go to the Etsy Seller Handbook for tips on understanding Etsy SEO and that’s great and very appreciated by many, but for some reason there is still some mystery on how to rank and get seen? I don’t know if this is built into the Etsy site, is caused by their constant testing, or is SEO’s constant evolution but it has caused thousands of websites to blog their take on how to do Etsy SEO. This tells me one thing. It’s different for every store. Which also explains why there is such a wide and differing content for all these well written and researched blogs and yet there is still so much mystery? I have been testing my SEO theory for years. Each listing has a Quality Score, this is a measurement of the listings popularity with buyers and its placement in searches. Many factors go into these scores, a whole lot more then you could imagine. Its all these factors that make up the mathematical equation that is the Algorithm. Computers- especially AI have the ability to do complex calculations on many levels at the same time. That’s billions of calculations each second.
So saying that if you do certain things a certain way like- Photos, Titles, Prices, Special Offers etc. you stand a good chance of being at the head of the pack, but not at front page status. Front page status takes into account even more information that is drawn from the AI’s understanding of your listing vs the competition. This can help explain why you see listings with almost no favorites or sales in front page placement when in theory it shouldn’t be there. This is caused by what I call “shopping boosts”. This listing has something that gets shoppers attention. Something that stands out. It could be a new trend just getting started on the horizon or an eye catching sparkle in the picture, but its getting noticed by shoppers and in turn the AI. It’s a fact that the front page of a section converts more sales than any other page. This is why AI closely watches these shopper boosted listings. A listing can quickly take off and catapult into thousands of sales so fast it soon creates its own new section and attribute. I actually had this happen with one of my listings. Fortunately I was paying attention while trying to keep up and taking notes.
Trends are funny things, they have a life of all their own it seems like. They are born, they live, and unfortunately sometimes they die. I’m sure you have all seen this in some way. Like Fidget Spinners. When they took off WoW did they take off! They were actually invented in 1993 but they had no audience or interest. This is because they were ahead of their time. Not until their relaunch in 2017 did they actually gain traction and almost take over the world. This is in large part due to timing. The Who and What of marketing. The “Who” is their target market was too young or hadn’t been born yet, and the “What” is a large population of people needing a temporary distraction to life’s problems. Add to that the Era we are in today with having people who have trouble focusing, dealing with high anxiety, nervous energy, and possible psychological stress and its no wonder why they were so popular. Today is nothing like the kick back good ‘ol days of the early 90’s if you’re young enough to remember them. It wasn’t always like this my young readers. The world has truly changed since then. But when the computers seen the quick boosting of shoppers interest in these old and all but forgotten toys they took off like a rocket for any store that had a few laying around and Poof! An instant trend was born. What killed the trend was the millions of copies and people trying to ride its success so they could have their share of the success. It’s like a sinking ship, the more people that climb onto what’s left the faster it goes down! This is where copy rights and trademarks come into the picture, but more on that later.
For your listings to hit the front page you need a combination of a lot of things. I will say absolutely everything goes into the equation of factoring what is in the front page listings. So many factors i’d need a whole separate post just on that subject and will probably do so later on. But for now we will keep it simple and explore the 12 main subjects of the basic listing score. Those 12 subjects are:
1. SEO
2. Photos
3. Descriptions
4. Pricing
5. Completed Shop Policies
6. Amount of products in stock
7. International shipping
8. One unified shop theme
9. Completed About Me sections
10. Clear Categories
11. Links inter linking your store with other pages in it
12. Coupon Codes
Yes all these things and more are involved in your listings rankings, but i don’t want to overwhelm you with all this information at once so i will go over them one at a time in an organised fashion. We are still on square one of SEO and i think i’m gonna need another post or two to even cover what’s most important, but all of these 12 things tie into your listings placement as a whole. To break it down even further let’s do an example so i can show you details. Never guess your Titles or Keywords. Just don’t do it. Its not accurate and here especially you need to be accurate! You have 7 words to get you where you need to be. Using keyword tools is a must. They do the thinking for you to a point. Marmalead and Erank websites are great for Etsy sellers but they only go so far. If you want to reach Google you’ll need to use sites like Ubersearch and Google Keyword Planner. There are a bunch more you can use also. How far you want to go with your “Seed Word” is up to you. But we will stick to these four for now.
Once you have determined your ultimate phrase put that as your first few words followed by the next most popular words until you have a strong working title. Then stop. You don’t want full length titles anymore. Long tail keyword titles yes, but only 7 words long not 143 characters like before. That’s the old way. It still works fine if you have older listings that are doing ok but for new listings you want to keep from truncating your titles in search. Truncating just means shortening something by cutting off the top end- which you don’t want to do. This drops your SEO listing score and placement in search. So shorten up those titles to 7 power words. Then you can stuff everything else into your tags. Your tags are where all the other search terms should go. Don’t repeat them, make the most of your spaces with as many unique words as possible. I do this by searching for as many keywords as possible in lots of different search tools, writing them all down and crossing out the repeating words and combining words that make sense together into long tail keyword phrases. The AI will search for all these words when a shopper types in what they are looking for in the search bar so you want as many different words as possible to have more chances for a match to multiple search terms. There are as many combinations as there are people. These techniques will get your new listings found more effectively but are not the whole formula. For that we will need to go further in depth in our next subject in this blog series. I have termed it “Climbing the Ladder” to the top of SEO search by using keywords to place higher in smaller searches to grow your way to the top.
If you have enjoyed, learned, or want to add something to this subject please let me know in the comments section below. Like and subscribe so you can see the continuation of this conversation in my next post where i will be covering more of these interesting topics. All of my information and advice given here comes from my personal experience and are in no way a path or formula to success. I just would like to help people if i can to be more successful with their businesses. As with real life the advice given here is just that- advice. I in no way promise or are responsible for the outcomes of the choices you choose to make. So if it don’t feel right to you, don’t do it. Please stop by and visit my store for more info on me and to see what i make and what others think about my work. Just going into my store and looking around really helps! And I do appreciate the help. You can visit me at: https://www.etsy.com/shop/MysticMountainJewels?ref=seller-platform-mcnav
Mystic Mountain Jewels 