When shoppers go on Etsy, they’re usually looking for something unique, bespoke, and made with care – as an Etsy shop owner, it’s your job to ensure that your item stands out and can be located easily, thus optimizing your shop appropriately is a crucial step in helping to increase the visibility of your shop and point shoppers in the direction of your items. Whilst a range of factors go into search rankings for Etsy, there are elements that are within your control and that allow you to better match shoppers’ searches and improve your ranking within the results of those searches.   

The Importance of Keywords

As with any form of SEO, the most important consideration when attempting to optimize your placement in searches is to consider the keywords you include. The more exact and specific the phrase is, the higher it will be placed in searches surrounding that phrase – ‘girl’s jumper’ would elicit better, more specific results, for example, than ‘girl’ and ‘jumper’ individually.

Additionally, placing the same word in both your item title and the tags for that item creates coordination that will help you rank higher, as the repetition makes it more relevant in searches including that keyword. It is also important to remember that the beginning of the keyword phrase – particularly long tail keywords – is more important than the end, making it essential to place the most valuable information at the beginning of the phrase. However, including too much repetition can cause your shop and items to be considered too broad or general, and this will prevent you from appearing in a higher-up position in Etsy search rankings.

Get Tagging!

At first, the value of adding tags to items is often underestimated by shop owners on Etsy. The platform provides 13 tags for each item and, whilst they are not mandatory, utilizing all 13 of them will help to increase your search ranking exponentially. Some key rules to remember if you want your tags to be successful, however, are as follows:

• all tags must be written in the language of the item’s listing
• avoid using a tag that has already been used in the item’s attributes
• avoid repeating the same information throughout these tags
• do not use plurals in your tags and avoid any misspellings – the Etsy search algorithm will automatically redirect any common misspellings, so these do not need to be included in tags

Remember, the more tags you include to describe your item, the more likely it is to be placed in a higher position during searches for that item or similar.

Be Specific

There’s nothing more detrimental to the ranking of your shop in an Etsy search than being vague when describing and categorizing your items. To render your items more relevant, the trick is to treat the categories section in the same way as the tags – the more categories and subcategories that you include, the more detail about the item the system has and, therefore, the more likely it is to appear in relevant searches. Start off listing the broader categories it can be included in, and then gradually filter this down to more specific categories.

The same applies to the item’s attributes, which again work like tags. You should consider the colors, listing the primary then secondary colors, the celebration or occasion the item is for, the height, and the width, for example – this will again help it to appear in relevant searches and place higher than similar, but less-specific, items. After this, you can then add more specific attributes that are unique to that category.

Titles – Informative yet Snappy

On Etsy, store owners have up to 55 characters to produce a shop title. They then have the ability to add a tag line or a slogan. Carefully considering the shop and item titles is important – in general, the shorter, the better – as is the tag line/slogan, which will help the shop and items rank higher in searches if specific keywords are included.

It is well-known that popular listings perform better in Etsy searches, and it is even more beneficial to place the most important keywords at the start of the listing. The first 160 characters in the item’s description are used in the meta data, making these characters the most important aspect of the item description when considering placement in searches.

All About You 

In the ‘about’ section of your Etsy shop, you have an opportunity to tell potential customers more about yourself and your shop – something that can not only interest customers and builds an affinity with you, but that can help to improve your customer and market experience score, which may aid in improving your search ranking. Furthermore, including clear shop policies and utilizing Etsy’s own template for this purpose can be helpful.

Etsy also includes something called context-specific ranking (CSR), which takes into account various qualities of your shop and items when ranking. For example, if your shop is local to a customer, your items will be more prominent in their searches, aiding your ranking for nearby customers, thus having an ‘About me’ section that gives some specific information could prove beneficial to you!

Promotion

Again, as with all SEO, the promotion of your brand and items is invaluable to driving traffic towards your shop and aiding your ranking placement. Specifically focusing on building inbound links for promotion is helpful because it not only increases your exposure, but also helps you to forge relationships with others in and around your industry.

Paid promotions on social media and creating a page for your shop can be incredibly helpful, as can building relationships with websites and bloggers who can promote and provide links for your shop/items. Requesting affiliate and influencer reviews for free samples can also help improve your exposure, which will aid your ranking on Etsy search.

Each of the above will help you to optimize your shop to improve your rankings on Etsy, helping to expose your products to a variety of potential customers. This can be further aided by including free delivery, or lower delivery costs if they cannot be avoided, and renewing the items in your shop regularly. But, most important of all, always check, update, and renew your tags and keywords regularly!