How to Optimize Your Shop & Listings for Search
If you sell unique and creative products, Etsy is the place you want to be.
However, even if you’re selling handmade crafts or rare vintage items, Etsy can be extremely competitive. It’s filled with amazing products on offer.
How can your shop and products stand out and get noticed?
Etsy shops, like every other corner of the internet, need SEO to be successful. In fact, SEO for Etsy shops isn’t all that different from SEO for any other website.
If you need to boost your Esty shop’s visibility, here are some tips and tricks that can help.
How Does Etsy Decide Rankings?
If you want to improve your Etsy shop’s SEO, you first must understand how Etsy chooses which listings get shown first to buyers.
Once Etsy finds listings that match a buyer’s search, they look at a few different factors to determine how the listings should be ranked. These ranking factors on Etsy include:
- Relevancy.
- Listing quality score.
- Recency.
- Customer and market experience score.
- Shipping price.
- Translations and languages.
- Shoppers’ habits.
Shoppers’ habits are an important factor to keep in mind when optimizing your Etsy shop. While you can improve how highly your listings rank, they won’t earn the same position for each user.
This is because Etsy tailors its search results for each user to match their past behaviors.
Even if you can’t maintain a certain ranking across the board, you still want to do everything you can to be the best option for buyers.
Accurate Keywords Are Key
Many Esty sellers are extremely creative, and some might think it’s best to showcase that creativity in their shop listings.
If you sell original artwork, for example, you might have given it a special name of your own and used that as the listing title.
However, Etsy shops are similar to any other online store in that your keywords should reflect what buyers are actually searching for.
A fun, creative listing title that doesn’t accurately describe the item won’t help you get found.
Try to fit in as much detail as you can, too. You can use long-tail keywords on Etsy just as you would on your website, to be more specific about what it is exactly that you’re offering for sale.
This can help you find buyers who are close to making a purchase. These buyers know exactly what they’re looking for, so their searches tend to be more specific.
Avoid Repeating the Same Keywords
When you’ve found a keyword that fits some of the products you offer, you might think your best bet is to use that for all of them, to try to get them all seen by buyers.
No matter how great your shop is or how many optimizations you’ve done, Etsy will only show your listings a few times in one search. This means if you’re using the same keywords for multiple listings, most of them won’t end up in a buyer’s search results at all.
If you’re too repetitive, you just end up competing with yourself in addition to every other shop out there.
Even if you have a lot of similar listings in your shop, try to use slightly different keywords for each one.
Don’t Forget About Tags
Taking full advantage of the tags available on your listing. A tag is just one more way of telling Etsy what exactly it is that you’re selling.
Etsy gives you 13 tags for each listing, which you can use to target 13 different keyword phrases that describe your listing.
Tags are a great way of going after as many different keywords as you can, so long as they’re relevant. Find as many keyword phrases as you can that are applicable to your listing.
Keep Shop Sections Optimized
Shop sections on Etsy help you keep your store organized.
You can categorize your listings into sections that contain similar products, to keep them grouped together. This can make it much easier for potential buyers to navigate your shop and find what they’re looking for.
Organization is a great enough reason on its own to utilize shop sections, but it’s also an important part of Etsy SEO. Like tags, sections are another chance to include keywords in your shop.
To make the most of using shop sections, be smart about the keywords you use for each one. These should be the keywords you want to rank for, but they also need to provide a good description of that category to make it easy for sellers to browse.
Get Links to Your Listings
SEO for Etsy shops goes beyond what you have listed in your shop. People referencing and linking back to your shop are impactful, too.
People will see that others are talking about your shop, which is a great way of bringing in more customers.
This might not be an audience you would have reached on your own, and having someone else vouch for your work says a lot about you as a seller.
To get more backlinks for your shop, focus not only on your Etsy shop but on your other online listings, as well. This means managing social media accounts for your shop and, ideally, even a website.
Being active and visible online helps more people find out about your business and gives you more chances to get people to link back to your store and listings.
Offer Free Shipping
Etsy sellers have the option to cover the cost of shipping for their listings or have the buyer pay it.
Since covering shipping costs is only optional, some sellers might choose to just have the buyers for it like they would on most ecommerce websites.
However, offering free shipping for your customers is a great way of getting more people to see your listings.
Of course, everyone likes getting free shipping, so this could encourage more people to buy from you. But there’s an added bonus when you do this on Etsy.
Sellers who offer free shipping to buyers on Etsy get priority over those who don’t in search because they’re seen as a better option with more value for buyers.
If paying for shipping is financially possible for you, this is something to consider.
Conclusion
SEO is necessary for any Etsy shop to get their listings noticed by more buyers. However, don’t plan on getting all of the benefits of optimizing your shop right away.
SEO takes time, so if you don’t see changes quickly it doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong.
It can take a while for it to kick in, but once your listings start getting more attention from buyers, you’ll see that the work was worth it.
