Sell More with Keywords for Etsy

1. Introduction: Etsy is one of the most popular places to sell physical or digital products online. But unless people are seeing your listings and their searches, you aren't going to be making many sales. Keywords are an important tool to ensure that your great products are shown to potential customers. But picking the right keywords and using them effectively can be a challenge. So in this course we are going to look at the best practices for researching, identifying, and implementing a keyword strategy for your shop. This is an introductory course perfect for anyone who is starting their very first Etsy shop or who has won but has never learned how to use the keyword and features efficiently. First, we're going to look at exactly how Etsy lets you use keywords in your listings. This will give us some parameters to work with when creating our list of potential keywords for your item. Next, we'll look at a few different places that you can do your keyword research to make sure that you're picking effective highly search terms. Finally, I'll demonstrate setting up a listing using keywords I've identified using these methods. So you can see exactly how I recommend you do it. This is going to be a pretty quick and straightforward course that will teach you an important skill to help your Etsy store flourish. My name is Rebecca and I'm your instructor for this course, as well as the owner of multiple successful Etsy stores myself. If you're ready to get a handle on keywords and let's get started. 2. Understanding Keywords: In case you're unfamiliar with the term, a keyword is simply a word or short phrase that is used to describe are labeled something. They are used on Etsy to identify product listings that match up with things that customers are already searching for. There are two kinds of keywords, short tail and long-tail keywords. A short tail keyword is usually made up of one or maybe three words. This is going to be something that is broad and generally searched a lot. So t-shirt or a summer dress or baby shower gift are all short tail keywords because they are descriptive but also very broad. There can be a lot of subcategories within each of those terms. Long-tail keyword is much more like a phrase and it's usually longer than that three words. This is where you start to get much more specific about what you're offering or what a customer is searching for. Black t-shirt with a white cat or pink gingival cottage core summer dress or green themed baby shower gift on a budget, are all long tail keywords that get really specific about what kind of item you're selling. A good keyword strategy is going to be a mix of both long and short tail keywords. That's because you have a high volume of people searching for the short tail keywords and a smaller group of more specific buyers looking for the long tail keywords. So how do we use these kinds of keywords on Etsy? Well, let's head into the next lesson and find out. 3. Keywords on Etsy: There are three places in your Etsy listing that you can use keywords. These are your listing title, your 13 keyword slots, and in your item description. Until recently, it was a bit controversial as to whether keywords in the item description actually mattered. But in May 2022, Etsy announced that their search algorithm will now scan descriptions for keywords. Prior to that, the description only important for external SEO like Google searches. So that's all to say that now we definitely know that the item description is another important space for keywords. There are certain guidelines that you have to follow for putting keywords in each of these spaces. So let's go over those quickly. Listing titles can be a maximum of 140 characters. You can use all caps words three times. For example, PDF or a USB. That's the encourages its users to write really descriptive titles. But the best practice is to put your top keywords in this section as a list with either commas or another punctuation mark separating them. You'll want to put your most accurate and specific keywords at the beginning of the title. As this is what will show up in search results first, put broader or alternative keywords after that in the title. Every listing on Etsy comes with 13 keyword slots where you can enter birds that are attached to your listing. Each keyword can be up to 20 characters long, which means you're mainly going to be entering short tail keywords here. Your product description is the largest space that you have to enter information about your product. This is a good place to integrate long-tail keywords in particular, as they might not fit properly into either of the other spaces. When someone visits your Etsy listing only the first few lines of the description or visible until they click on Read more. For this reason, I don't recommend cramming keywords into first few lines of your description. Makes sure that this part of the text is compelling sales copy. Instead, the best method to put keywords into your product description is to integrate it naturally into the text. I don't recommend making a list or a block of keywords. Instead, turn them into sentences that make sense when you read them, your customers shouldn't realize that there are keywords in there at all. For example, if the long-tail keywords that you want to integrate is unicorn theme, tenth birthday party. Then create a sentence like if you're throwing a unicorn themed tenth birthday party, that makes sure that you're using these easy to edit invitations for all your guests. So these are the three areas of your product listing where you can place your keywords. One question I do come across sometimes is whether you can repeat keywords in each of these spaces. In general, It's a good idea to use as many distinct keywords as possible. And using all of these spaces should give you ample room for as many applicable keywords as you can find. However, I have encountered specific products in my stores where I have come up short a few times. So I'm trying to fill up my 13 keyword slots and have repeated some of the keywords from the title. There isn't particularly any harm in doing this other than losing out on the opportunity for new keywords that you haven't used yet. But I would say it's better to use a keyword in both the title and the cube root slots than to leave a keyword slot unused. And of course make sure that you aren't repeating the same key twice. Myriad of the listing at these filters should flag if you do this. Now that we understand what keywords are and how we can use them on Etsy. Let's move on to the next lesson and take a look at how we can find keywords for our products. 4. Tool 1: Etsy's Own Platform: There are two different ways that you can use the actual Etsy website itself to help you do keyword research for your listings. The first method is going to be by using the search bar, and the second method is going to be by looking at competitors listings. So we'll look at those one by 1. First I've got Etsy homepage up here, and I'm going to go up to the search bar. Now when you type in different keywords here, Etsy is going to auto-fill and prompt you for some other things that people have searched relevant to what you put in. Now before we even type anything in, one interesting feature is you can just click on this box here. And it's going to show you search terms that are popular right now, especially in the country that you're located. This doesn't really help when you're trying to find keywords for specific products. But if you were looking for inspiration in the moment, there might be something here that inspires you. For now, let's pretend that we are trying to sell birthday party invitations or some sort of invitation template. The word that I want to type in here is invitation. We can see all these other keywords pop up in relation to invitation. Now these are all things that people are actually searching for. Etsy recommends them because they're common. Now you can click on any of these to see the results that come up or you can just continue typing. So let's try templates next. And even more keywords. And at this point we're starting to get into long tail keywords versus short tail. Now some of these could be relevant to the item you're selling, or this could also be a great way to get inspiration for more products you could sell if you already sell invitation templates, for example, but you want to more ideas of examples of categories or variations you could make. This method works for pretty much any kind of item. As you see here, when I type in the word dress, it gives me both dresses and dressers and dressing gowns. So a lot of variations on the word that aren't actually relevant to what I'm looking for. But you can use this tool to help narrow down even further keywords. So if I type in dress for, it gives me all these examples of subcategories of type of person who may be looking for a dress. And of course, these suggestions are going to change with the time of year, the trends that are happening right now, and any other variables that make things come and go through popularity. So that's pretty straightforward, but that's a really easy free way to find keywords that people are actually searching for on Etsy. Now the second method for using the website itself for keyword research is to look at the competitors products. These five items are popular right now. So let's just click on one of them and see what kind of keywords they're using. So first of all, you can see here in the title, this is heavily using a list of keywords you could borrow from some of these if they are relevant to your product. As we scroll down, this is the description of the product. Now you can see here that they've actually included a list of keywords which I don't really recommend because this is just the section that we see without learning more about this item. So I would actually put this list a little bit further down in the description. That's just a personal preference, so it doesn't look as computer-generated. But there are lots of phrases in this text that you can borrow as keywords as well. If you scroll all the way to the very bottom, there's some interesting information right here. So first of all, we have explored related searches. So these are some other keywords that are related to this item. These are definitely great options for you to use as keywords yourself. You can also take the words that we see here and try typing them into the search bar and see what auto-generate, you may be able to get some additional long-tail keywords just by starting with wooden coasters, for example. Even though this isn't about keywords, there's interesting information with the categories here. If you are struggling to figure out how to categorize your item, sometimes the more abstract things, templates and digital products, especially it's hard to know what category to put them in so you can check out your competitors, find out what they're doing down here. Back to the main page. I'm just going to try searching that in wooden coaster. And you can see lots of variations of terms that you could use to more specifically labeled your products. You can use all of these as keywords. If they are beyond the 20 character limit, then they can't fit into the 13 Cambridge slots. But again, put that in your title or in the description of your text. Clearly, Etsy is really useful for doing your own keyword research. It is free, it's really quick. The only thing that it doesn't allow you to do is to see any analytics about these keywords. It doesn't give you the details about how many people are searching for them or how many search results are there. Although you can click through and see the search results yourself, it's just not automated in that way. And that's why some people prefer to use a software like e rank. In the next lesson, let's look at how to use that software if you are interested in even further keyword research tools. 5. Tool 2: eRank: A popular method for doing keyword research for Etsy is to use a third-party tool or piece of software. The one that I'm showing you here on the screen is called E rank. The website is e, j and k.com. It is one of the options that are out there that I prefer to use. Another example is marmalade, that is very popular as well. The reason I choose e rank over marmalade is that there is actually a free version of it. So you can do a certain number of free searches per day for a lot of people that is actually going to be enough because you're not always doing keyword research all the time. Maybe you're just doing it a couple of times just to get your store started. So I can't show you everything it does, but I do want to just show you what kind of results and analytics it gives you for actual keywords. I'm just going to go to the search bar here and search for wooden coasters because we were already looking at that. So here's the results it gives you. The default Marketplace it looks at is the US, and that's just because of how much buying power is there. I think it's fairly representative of other markets as well, but that is the base that they use. So it shows you right here for the term wooden coasters, we have 228 searches per month, on average, a 186 clicks, that's an 82% click-through rate. And basically you want a really high click-through rate and His people who are searching for it are actually engaging with it. They're not searching and scrolling away. The other important number is Etsy competition. So that's how many listings there are for this search term, which is 10,572. Now they use colors to indicate what's good and what's bad here, you want a really low competition number and a really high search volume. So this isn't bad, but it is a very competitive market. Obviously. This is information that just searching on Etsy will not give you. So we're looking through the Etsy search bar or scrolling on eliciting, we don't actually know any of these numbers were just guessing that because they show up, they are in use at all. But that doesn't mean that it's not a very competitive keyboard or maybe there's not a lot of people using it in general. So that's why some people will prefer to use a software like this to get a bit more information. If I scroll down, we see other keywords that are related to this one. Now this is actually a very shortlist. Normally there's dozens and dozens that show up. But I think because this is a two-word keyword, it didn't give me a lot. But again, this is the kind of information you can access this page with a free account. It may just limit the number of searches per day you can do so. Make sure you use them wisely. In terms of what data is along here that is useful. First of all, we have search trends. So if there's a seasonal peak, you can see that that's really interesting to know, especially if you're basing your whole store around one kind of product or concept, if you realize that this product only seems to sell in January for some reason, then maybe you want to expect that. Next is the character count. This is really important. As I mentioned, you can only fit at 20 character word in the 13 keyword slots on your product listing. This one, for example, would be too long to fit there, but you could put that in your title, but more likely in your product description. Next, we have the same data as above, but across a couple of different listings. So average searches per month, average clicks per month, the click-through rate, which is about this number here. And then the ETC. Competition up above here. This data was just for the two-word phrase, wooden coasters, which we see as the third listed here. But just the word coasters and just the word wooden. You wouldn't want to make an item-based just around those concepts because there's far too much competition. We also have data here on Google searches, which is interesting. But if you're just focusing on Etsy for now, we're just getting started and I wouldn't worry about those. This is an indicator as to whether the keyword is a long-tail keyword, which it is good to know. Just to ensure that you have a diversity of keywords. And these last four are long-tail keywords, but as you notice, they are the ones with the fewer searches. So as you get the longer phrase, the narrower the funnel gets a number of people looking for it. Now if I was trying to make a list of keywords to put on my listing, this would be a place that I start to pull them from. However, we don't have a lot of options here. So let's look at a different kind of keyword to see something that has a lot of variations. Now, I've searched for the word planner here, which is a very common basic keyboard. There's gonna be a ton of results and as you can see, there's almost a million search results or products rather than 35 thousand people a month searching for it. So very popular, very saturated. You would want to get much more granular and focused in terms of designing a product around this keyword. If I scroll down just vaguely, you'll see there's tons and tons of search results that are different keywords that relate to the word planner but are quite different from each other. And you can use these different filters to sort by what you're looking for. So if you wanted something with not a lot of competition, we could click on just the competition to resort. And I'm going to search it that way. So if we scroll up here, we see there's very little competition for these keywords. One search result that stands out here is garage sale planner. That doesn't have a lot of competition, but it does have a lot of people looking for it. And you can see that it's 19 characters, so that would fit in the keyword slots on your listing. So what I'd like to do is do these kinds of searches through here and write down a list just on some paper or on my computer of all the keywords they want to use. And then I'll go back through and evaluate them afterwards. This is obviously a much more technical way to get keywords, and it does provide you with a lot of data, but it does take longer. So it's not necessarily something you need to do for your very first door or your first listings. But over time, if you find that certain products aren't performing the way you want them to, or you're not seeing a lot of views or sales, you might want to look at the keywords on that item, maybe run them through a software like this and then reassess. So this is a tool that's not just great when you're starting out, but also great to continually check in and improve your store over time. 6. Tool 3: Etsy Ads: Another place where you can identify and verify the effectiveness of keywords on your listings is through the ETC. Ads platform. This is a method that I don't recommend you use as a first-line of research, but rather something that you might want to consider trying after you've built up your store a little bit. Also as this will require you to be using Etsy ads, there is some cost involved. The amount is up to you, but the minimum etsy requires is a budget of one US dollar a day. And it needs to have at least seven days of data to provide you with keyword insights. Now I won't give you a whole rundown of how to use Etsy ads because it's actually pretty simple and their guide will provide you with all you need to get started. But if you are running an ad with them and you want to see the keywords showing up for. This is how you find that information. On your Etsy dashboard. You're going to follow this sequence. Click on marketing in the sidebar and then on Etsy adds. Near the top of the Ads dashboard, There's a link called managed advertised listings. You can then click on search terms for any of the items that your advertising and you'll see what the keywords are, the ETC is using to get viewers looking at your products. Just here I've blanked out the data from my ads, but this is what the listing dashboard looks like in general. Here you can see an excerpt from one of my products. The product is a book template and I've been running a promotion on it for about seven days now just to get some data on it. One of the interesting here is that one keyword was flagged as having a high click rate. That means that this keyword is really effective for my product. It's not actually a keyword combination that I used anywhere, so this will help me update my listing in the future. Something else interesting to note is that even though these addView numbers are relatively low, I did actually make a couple of sales of this product in this timeframe, which just goes to show how highly targeted keywords can be really, really effective. You'll see there's also a toggle for relevant keyword. This you can use to flag keywords that are not actually relevant to your product. Sometimes the algorithm can mess up, especially if your search Trump has a lot of similarities to another. Remember the dress and dresser. So you can use this to avoid spending your ad budget on irrelevant words. Exploring the ETC. Ads feature is not only a great way to see where your products are showing up, but also a way to understand which keywords on your listing our high-value. Maybe you have other products that would fit the seed keywords that you can add to their listening as well. You can also take those keywords and search for them on Etsy to see who your direct competition is. The people showing up for those exact same keywords. Check out their listings using the methods that we talked about in lesson three for additional keywords that you might have missed. Sometimes we don't discover our true competitors on Etsy until we have our listings up and can see them side-by-side. Now that we've looked at three different ways, you can find and evaluate keywords for our Etsy listings. Let's move on to our last lesson to see an example of all of this in action. 7. Example Product Listing: Now that we've gone over several methods to gather keywords, let's look at an example product and the kind of keywords I would pull for it for our sample item, let's say that we were selling this child's dress. My objective is to find 20 keywords that will work for this listing, which will give me 13 for the keyword slots, a handful for the title, and then anything extra I can put in the product description. Let's consider this item and its attributes. This will give us a starting point for keyword research. Consider the style, colors, occasion, age, range, aesthetic, and any unique qualities the item might have. Using all the methods we've discussed in this course, I pulled together this list of keywords. Now most of these keywords are somewhere between a short tail and a long tail, as they are mostly three-word keywords. But there are a couple of longer ones. And you'll see that the word dress is repeated in almost every listing. And that's because it is the most essential keyword to describing what this item is. Now that I have all of these keywords, I'll start by selecting the best ones for the title. Keyword that I consider to be the most descriptive and most accurate is girls tiered floral dress down here at the end. So I will use this as the first keyword in the listing title. I've pulled up a new listing on Etsy to show you where we can put those keywords in. At the top we have our photos and videos, but if you scroll down to the listing details, the title is right here. For our example of the girl's dress, I'm going to start with the keyword that I liked the most, which was girls tiered floral dress. There are lots of ways you could divide it. You could just do a comma, you could do a space and a line like that. Or you could do a semicolon. I think the comma is probably most common, but some people prefer other ways for aesthetic purposes. As you can see here, I have 113 characters left, so I'm just going to add in some other keywords just to fill in this box. Oh, there we go. I was able to fit six keywords in the title. You can see I have five characters left. You can try and come up with five extra characters, but I'm not going to. An important thing to remember here is that the keywords are going to work in multiple ways. So when I put in girls tiered floral dress, that will show up as one keyword. But so well, girls tiered floral or tiered floral dress without the rig girls, and also just floral dress because all of those keyword combinations are in this phrase. So therefore, you don't need to put floral dress. Again here at the end is if I put summer dress because that combination wasn't somewhere else here. So now we have the title filled out. I'm going to scroll down. Here's the description box will cope over that last, I'm going to just scroll down to tags right here. Tags and keywords are the same thing. So in this case I'm just going to start adding keywords from my list. You can put commas between them or just hit Enter in between. And we can see that one went through just fine. But if I try a longer keyword, that one's more than 20 characters, so I can't actually use it in this space. So that's a keyword. Then I'm going to save to put up in the description. I won't bother typing in everything else from the list that I made, but this is how you enter keywords into the tag section. And finally, we go to the description here. And this is where you're going to write your beautiful informative description of your product. As I mentioned before, I would use the first couple of sentences for a bit more copy. That was a bit more salesy, not so much keyword filled. But just for the example, I'll show you, I'll integrate that keyword that didn't fit below sustainable handmade dress into a sentence. So again, here's an example of how you could fit that long-tail keyword in. The keyword is right here, sustainable handmade dress. And I turned it into looking for a sustainable handmade dress for someone special, this hand stitch garment was made with love right here in Nova Scotia, Canada. Just as an example, you can see I could fit, these could be other keywords as well. Hand stitch garment can be a keyword. Even the place name could be a keyword if someone was looking to support a business from this location. So those are the places you can add your keywords on your listing. Other than that, you want to fill in all the other information as usual. And you can always go back and edit these pages. You don't have to keep your item listing the same forever. And the keywords sections like the title, description and the tags slots here are very easy to modify going forward. If you do a bunch of keywords the first time, decide that they're not working so well. Maybe you've already done that actually. Then you can come back and edit them and publish, republish your listing. Then you just leave it for a little while, see how those keywords perform and reevaluate if needed. It is a little bit of a job to keep on top of your keywords to make sure that your listings are performing. But that's just part of the maintenance that you do and running an online store, especially in Etsy store, which has so much organic traffic out there. There are millions of people searching to byproducts at any minute on this platform, you just need to make sure that your products are showing up in front of them. And keywords are gonna be the way that you can do that. Now we've reached the end of the course and I hope you feel more confident approaching SEs keyword system. If you enjoyed this course, please do consider leaving me a review. I read all of them myself and I really appreciate it. I also offer a wide range of other courses on Etsy, e-commerce and design. So if you like learning with me, I hope to see you in another class, happy creating.