Search Words and Your Etsy Store

It's no secret that Etsy is absolutely swamped with jewelry.  Within Etsy, it's important to have your item tagged correctly so folks can find it.  Personally, I don't know how much of a help that is, because most of the folks who are already on Etsy as customers seem to frequent shops they've heard about from other places.  So how do you get strangers to find your shop?  Search words.

This is no great secret.  It's all over Etsy.  But how do you figure out which search words to use?  I did a quick Google search and found this gem:

When employing search engine optimization techniques to the web pages, you must identify the main concept a page talk about and base the main keywords and phrases from that. For handmade jewelry websites most have pages for handmade earrings, handmade bracelets and handcrafted necklaces so focus on those keywords and related keywords. It is best to have only two or three phrases per page.

The title tag, meta description and meta keywords tags of each page should also be optimized with the chosen keywords and phrases. It is crucial to make the title tag and meta description attractive to your customers as well as the search engines. Most major search engines will use the title tag and description on the search engine results pages which means that this is what people will be reading once they search for a query relevant to your content. The meta keywords tag is not used by most search engines anymore but it is worth including just in case.

WTH does THAT mean?  Well basically, you want to keep your message short and sweet because the more times you can work it into the content of your page, the higher the keyword density and therefore the better your Etsy shop will perform in google searches.  Once upon a time, people used to get around this by more or less spamming a key word on a page repeatedly (the easiest way to do it was by typing the text in tiny letters in the same color as the background).  Search engines have long since been able to identify and discard such pages and you can't do it on Etsy anyway.  So you just have to find a key phrase and work it into your content as naturally as possible.


So which key words DO you want to include on your Etsy listing?  Well, it depends.  I used to use the Google Trends tool but that really didn't help me much other than to tell me folks will spend an average of less than a minute on your shop before clicking through to something else.  In my case, since I'm a very small shop and really have only one "best seller," (a silver ring with pearls and shells)  which as far as I can tell, is a fairly unique item, I decided to focus on trying to get that one item to place high in Google searches, and hope that maybe customers would also click through the rest of the store.  Where I normally sell 4 of my pearly shell rings per year, I managed to sell 4 in December alone.  So while that's not enough to quit my day job, it did multiply my business by a factor of twelve.


Granted, I did luck out and got a repeat customer.  Which brings me to my next point.  If you don't have a unique item, you could try focusing on your location instead of the item description.   Almost all of my items are tagged with Hawaii, since that's where I am.  You can add your location to the footer of every page on your website/blog, facebook fan page, and in your product descriptions.  (It's quite easy to do- at the end of the listing, just say, "If you're local in Hawaii, please contact me for alternate shipping options." And there you go.)  


Another way to get more business to your Etsy store is to trade links.  I joined a three teams- the "local" Hawaii team, and two large teams- Homefront (for folks affiliated with the military) and Etsy Mom.  People are always willing to trade links.  When you have the same URL associated with the same hyperlinked phrase a bunch of times, it pops up higher in search engines.  The Blog List widget on Blogger will even set up your blog roll to display the 5 or 10 most recently updated websites so you don't have an overwhelming list in your margin.

Finally, you could try giveaways.  An online jewelry supplier had a killer program in which they allow beading bloggers to select a few items to receive and review in exchange for hyperlinks back to their store.  For example, one of the most popular jewelry supply searches is "Swarovski crystals," so say that you could pick out $20 worth of Swarovski jewelry, make something pretty, then blog about it... and every time you said "Swarovski" or "bicone" or whatever, then you create a hyperlink going back to their storefront.  While most of us probably don't have the inventory to do something quite on that scale, you could offer a giveaway in exchange for a product review on a popular blog.  Or you could offer a freebie for your 100th Facebook Fan or for readers of your blog who comment on a certain post.  But, tying back to the original topic, "free" is one of the top search words.  That, and people who have popular blogs are generally willing to promote something that's free for their readers, as opposed to someone trying to sell something.

Yes, yes, it takes time.  Internet content writers get paid obscene money for their ability to do this and generate business.  I know- we're already expected to create our products, learn bookkeeping, be spectacular photographers, and have colorful item descriptions... and now we have to be content writers too?  Nobody ever said it would be easy.  But I hope this makes things a little less confusing.


And if you happen to like what you read, please let me know by leaving a comment.  With no comments on this blog, I'm sort of drifting here.  :)  P.S.  You can also like Simply Leilani on Facebook.  It's free.