Improving Search Results for Your Etsy Shop with Keywords

By Allison Strine and Kate Shoup from Starting an Etsy Business For Dummies

Short of purchasing Google or Yahoo! outright, you can improve your search results by doing a little research to determine whether the keywords you're using for your Etsy shop are appropriate or whether other keywords may serve you better. To aid you, Google offers its handy, dandy Keyword Tool. You use it like so:

Open the Google Keyword tool.

The page for the Google AdWords Keyword Tool opens.
Type any keywords or phrases that you use in the Word or Phrase box.

Include one keyword or phrase per line.
Fill out the CAPTCHA form.

In other words, type the characters that appear in the picture.
Click the Search button.

The Keyword Tool shows how often the keywords you typed are searched, as well as other keywords you may want to consider. Notice here that more than 1,000 local searches focused on the phrase "bottle cap bracelet." That is, over a 12-month period, 1,000 people in the United States searched for the phrase "bottle cap bracelet." Also notice that, in the same period, nearly 7,500,000 people searched for the term "jewelry."

Now, you may think that you need to focus on the higher-volume keywords or phrases — that is, keywords like "jewelry" rather than phrases such as "bottle cap bracelet." After all, more people are searching with those. But given how many matches are in that category, the chances of your shop or item ranking near the top are essentially nil. You have a much better chance of appearing near the top of the results for a narrow search, like "bottle cap bracelet."

What about finding keywords that may work better than the ones you're using? Simple. Just read through the list of keywords that the Keyword Tool spits out to find ideas for keywords or phrases you can use. This list contains actual search terms that people have entered into search engines to find items like yours. In this example, you may add "bottle cap jewelry" or "bottle cap crafts" as keywords.

You can use Etsy Web Analytics to see which keywords visitors used to find you on Etsy.

To make sure your titles are optimized for search, keep these points in mind:

Include keywords . . . Every item title that you write needs to contain at least one keyword or phrase (more, if possible).
. . . But not too many. Yes, you want to make sure that your title contains as many keywords as possible. But stuffing your title with too many keywords for the sake of SEO may render it terribly boring, if not completely unreadable. The idea is to write titles that are catchy for both people and search engines.
Put keywords first. Place keywords at or near the beginning of your item title. Although search engines search your entire title for keyword matches, they display only the first 66 characters (including spaces) of it in the list of results.

The same points apply to your item description — except one: Search engines display more characters from your item description in search results (160 in all, including spaces). But again, even though you have a little more wiggle room, you want to make sure that your keywords appear toward the beginning. You also want to repeat any keywords at least once (but preferably two or three times) in your item description, to boost your Etsy shop in the search rankings.