Etsy is one of the world’s largest online marketplaces, where you can buy and sell a variety of handmade and vintage items. Launched in 2005, Etsy now has over 500 million monthly active users, and billions of product listings. Basically, if you have a product that you think others might be interested in, you can put it up for sale on Etsy.

The key to successful e-commerce growth on Etsy is SEO (Search Engine Optimization). Just like with any other business, you can take advantage of marketing a few different ways to gain the most traction for your products. In this article, we will go over the different types of SEO that you can use to optimize your Etsy shop and how to do them effectively.

Product Title Tags

One of the most basic and effective ways to gain more traffic and sales is to use product title tags. A product title tag is the bit of text that shows up in the title bar of your product listings. It’s usually around 10-12 words, and it’s the first thing visitors will see when they arrive on your product page. The goal is to grab the attention of potential customers with an intriguing, relevant, and unique product title tag.

For example, let’s say you are selling bed sheets on Etsy. Your product title tag could be:

“Premium Bedding Sheets With High-Quality Prints On Both Sides”,

or

“Featuring A Variety Of Designs, These Bed Sheets Will Add A Little Spice To Your Sleep Space”,

or even

“Luxury Bedding Sheets With Printed Flowers On One Side — How Can You Possibly Bed Without Floral Envelopes?”

All of these title tags are pretty long and have a decent amount of words in them. They are, however, extremely interesting and will probably catch the attention of anyone scrolling through the search results. Not only that, but a longer product title tag usually means a higher chance of a potential customer discovering your product and getting interested in it. You should definitely use longer title tags if you want to rank higher in Google searches.

Product Description Tags

The next step is to add some more words of description to your product page. A good rule of thumb is to add 4-6 sentences to your product description, although it really depends on the nature of your product. More text means more likely to have some useful information.

If you are selling artwork, you might want to make your product description longer so that you can write a more in-depth and descriptive text about the piece. A good rule of thumb is to add more text if you want to increase your conversion rate.

With a longer product description, you have a better chance of someone discovering your product and getting interested in it. You can use your product description to talk about the advantages and the features of your product.

Image Galleries & Product Pages

If you’ve ever shopped on Etsy, you might have noticed that a lot of the listings feature either no images at all, or just a small image accompanied by a short bit of text. Usually, these are text-only listings, which means there is no actual photographic evidence of the product. The idea behind this is to keep the number of words to a minimum while still maintaining the visual appeal of the product.

However, not all text-only listings are created equal. While it’s tempting to grab your smartphone and take a quick snap of the product you’re selling, that’s probably not the best idea in terms of online marketing. From an SEO perspective, the text on your product page and in your product description acts as the important information for potential customers. While it’s always nice to include a few images to add a little bit of life to your product description, you should only include those which are relevant to the content.

With the continued evolution of mobile devices and the increasing power of large-screen televisions, the days of text-heavy product descriptions are numbered. While they still serve a purpose, modern shoppers are often better off without the distraction of a picture.

Meta Data

Last but not least, we have the meta data. Meta data are data about data, in other words, keywords or metadata can be used to help search engines, like Google, determine the content that’s most relevant to a user’s search.

Usually, you’ll want to use the singular, meta data, as companies like Google will crawl each page once all the relevant meta data have been entered. The meta data for your Etsy shop will be a combination of words and phrases that describe your product and its qualities. For example, if you sell handmade face cream with SPF 50+, you could enter this information as a product title tag:

meta data

• SPF
• 50+
• handmade
• face cream

When someone searches for SPF 50+face cream, your product comes up on top of the list because your meta data have helped determine its relevance. Don’t worry, you don’t always have to go overboard and list every single detail about your product. Think of a topic that’s relevant to your product, and use keywords accordingly.

A good rule of thumb is to add a few relevant keywords within the first 500 words of your product description. After that, you can start incorporating more keywords or turning the description into a mini-essay.

The Importance of SEO

To conclude, let’s reiterate the importance of SEO. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it is the process of getting your product to show up on the first page of a search engine when someone is searching for a related product. Essentially, the higher you rank on the search results, the more potential customers you’ll draw in.

To find out how to rank your product or service in Google, simply enter your product or service name into the search bar and hit enter. You’ll then see a screen similar to this:

As you can see, Google search results are broken down into different categories, from local businesses to websites for products similar to yours, to news articles and much more. When someone clicks on a result, they’ll be taken to a landing page containing more information about the product or service that they were originally searching for.

From an SEO perspective, your product title tag is your first line of defense. Make sure that it is relevant to the product that you are promoting, and also includes your target keyword or phrases. From there, you can work on incorporating more keywords into your content as well as improving the quality of the text on your webpages. Good luck out there.