April 5, 2011

Tips and Tricks Tuesday: Improving your Etsy SEO

Your SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is an important part of getting your work seen by potential buyers. Search engines like Google only use a certain number of characters, so you have to use your title and description, shop announcement, shop title, etc. carefully. You don't want to waste valuable characters on words that buyers aren't going to use in a search.

I recommend starting with Etsy's HELP guide to SEO here. It tells you which parts of your shop and listing are used for search engines, so you can tailor your keywords to achieve the greatest impact.

Handmadeology has an excellent post about SEO.

Etsy user "SEOWebDesign" has a great series in the forums that goes into lots of detail about SEO. Find the first post in the series of six here.

There is also a video on this page, created by DanielleXO (Etsy admin).

An important SEO tip: set up Google Analytics if you haven't already. (What is Google Analytics?) This will help you figure out which search keywords to use once you know where to put them. To set up Google Analytics with your Etsy shop, log in to "My Etsy", go to "Options" and "Web Analytics". This will allow Google Analytics to access your shop to create your analytics reports. I use two main features on Analytics-- both are under "Traffic Sources" (on the left hand menu when you log in to Analytics). One is the list of referring sites-- this tells you which websites people are using to access your site. The second is the list of keywords-- this tells you which search terms people use to find your products.
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5 comments:

  1. june at noonApril 5, 2011 at 11:10 AM

    I haven't ventured into the SEO world yet. Where to find the time? Thanks for the collection of tips. At least it'll save me time when I do get around to it.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Sarah ConstantinoApril 5, 2011 at 12:17 PM

    I started playing with SEO last fall and saw my views double and triple, along with my sales. I highly recommend doing it. It makes your titles look ugly, but hey, I can live with that.

    I think people that are good at driving outside traffic to their store on their own wouldn't need it as much. I'm still working on the outside marketing part, so the amount of people that have found me through google search and other sites has been a tremendous help.

    I also think it can help people find your items through Etsy's whackadoodle search better. That might be just my opinion though.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Shelley/SpincushionsApril 5, 2011 at 4:46 PM

    Timely post - I attended an SEO workshop just last night. I great tip I picked up was to not just focus on your own website SEO, but also off-site SEO - eg getting links to your website posted on large blogs, directories, posting comments on forums & blogs with your link too.

    Also, images and video are having a bigger weight in the rankings too. Tag all your pics & vids with your keywords.

    ReplyDelete
  4. ShonetteApril 5, 2011 at 9:43 PM

    the world of SEO and google analytics are sooo foreign to me , I will start using analytics as soon as I get the blog up and running the way I like!, did get facebook and etsy up, still working on the rest , lots of luck to all

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousApril 13, 2011 at 3:48 AM

    Thanks for the links- I will be checking them out!

    ReplyDelete

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