Etsy Relevancy Search 45 Days Out

When I first posted about looking at Etsy Relevancy objectively it was about a week later. It's now 45 days out and how is my shop doing? Well sales are up over this time period last year but there were things going on last year that affected my ability to make, list, and relist items so it's hard to tell how badly that affected my sales over this time frame last year. My sales are also up over the 45 days immediately prior to the relevancy switch which I think is a better gauge of how things are going. The big payoff though is looking at site search stats:

The blue line is the last 45 days since relevancy, the green line is the 45 prior to the switch.
Visits with search: +60.74%
Total Unique Searches: +59.36%
If something is hurting my sales right now it certainly isn't the new search. Of course some sellers are doing worse with this change and I am sorry this change is hard for them, anyone who wants me to help them improve their shop is welcome to contact me with any questions. However the people making sweeping statements about how Etsy is killing their business and no one is making sales or getting traffic is just outright wrong (Etsy's own statistics show sales in August were way up over both last year and July).

Etsy Relevancy and How to Get Noticed

I put off writing this article for a couple weeks to see how relevancy is working and work out what I think works and doesn't work. First of all I want everyone who hasn't read it yet to go read my posts SEO and Your Customers and Being Seen is Not Enough for some more background on my thoughts on how your writing effects your customers and why ranking well in search shouldn't be your only goal.  

This article is going to have a lot of images so I'm posting them scaled down, click to enlarge if you're having trouble reading them.

Determining Relevancy
Factors Etsy uses in determining relevancy according to their article on the subject.
Titles - In particular Etsy is weighting the words at the beginning of a title more than the words at the end. In particular the first 3 words are the most important.

Tags - Tags in this case also include the categories you pick when you list an item. I'm not positive on this but my own experiments seem to imply that those tags weight a little higher than the ones you type in. Keep in mind that Materials do not count as tags and are not factored into search (I tested this, using a material listed that I am not using as a tag and it did not show up in the search at all) so if the material is an important selling point of the item you must have it in the tags.

Recency - This is how newly listed or renewed your item is. In the past all of Etsy's searches defaulted to just the most recent, now it is just one factor in the search. This means you don't need to renew items all the time to be higher in the search but it's probably still a good idea to have items spread out in how recently they have been listed. If you previously renewed multiple items every day you can now just renew an item or two that are close to expiring. This of course is going to save you money in listing fees that you can better use on other advertising.

Attributes - These new options for recipient, occasion, and style. Etsy has stated that they will be used in search eventually but right now they do not factor into search (as proven by the fact that "unisex adult jewelry" has almost no results). So until these attributes are included in the search if they are an important selling point for your item they must be included in tags.

From my own experiments this is how I think the level of importance for relevancy goes:

1. First 3 words of the title
2. Categories (possibly the same or nearly the same weight as #1)
3. Tags 
4. Remaining words in the title (possibly the same or nearly the same weight as #3)
5. Recency

I haven't been able to determine the exact weight of these factors but let's for the sake of simplicity give them point values (I am sure the algorithm is more complex than this but it gives you the idea):

• First 3 words = 4 pts
• Category = 3pts
• Tags = 2pts
• Other title words = 1pts

Okay so if I search "Octopus Necklace" we would have:

(Category -> Necklace)+(First 3 words -> Octopus)+(Tag -> Octopus)+(Title words -> Necklace) = 4+3+2+1 = 10

but if I searched "Octopus Pendant" I would instead have

(First 3 words -> Octopus)+(Tag -> Pendant)+(Tag -> Octopus) = 4+2+2 = 6. 

Thus I would expect that even though there are far fewer results for "Octopus Pendant" than "Octopus Necklace" that I would rank lower in the search results for "Octopus Pendant" (and I do, in fact when I just ran this search "Octopus Pendant" didn't return one of my items until page 16 while the same necklace was near the top of page 2 for "Octopus Necklace"). So where does recency play into this? I think Etsy uses recency to rank items that otherwise have "equal" scores with the newer one being higher ranked than the older one.

Improving your Relevancy
In many ways improving relevancy is the same as improving your onsite SEO (one of the reasons I've had to make very few changes in order to rank well in relevancy). Use good keywords that shoppers are going to think of in search, if you need a little help use a keyword tool like Google Keyword Tool. Also use the keyword tool to make sure the words and phrases you come up with are ones that people search for while still being closely related to what your product is.

Make sure you use all your tag spaces and select all 3 categories if you can. Don't waste any tag spaces. For example if your items colors have name variations (for example a deep purple could be tagged both "purple" and "plum") and you have a space to fill use the color variation. If you item has a number of different names for the style make for you use them (for example a woman's tank top could also be tagged with "camisole").

Write good descriptive titles with important words at the beginning. You don't have to sacrifice your cute item names either! For example if you are a baby clothing maker and you have a item currently called "Joshua" that is a blue corduroy jacket a title like this would have good relevancy: "Blue Baby Jacket "Joshua" in Soft Warm Corduroy for Age 16 Months". Now the title "Blue baby jacket corduroy 16 months" would be just as relevant for the keywords "blue", "baby", "jacket", "corduroy", and "16 months" but the first title has more consumer appeal. You have a 140 character limit for titles, that first title looks long but it's only 65 characters so don't be afraid to write longer descriptive titles if you need to.

Remember the "long tail" while a lot of people will search popular but general terms like "red dress" a person searching for "red polka dot retro dress" is more likely to be interested in and buy your item if it's a red polka dotted 40s inspired dress. This is why it's important to write descriptive titles and use all your tags, to make sure people using those long tail search terms find your items because they are more likely to buy.

Being Seen is Not Enough

Back around February I started making some changes to my Etsy listings. I started adding cute little stories the the start of every listing. It was a disaster.

My traffic didn't change, the number of visitors didn't change, my Google rankings stayed about the same but my sales tanked. For the first month or so I chalked it up to being a slow time of year but then one of my usually busy months was a lot slower than usual. I took the stories out of the beginning of the listings and put them further down the page, below the descriptions. Sale bounced back almost immediately.

The lesson here is this: just being seen is not enough. What is seen has to be compelling to people. In my case while the stories were fun visitors wanted to see information on my jewelry first. Lesson learned.

This is the reason I wrote the post last week SEO and Your Customers often a listing that looks good to search engines or looks good to you as a creative person doesn't look good to customers.

So what about the stories? I have plans for those, I want to do a series of cards with illustrations on the front and the stories on the back but for now they are being retired from my shop.

Also if you are working on editing your titles and descriptions I recommend Craftopolis' Edit Express to make it go faster. Unfortunately it doesn't have a batch tag editor though.

Handstitching the Long Tail

There's recently been a lot of stress in the Etsy community over the search being switched from Recency to Relevency. I'm not stressing. Why? Because the same things that help you in the Etsy relevancy search are also the things that help you in Google searches and if you've read this blog enough you know that I think Google is what you should be focusing on.

The first page of any Etsy search is 40 items, that means that you can't be on the first page of every search that would be relevant for your items. It's impossible. What you should be striving for is a well rounded listing that isn't trying to be at the top for only one or two searches, but a listing that ranks well if not at the very top for a wide range of related searches.

There's a concept called the "long tail" that is very important whenever you are talking about search engine rankings. The idea behind the long tail is that many search terms are only search for rarely but if you rank well for enough of these little searches you will get a lot of traffic. So stop worrying that you aren't on the first page for "dress" and start making sure you are titling, tagging, and writing descriptions so you will rank well for "blue cotton seashell print dress" in either Etsy or Google.

Wish all you want but Etsy, Google, and any other search engine is never going to tell you exactly what will put you at the top. The best you can do is write as relevant and accurate listings as you can that use good keywords that describe your items (and for Google build good backlinks). Don't pull your hair out trying to rank best for one narrow term in one search engine as your main way to get traffic, a broad approach to SEO and promotion will give you more consistent results that will protect you from major changes in just one area.  I would rather have 50 small traffic streams bringing me 5 visits each than one source sending me 250 visits because if one out of fifty disappears I'm not going to be devastated, I can just roll with the changes.

SEO and Your Customers

Users come first. That should be your number one rule whether you use Etsy, Artfire, or a self-hosted webstore. What this means is that while you should be using important keywords in your titles and descriptions, those are useless if your customers are turned off by the way your titles and descriptions are written or how your photos look they aren't going to buy no matter how well you rank in search.

This concept is called "conversions", you want the highest conversion rate you can get (for a web store that the % of visitors who make a purchase). If you have 5000 visitors a month with a conversion rate of 1% you are doing the same amount of business as a shop with 1000 visitors but a 5% conversion rate (50 sales per month). If you have 10,000 visitors a month but no one buys anything you might as well have had no visitors at all.

Here are three fictional titles for the same fictional product:
"Marvin the Robot"
"Soap robot lavender scented blue soy moisturizing handmade vegan"
"Marvin the Robot soap, moisturizing lavender scented soy soap"

The first is terrible, it doesn't even tell you what the item is. You can have creative names for your product, a memorable name may stick in a visitors head better than something descriptive but generic. However if the not having many clues, or misleading clues, about what the item is will hurt you as well. If visitors are clicking on "Marvin the Robot" expecting a toy or artwork not soap then that's not going to help your sales.

The second is better but a visitor is going to see it as either boring at best and spammy at worst. Why? because it's just a list of attributes of the product. People react to language in certain ways and if words don't read like a meaningful statement people aren't going to perceive it as valuable. Try reading your titles out loud and see how they sound.

The third title strikes the right balance. It both is descriptive, telling you a lot about the product (that it is a robot shaped soap, made of soy, moisturizes the skin, and is lavender scented) while also giving you product personality. If you don't know about the importance of telling a story about your business please go read All Marketers are Liars by Seth Godin he describes the concept far better than I can but the gist of it is that people respond far more to being told a good authentic story than they do just being given the bare facts.

I used titles in this example because Etsy's new CEO just released an update on improvements to relevancy search and how to make titles better for search. I applaud the Etsy team for making much needed improvements to the search engine but I think it gave people the wrong idea. Ranking higher in search will not do any good if your customers aren't enticed by what they see.

Great SEO Guide You Need to Read

SEO is something people are always confused about on the Etsy forums and elsewhere that handmade business people hang out. I'll be honest, even to a total web geek like me it can be confusing. SEOMoz which is a great SEO consulting company has a Free Beginners Guide to SEO on their website and it's really free, you don't even have to sign up for anything to get it.

I also highly recommend subscribing to their blog as well it's always full of interesting tips and insights into what's up and coming on the web.

Link Roundup - Getting Technical

It's been a while since I've done a Link Roundup but I thought this was a good time to do one with the launch of Google+ (yes, I'm on) and many sites on Google and elsewhere launching major redesigns. In fact Blogger which hosts this blog and is owned by Google has a fantastic new look if you use the Blogger in Draft feature that lets you try new features before they roll out to everyone.

So this roundup is recent news and articles focusing on web technology and how it relates to or can be used by small business.

The Tech Stuff

Google Plus Doesn't Need to 'Kill' Anything to Be a Winner from AllBusiness
Google+ Statistics Report from FindPeopleOnline
Top Gmail Apps and Plug-ins for Running a Business from Small Business Trends
Find & Make Your Own Infographics With Visual.ly from Mashable

Some Great Non-Tech Stuff
5 Ways That Content Marketing Has Changed The Art Of Selling Forever from Duct Tape Marketing
Free Class – Copywriting 101 from Indie Biz Chicks
Business Thank You Letters – Your Secret Marketing Weapon from Craft Marketing Tutor

Etsy SEO Cheat Sheet

Okay, since I guess a lot of people are confused by Etsy's SEO guide I've decided to do this quick and dirty cheat sheet. The guide is still a much better resource so I hope this post will make the guide easier to understand. You can download the full guide here: http://www.etsy.com/storque/how-to/etsy-guide-to-seo-5224/ along with a video and other information. If you've had trouble downloading the Guide as a .pdf file try viewing it online in Google Documents.

What you are optimizing
This guide is to show you how to use the text you can edit in your Etsy shop to improve how search engines rank your shop. We're going to start with your main page and then move on to the item listings.

Introduction to Keywords
Think of keywords as important words and phrases that you want people to use to find your shop. To start targeting the keywords you want think of the best words to describe your product. We'll use mine as an example, a few obvious keywords are:

• cuttlefish
• squid
• octopus
• polymer clay
• handmade jewelry

Now if I plug some of those into a keyword tool I'll get suggestions for other phrases I might not have thought of like:

• deep sea octopus
• giant squid
• polymer clay beads

Not all the suggestions will be perfect so make a list of these keywords and select only those you think are best for your shop. You want to work these keywords into the text you write. You want to spread your keywords out among your shop, one or two per sentence. Hopefully these keywords (or a combination of them) will be what people will type into Google to find your shop. You won't always rank highly for all of them no matter how good your SEO is.

Shop Title
Your shop title is that bit of bold text right under your shop banner and search engines will consider it the most important piece of text on the page. This text will also show up in the title bar of the browser as "your shop title" by "your username". It has to be short and sweet, only the first 30 characters that you type into your title will be displayed in the title bar and in search engine results.

You want to write a title that says what you sell with some of your keywords. "Welcome to my shop" is not going to be helpful, tell us what you sell.

Shop Announcement
Your shop announcement lets you introduce your shop and what you sell. The most important part of your announcement is the first 160 characters because that section will get used by some search engines as the piece of text they show in search results like this:

That screenshot was made using a new tool Etsy has given us when we edit our shop appearance. If you click the link that says "View a preview of how your shop homepage will appear in Google search results" on the shop appearance editing page it will display how your search results for your page will look. This is a really valuable tool to make sure your title and announcement fit all the important stuff into the character limits.

The beginning of your shop announcement should be describing what you sell using some of your keywords. Leave any announcements of sales, how long you've been creating, etc. for after that introduction paragraph.

Section Titles
Sections are best created to better organize your shop however you can do a little SEO optimizing of the titles by using some of your keywords in them.


Item Titles
This is the most important thing to write about your product. This text is the most prominent, and goes in the page title and the alt tag for the image (another bit of text that search engines view). You have a total limit of 42 characters before the title gets cut off in the top of the browser and for search engines (however the total title will display on the page above your photos).

Again Etsy has a new tool for use to help see how much of our item title and description will get displayed in search results. Right below the text box for your item description when you create or edit an item is a link that says "View a preview of how your item will appear in Google search results" clicking it will display a preview of a google search result like this

It will update live as you edit your item titles if you need to work them shorter to fit the limit. You want to work in as many of your keywords as you can while still making the title make sense and sound like it was written by a person. A list of keywords is a bad idea, google is wise to that sort of thing and it will hurt you.

For items I also consider the colors or other major characteristic of the item as a keyword just for that item and make sure to use it. Descriptive names are going to be better for SEO than a cute name like "The Lulu dress" so it you want to name your products like that you need to put more description after the name like "Lulu, a knee length blue jersey dress".

Item Descriptions
Like with your shop announcement the first 160 characters of your item title are the most important. This is where you should describe your item. Leave any technical specifications like length, size, etc. until after you introduce us to your item. Again you need to use your keywords.

Tags and Materials
These are first and foremost the keywords you want to use to get found using Etsy's internal search so worry more about that than google when writing them. They will help but only a minor factor for google and in any case your Etsy tags likely already contain keywords you would be using for your items anyway.

Backlinks
These are simply links to your shop or items from other sites. Blogs, directories, other shops, etc. Google uses backlinks to help determine how good your shop is and more and better backlinks will help you rise in the search results. Some you can create yourself by writing a blog or submitting to directories but most shoudl come from other people writing about you. Don't be afraid to submit your items to blog writers and ask them to feature you.

I hope you've found this barebones desciption useful and it helps you understand the full guide better. Please let me know in the comments if you have questions and I'll try to answer them.

Video Pick - Etsy SEO Lab

Video from the Etsy Virtual Lab hosted by Rand from SEOMoz on what SEO is and how you can optimize your shop. It's full of good information.


Etsy Guide to SEO Workshop from Etsy on Vimeo.

Other SEO Posts:
Etsy SEO Changes and Guide
Why is SEO Important for my Shop?

Etsy SEO Changes and Guide

This is pretty great news so I'm going to post it now instead of waiting for Monday so you Etsy sellers have the weekend to look it over and make changes.

In case you have been out of the loop or don't frequent the Etsy forums much they had a bit of a debacle earlier this year over their SEO changes. To basically sum it up, Etsy tried to do the SEO all by themselves without really knowing enough about it to do it right, they made changes without informing sellers, and the changes were less than successful. I'm of the opinion it was not as bad as some people who flipped out over it but it was a mess. In the wake of this Etsy did the smart thing and hired SEOmoz an experienced SEO company to consult with and make changes to the site. The first round of SEOmox suggested changes rolled out this week.

Here's the article describing the changes: Tech Update: Changes for Shop and Item Page SEO 

SEOmoz also put together a great guide to SEO specifically for Etsy sellers detailing the ways you can optimize your site. Download the guide (pdf)

Why is SEO Important for my Shop?

After reading a number of conversations on the Etsy forums lately I've realized that a lot of sellers don't know what SEO is and why it's important for their shops. I'm writing this as just a quick primer on optimizing an Etsy shop for SEO (it will also work for other venues like eCrater and ArtFire). This is just an overview touching on what I think are the most important things to work on.

Definition of SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, makign your website attractive to search engines so they will rank you highly in search results. Search engines account for a tremendous amount of traffic online so if your shop isn't ranking on search engines you're missing out on a lot of visitors who may become customers. The two sides of SEO to focus on are on site and off site.

This post is just going to focus on on site optimization of your Etsy shop. Off site will have to wait for a later post.

On Site Optimization

On site optimization is creating your site's content in a way that makes it clear to the search engines what your site is about and what keywords are important so you'll show up in search results for those keywords (on Etsy tags are the Etsy search keywords). Since I'm talking about optimizing an Etsy shop the options for optimization are limited. You only have what text you can edit to use in optimization.

It is possible to optimize a site for search engines and lose customers. User friendliness and content has to come first and then SEO but the good thing is a lot of SEO changes can also help user friendliness if done right.

Keywords

Keywords are the words that people use to find your site when they use a search engine. You want to try and target keywords that you want people to find your shop using. The obvious ones are the type of product you make, subject matter, or materials, less obvious ones can often be things like occasions people would buy your product for, wider categories of products, etc. Google has a great keyword research tool that can give you suggestions based on a sample of keywords you give them.

Make a list of the keywords you would like to target to use while editing your shop. Keep these keywords on hand for Part II on off site optimization.

Titles

It's a good idea to use keywords in your title, but not at the expense of making the title informative. So something like "Blue Sparkle Earrings" is informative but few keywords "Blue Sparkle Earrings, Handmade Lampwork Glass Jewelry" is both informative and has several keywords. Keyword stuffing is loading a title with a list of keywords and while it may help your search engine ranking it will be a turn off for customers, an example would be "handmade earrings lampwork glass gift etsy blue bead crafts". You must balance SEO with user friendliness.

Descriptions

Your descriptions first and foremost must inform a potential customer about your products. The good thing about this is the more you tell your customers the more there is for the search engines to pick up on. Make sure you work in your keywords where you can. As an example I make jewelry based on cuttlefish so my descriptions all contain this paragraph after the description of the piece of jewelry:

Cuttlefish are not fish at all but are cephalopods, their closest relatives are squid and octopus. These amazing sea creatures have eight arms and two tentacles with suckers that they use to capture their prey. Some cuttlefish are brightly colored and many can change the color and the texture of their skin as camouflage, mating display, or warning.

It gives from background on cuttlefish which help customers who may not be familiar with these cool animals but it also includes many of my keywords such as: cuttlefish, fish, squid, cephalopods, tentacles, sea, etc.

Make the first few sentences of your description count the most, Etsy pulls the first 240 characters for the meta description tag. How much this tag matters anymore is debatable but some search engines pull this info for their results display. So you want to make sure it's clear in those first few words exactly what your item is.

Tags

Since tags are text on the listing page google will see them but you should be focussing them for Etsy search because that's where they will do the most good. List type of product, subject matter, materials, colors, etc. then if you have some tag spaces left over throw in some of your keywords. The tags also show up in the keywords meta tag but most search engines no longer give those much weight so Etsy search first then what might help with Google.

Shop Announcement

Your shop announcement is the only solid piece of text on your gallery page. Use it to introduce you and your products while working in your keywords. Like your item description the first 240 characters of your announcement are pulled for the meta description tag so describe your business first before any other announcements (including sales).

Also don't forget your shop title, you have about 55 characters to work with so instead of just your shop name include a little more info and keywords. As an example instead of just using "Noadi's Art" I use "Noadi's Art on Etsy, Polymer Clay Jewelry & Sculpture". It doesn't just show up in bold at the top of my shop annoucnement but is also used in the title tag, the title tag shows the title in the top of the browser (or on tabs) but search engines also factor it into your rankings.

Shop Sections

Shop sections need to be clear to your customers what they include, but they are also text so search engines see them (also along with your user name they are pulled into the meta keywords). Instead of for example listing "Hats" be more specific and put "Fleece Women's Hats".

Off Site Optimization

Off site optimization boils down to one basic thing: backlinks. Backlinks are links on other sites that lead to your shop. You want to have links from many other sites, but not just any site. Sites with content related to your shop will have more effect than a totally unrelated site and some sites have more weight with search engines than others (google pagerank is often used a measurement of this).

NoFollow

Not every link will help your search engine rankings. The nofollow attribute tells search engines not to count a link, blog often have these on the comments and all paid links (like ads) are also supposed to be nofollow. These links might bring traffic so they aren't useless but won't help you with search engines.

Getting Started

So where to start building backlinks? If you have a blog, twitter account, flickr account, etc. add a link to your shop. Then you can start searching for free directories to add your site to, here's a big list of free directories and you definitely should get added to the Handmade Product Directory. Other things you can do are start a blog just for your shop, create Squidoo lenses for your products, email other blogs about featuring your shop, most Etsy teams have a blog that lists member shops so that's yet another great reason to join a team (among many including meeting cool fellow Etsy users). If you have great products and good promotion other people will do some of the work for you by linking to your shop themselves.

Another way to build backlinks is to use the RSS feed that every Etsy shop has. has a great list of places to submit RSS feeds.

While not directly related to the normal google results you deifnitely want to sign up for an submit your products to Google Base so they will show up in the product search. Let's Ets is a great tool for getting the bulk file to upload.

Linking to Your Shop

You can't control all links to your shop just those you create yourself. This is where your keyword list comes back out. You want to create links to your shop that use not just your shop name (you do want a number of those) but also your keywords.

If you are using images to link to your shop the best option is to also have a text link below it or near it to the same page. However you can also use the alt and title tags for images in the format <img src="http://yourlink.com/image.jpg" alt="Your shop name" title="Your shop name"> and the search engines will read that text for the image.

Hiring Out your SEO

There are many companies online that will do your SEO for you. If you find this all overwhelming you may decide to hire someone else to do it for you, however be very careful. There are some shady SEO companies out there that may want to scam you or who use unethical practices that could end up getting you punished by the search engines by being blacklisted. Always do your research before hiring anyone.