Category: Etsy

Increasing Etsy Promoted Listing Impressions, or “Think Like Etsy Searchers” (My Thanksgiving SEO Test)

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date December 3, 2014

As you may be able to tell from my SEO-heavy reading list a few days ago, I’ve been playing with the SEO on my Etsy business of sealife art, Harbor Hangings.

The big problem was that I was spending time and energy putting together and sharpening new products, but nobody was looking at them!

This is just the paid impressions and even they’re only in the 400’s. The actual listing stats are even crappier: single-digit visits per day.

But then I found the light. I saw the way. I read everything on my SEO reading list and took it to heart. And then this happened:

That’s an 11x increase in promoted listing views!

So what did I do? I thought like Etsy shoppers.

“The Goldfish Vintage-Style Print” became “Orange Goldfish Art – 8×10 Fishing Print Poster Beach Lake House Warming Gift Decor Housewarming Ocean Fish Wall Art Dad Christmas Present“.

“The Pickerel or Federal Pike” became “Blue Northern Pike Art – 8×10 Print Fishing Poster Minnesota Lake House Warming Gift Housewarming Engagement Ocean Art Dad Christmas Present“.

When someone is going to Etsy to look for a unique piece of lobster art, they’re not typing in “The American Lobster”. According to my site search stats, they’re searching for “maine boston lobster print” or “lobster art 8×10” or “framed maine“.

I was getting 0 views because the majority of Etsy engagement (and engagement on the Internet) is search – and I wasn’t helping people find my stuff! The ultimate goal of search engine optimization is to appear in result 1 on page 1 of a search that relates to you item. According to this tool to determine Etsy search engine relevancy, I wasn’t appearing in the first 10 pages!

So to increase my search views, I:

Used all 140 characters available to me in my Etsy item title to include phrases people are likely searching for. It appears that Etsy uses the item’s description as the heaviest weighted data source when searching, so fill your title up with search terms! I think it looks spammy, but looking around Etsy (and even at the items that I eventually purchased for myself), the most successful stores are doing it. I have to assume that buyers are used to it.
Take that same, keyword heavy title, and translate it exactly into your 13 listing keywords. It appears that Etsy’s second heaviest weighted data source when searching is the keywords. If your title has search phrases and your keywords match, your listings are going to get a high search score and you’ll appear higher in search results.

Titles and keywords won’t grow your Etsy business entirely, though. According to my short test this week, Etsy also takes listing age into consideration (which opens another whole debate about Etsy activity driving search relevancy). Additionally, I continue to have a problem with people seeing my item in search, but not clicking on it. But more on that in a future post.

Etsy

Does Renewing Your Etsy Listing Give You More Views?

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date December 1, 2014

Lots of Etsy sellers have recently been de-bunking the myth that listing renewals don’t help your search relevancy. Obviously, we won’t know for sure unless we get an answer from an Etsy developer, but based on one recent datapoint on my store, I’m starting to think that the age of your Etsy listing does actually effect your search ranking.

Case in point. I checked search results for my Etsy store, Harbor Hangings. Didn’t see anything interesting. Then, a few minutes later, I apparently showed up in search results when someone searched for literally nothing:

Screen Shot 2014-12-01 at 11.06.26 PM

Now, I’ve been working (a lot) on my SEO, but even this is too good to be true. Clicking on Blank Search shows me one listing:

The one single listing that I renewed in between search term checks (10-15 minutes, tops), my 8×10 Goldfish Print, is the only listing I renewed today. And is the only listing I’ve ever seen show up for Blank Search. And is no longer available when you submit a Blank Search.

Count my vote in the affirmative that listing renewals helps your search relevancy.

Etsy Harbor Hangings Reading List

Reading This Morning: November 30, 2014

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date November 30, 2014

We spent the last few days celebrating Thanksgiving at my wife’s parent’s house this weekend. This gave me lots of time to tweak and play with all the different levers of my Etsy business, including a major focus on search engine optimization. Of all the articles and sites I read in the last couple of days, here are the three that are most interesting to me:

Are My Listings Relevant?
A tool that will do a search for any term and tell you how relevant your shop is in Etsy searches for that term.

Etsy Relevancy SEO and Stats Explained!
Basic information to make you relevant in Etsy searches.

SEO: Low Views or Keyword Rut?
This is the forums posts that helped me the absolute most. Kelly from KAStylesMasonJars offers up on-demand advice on the keywords and titles you’re using for your listings. I went through page after page of other shop owners asking her what she thought, and she gave them the same advice: your titles and your keywords don’t match, aren’t long enough, or aren’t descriptive enough. Then gave suggestions. I’ll do a write-up on my experience (stats and all!), but to show how effective this is quickly: I had 340 promoted listing impressions before I started executing her keyword and title strategy (about average for Saturday @ 7). I now have 1,402 in less than 3 hours.

Etsy Harbor Hangings

Another Etsy Promoted Listings Test

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date November 26, 2014

The “prettier pictures” test I wrote about here didn’t do anything. Literally no increase in either impressions (which was expected) or click-through rate (which was the point). Click-through rate for our Etsy Promoted Listings for my lobster prints didn’t increase at all.

I’ve started poking around some random Etsy-focused sub-reedits like r/etsy r/smallbusiness and r/etsysellers. While these are mostly quiet communities, there seem to be lots of other who are having similar problems with Promoted Listings – it doesn’t seem to be working as well as the original Etsy search ads work! It’s good to know that it’s not just me.

There seems to be one store that keeps showing up in my search results and on reddit and some of the Etsy forums: busybeeburlap. Busy Bee Burlap has hundreds of sellers and even more admirers. They sell a (relatively) similar product as I sell: small prints (but on burlap instead of paper, obviously). How are they getting so many sales?

Clicking around their site, I see they have loaded their listing titles with all kinds of keywords. Compare one of my titles…:

Maine Red Lobster Vintage-Style Illustrated Poster

…with one of their titles:

Joshua 24, As for Me and My House, We Will Serve the Lord, Burlap Print, Housewarming, Wedding, or Anniversary Present, Christian Art

Which one do you think is more likely to get search results? And more importantly, which one do you think is going to get more Etsy promoted search keywords? It’s not 100% clear how Etsy decides what keywords to use when determining promoted listing search results, but I have to assume that the title gets weighed pretty heavily. Etsy gives you 190 characters to use in the title (I was originally using about 40 characters), and I can’t imagine why they would do this if they weren’t weighing title heavily for search. So with that in mind, I’ve started testing a similarly keyword-heavy title for the lobster print test:

Maine Red Lobster Illustrated Print – Housewarming, Wedding, Birthday or Anniversary Present for Those Who Love the Beach

I’ve added this string to the end of all of my test listings:

My hypothesis, assuming that the title is where Etsy is pulling most of their keywords, is that I’ll start to get impressions for not only “Maine” and “Lobster”, but also for more generic (but related) searches like “Housewarming” and “Beach”.

Etsy Harbor Hangings

Etsy Promoted Ad Image Test

Post author By Jeff Clark
Post date November 24, 2014

We’ve recently re-focused our efforts on our side business selling unique sealife artwork: Harbor Hangings. The goal is to build this business into something big enough that one or both of us can work on full-time. I’ve identified three channels that we’ll be focusing on in 2015: retail, online and live shows.

For online sales, we’re currently using Etsy exclusively. Etsy provides us with a sales platform that accepts credit cards, a built-in community of buyers and sells, and recently (as in earlier 2014) created an ad engine for promoting your listing in Etsy search results called Etsy Promoted Listings. It’s like Google ads, but Etsy-specific.

I enabled these ads for us a couple of weeks ago using our existing listing information and left the bids at whatever was suggested. The results are pretty crappy: our ads have been seen 3,500 times, clicked on 19 times, and there have been 0 purchases. 0 purchases aren’t going to give us the income necessary to quit our day jobs, so I’ve dug into the stats and found our first opportunity: ad clickthrough conversion.

3,500 ad impressions + 9 clicks = 0.005% CTR. Yikes. Granted, I’ve only spent about $3 in ads, so I’m not really upset. But if I can get that conversion rate into something respectable (1-2%, maybe?), I’d feel better about spending more money on Etsy ads – assuming the sales follow.

Digging into the ad analytics, I found a little pattern. Here’s a screenshot of the promoted listings screen inside my Etsy account, sorted by clicks. 18 of those 19 clicks are on pictures of physical items:

People love our items when they see them. But in my opinion, most of our items aren’t getting the attention they deserve from promoted listings. I believe it’s because the picture we use for most of our listings are pretty terrible:

So yesterday, I started a test. My hypothesis is that the product shot, when compared against other products in Etsy search results, isn’t helping. And since the name of the game is getting people to click on the ad, I want to test this. For our lobster poster, I am running the standard product shot (my control) against with the following five test product shots:

I’m using the lobster because it gets a lot of attention in search results, and I believe that using the lobster will get me enough impressions to consider the results significant enough to make a decision.

Product titles, descriptions, tags and prices all remain exactly the same. I even left secondary images the same on all of these posts since the primary focus of this test is to increase conversion from search ad impressions to clickthrough, and secondary images are only levers after the visitor has clicked through an ad.

Technically, it costs me $0.20 for each new test variant. $1.00 plus ad spend is worth it if we can learn something that gets us closer to closing more sales on Etsy. We also have the annoying side-effect that our storefront now hosts six variants of the exact same item.

I’ll let it run this week and see what happens. While writing this post, I developed a second hypothesis, but I’ll flesh that out after this test is over.