Etsy SEO: how to write titles and all thirteen tags

Ninety per cent of Etsy SEO advice is Google advice in disguise. It talks about keyword density and backlinks, which count for almost nothing here, and skips the thing that counts most, which is how well your listing converts views into sales.

Etsy is not a web search engine. It is a shop that has to sell, so it shows first whatever is most likely to be bought. Everything else follows from that.

How Etsy search actually works

The process has two distinct stages, and confusing them is what makes half the effort useless.

Stage one: who enters the race

Etsy takes the words typed and finds every listing that matches. It looks in four places: title, tags, category and attributes. If the words somebody typed appear in none of them, your listing is not in the race. It is not penalised, it simply does not exist for that search.

This stage is mechanical. It is the only part you fully control, which is exactly why it is worth the time.

Stage two: in what order

Among the listings in the race, Etsy decides the order. Here things that are not words start to matter:

• Listing quality score. How many of the people who saw it clicked, favourited or bought. This is the heaviest factor.
• Recency. A new listing gets a temporary boost, which Etsy uses to learn how it performs.
• Relevance of the match, with the first words of the title weighing more than the last.
• Price and shipping, because they affect the likelihood of purchase.
• Shop reliability: reviews, response times, complete policies.
• Where the buyer is, because all else being equal Etsy prefers to show a shop that ships closer.

The practical consequence is that a listing that does not sell will sink, however perfect the tags are. SEO gets you into the race, the listing itself wins it.

The title: the first words count double

You get 140 characters. The first third is what really matters, both for the algorithm and for the human eye scanning a grid.

The structure that works is always the same: what it is, who or what occasion it is for, then the details.

In the first case the words a real person would type are buried at the end, and the opening six words are adjectives nobody searches for. In the second, the first thing you read is exactly what the buyer typed into the search bar.

Three practical rules:

• No adjectives in the first thirty characters. Beautiful, unique, premium, handmade with love: nobody searches for these.
• Separate with commas, not dashes or pipes, and do not write full sentences.
• Do not repeat the same word three times. It does not help ranking and it makes the title unreadable, and readability affects your click rate.

Thirteen tags: use all of them, and make them different

Etsy gives you thirteen tags and half of all sellers use six. It is the easiest gift you can hand a competitor, because every empty tag is a search you do not appear in.

• Fill all thirteen. Always. There is no reason to leave one empty.
• Use phrases, not single words. Each tag can run to twenty characters: "allergy meal planner" beats "planner".
• Do not copy the title word for word. Tags exist to cover the different ways people search for the same thing, not to repeat what you already wrote.
• Think how a buyer searches, not how you describe. People type "gift for cat lovers", not "decorative feline item".
• Skip pointless synonyms. Etsy already handles singular and plural: do not burn two tags on the same idea.
• Mix broad and narrow. A couple of general tags for volume, plenty of long specific ones that bring fewer but far better matched visitors.

Long tags are the ones that sell

A tag like "planner" puts you against a hundred thousand listings and you will never win it. A tag like "gluten free meal planner" has a few dozen, and whoever types it knows exactly what they want.

Specific searches convert much better than generic ones, and converting well is what lifts you in stage two. The mechanism feeds itself: start by winning the small searches, and over time Etsy starts showing you in the big ones.

Attributes, the field almost nobody fills in

When you pick a category, Etsy offers attributes: colour, occasion, recipient, style, material. They look like paperwork and most sellers skip them.

Not only do they count as keywords, they also feed the sidebar filters. If a buyer filters by colour and you left colour blank, you are out of that list, even if your product is exactly what they want.

The description: less for the algorithm, a lot for the sale

The opening lines of the description carry some weight in search, the rest much less. But the description does another job: it removes the doubts that stop a purchase.

The first two lines are the only ones nearly everybody reads, because the rest sits behind a click. Put what the customer receives there, concretely. Further down: sizes and formats, what is and is not included, timings, how to use it, and answers to the questions you get asked most.

After publishing: what to change and what to leave

Etsy gives new listings a boost. Do not waste it by changing everything every two days: each edit restarts the observation period, and you will never learn what worked.

1. Wait thirty days. That is how long it takes to gather usable data.
2. Read the listing stats and see which searches actually found you. They are often different from the ones you had in mind, and the real ones are worth gold.
3. Change one thing at a time. Title first, then wait. Then tags, then wait. Change everything at once and no result teaches you anything.