Etsy SEO Not Working? Here’s What I Did.

Hey friend! Is your Etsy SEO not working? ME TOO!

Here’s the thing – Etsy SEO is a big topic but most of it is geared towards the beginners, and not so much existing shops.

It can be SO frustrating when you do what you think you’re supposed to be doing, but you aren’t making sales.

Now – there might be lots of other reasons why you aren’t making sales, but in a nutshell – if you aren’t even getting VIEWS, it means you just aren’t getting found and most likely your SEO needs improvement.

I mean – let’s be real, we don’t ALWAYS get it right, not to mention the algorithm changes and while you may be top of the listings one year, that won’t stick around unless you redo your SEO periodically.

In my case, for the last couple of years I’ve been putting most of my focus on my own website & email list, neglecting my Etsy, and so my Etsy sales & views have dropped over time.

(For the record – I’ve been an Etsy seller in one way or another since 2011, and my current SVG shop since 2017, so I’m not new to the SEO game and I knew Etsy SEO not working was definitely something I could figure out)

Because of this month, I’m taking the time to re-do all the Etsy SEO in my older listings, and I thought I’d take you along on the process.

The best part is that this is WAY easier than SEO-ing a new Etsy listing!

Note: I don’t know for sure this method will work – I’m just showing you what I’m doing, and in a few months we will know if it worked or not 😁 I will, of course, update this post in about 6 months so we can see if it worked.

Note #2: This is a method that’s not probably going to work well for newer shops because there’s not the data available for your listings, but SHOULD work for older/established Etsy shops that have declined in traffic.

For those of my fellow “Etsy SEO not working” brethren who don’t want to watch the video, here’s the (very simple) process:

1. Pull up the stats for an individual listing (from the listings screen, click the dropdown next to the listing and select “stats” and open in a new window.)
2. Change the timeframe for the stats to “All time” so you can see all of the data
3. Look at the keywords that your item is being found for, and re-SEO accordingly (First/most popular keyword is first, second most popular keyword is second, etc). More details on that below.
4. Make sure everything else on the listing is tip-top, of course… pics are good and show everything, description is accurate, etc.
5. You can renew now if you want to. TECHNICALLY as of right now, recency is supposedly not a part of the Etsy algorithm, but personally I feel like it can’t hurt. In my case, I’m redoing SEO as each listing either sells or auto-renews, so they are all recent, but if I’m going to do an older listing, I’ll spend the $.20 to renew it just in case.

MY ETSY SEO PROCESS:

I did actually write this out in a little more detail in a previous Etsy SEO article which is now a bit out of date (Cindy Lou Who 2 is the person I watch when it comes to that), so I’ll give it to you in a nutshell here.

1. TITLE: Compiled of keywords, the most important keywords should be at the beginning of your title. Use the keywords your item is being found for according to your stats, and just order them in importance of most to least. If you have a ton of keywords, just focus on the most popular ones.
   
   Now – don’t feel like you need to change everything. Sometimes you might just need to rearrange a few – like if you have an item that sells well and you notice the top keyword that brings you traffic is towards the end of the title, then move it to the front. Also, you’ll notice that a lot of them can be combined (For example, if you sell a personalized Mother’s Day sign, you might get traffic for both “Mother’s Day Sign” and “Personalized Mother’s Day Sign” and you can just leave that as one keyword.
   
   I format my titles like “Keyword 1 – Keyword 2 – Keyword 3 – Keyword 4 – Keyword 5” and so forth until I run out of space.
   
   If your item has keywords it’s getting traffic for that aren’t actually relevant, don’t optimize for that one!! And if it just has had so so little traffic that there’s hardly any keywords, do the best with what you’ve got and then re-do the SEO for the rest as if it was a brand new listing.
   
2. TAGS: Also compiled of keywords, it is important to note that as of now (July 2022) Etsy SEO will mix and match. The algorithm is a little more intelligent and so while it WILL mix and match, I am finding that most of my top keywords are usually things that are in the tags either exactly as-is, or broken up.
   
   For example, in the above two keywords for “Personalized Mother’s Day Sign” I would split it into two but try to keep “Mother’s Day Sign” intact if I can, and if I couldn’t, then I’d split it into three tags – “Personalized”, “Mother’s Day”, and “sign.”
   
   Just do the best you can here.
   
3. DESCRIPTION: Like I said above, I’m being lazy and just pasting in the title into my description, but it is optimal if you can hit those top keywords at least in the written natural language portion of your description.
   
4. VIDEO: I didn’t mention this above, because I am not doing this yet, but Etsy is obviously moving into a direction where they want sellers to include videos in the listings, so I have a feeling that this (at some point) will really help things along as well. This is something I will probably test but not for a while, since I want to see how well this re-SEOing process works for me first before I make any major changes.

Okay my friends – so if your Etsy SEO isn’t working, give this a try and see if it works!

You may have to wait a few months for things to even out, but I will say in the two weeks I’ve been doing just a few listings a day I’ve noticed traffic and sales picking up. That MAY be seasonal, though, since early August is when things start to pick up for my anyway, so I am going to let a full six months pass here before I pass any judgments. I’ll let you know!

And YOU let me know if you try it and what it does!

😘 Love,

Bethany

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