Etsy have answered merchants’ queries on Etsy SEO and listings after receiving questions from their sellers on search and listings optimisation. Etsy gathered sellers’ queries and took them to Etsy experts to deliver an updated guide on Etsy SEO and listings.
Titles and tags
Etsy says that the most descriptive are relevant keywords for sellers’ listing should appear in both of their titles and tags. Given that a merchant has 13 spaces for tags for each listing, all of the keywords that they use as tags don’t necessarily need to appear in their title too as it makes it difficult for shoppers to scan quickly an item in search results.
Sellers should prioritise keywords that best describe their products. For example, in Etsy’s shop stats tool or Search Analytics, sellers can see exact phrases that shoppers have used to find their listings and make sure that those keywords are included in both their titles and tags.
How does Etsy handle misspellings, singular, plural searches and keywords?
Etsy uses a process called stemming to convert a word into its root word. Etsy uses stemming on both shoppers’ search queries and the keywords in merchant’s listings. This means that a search for ‘diaries’ which is plural, would still be matched with searches that use the keyword ‘diary,’ which is singular because they have the same root word.
When it comes to misspellings, Etsy search makes an educated guess and corrects the customers’ search to the correct spelling. For example, if someone accidentally searched for ‘party flavours,’ Etsy will still show the results that match the query ‘party favours,’ with the option to look at results for their original query, which was ‘party flavours.’ Because Etsy search corrects spelling for shoppers in the moment, they advise merchants to spell things correctly in their titles and tags.
How does Etsy rates listings quality score for one-of-a-kind items?
When Etsy are determining a quality score, they look at things like past shopper behaviour to predict how likely shoppers are to purchase listings from sellers’ shop in the future. When merchants sell one-of-a-kind items or vintage items and are frequently creating new listings, Etsy search looks at how popular listings from both their shop and similar shops to predict how popular they might be with buyers in the future. Etsy encourages new sellers not to “worry” when they get a neutral listing score until Etsy have time to learn more about how those listings perform.
Etsy said that their search is always changing and evolving. Therefore, it’s important that sellers stay on top of these updates to benefit from optimised SEO and listings.