So one of the most crucial things to get your head around when listing your items on Etsy is SEO which stands for Search Engine Optimization. Put very basically is the way that a search finds the results that are listed in products found after using the search bar. Now as you can imagine most people when shopping online use the search bar to look for an item they are interested in, the key is ensuring that your item is one of the items that comes up when they search.
On Etsy there are a few things that are used by the search to find your items they are mainly the title, tags and description. So you need to ensure that they are giving you the best opportunity of being found. It is suggested that there should be similarities between your title, tags and description to increase the chances of being found. Hopefully by the end of the this blog post you will have an idea of how I go about finding these for my listings. Don’t get me wrong it is a lot of work but hopefully you will see the rewards of doing the legwork.
A little trick that I learnt which saves a little bit of time is if you fill in the title section of your listing first using commas to separate then you can use copy and paste. Once the title has been completed you can highlight the title, go to the tags section and paste into the box. This will automatically make tags out of the title you have already written.
So a title is a bit more than just what your item is called I will use my Teacher clay tags as an example. So for all intents and purposes I call these Teacher Clay tags however the title for this item on Etsy is:
Teacher gift, Teacher tag, Teacher appreciation, gifts for teacher, personalised, personalized, clay tag, end of year, preschool gift, apple
As you can see from the title it is more like a list of all the possible things that a person might type in if looking for a gift for a teacher. It is important that you think about who would want your item, for what reason or event this will help you think up your titles.
There are two main approaches that I take in order to check the title that I have chosen will work. The first is using the autocomplete on the search bar. Start by opening an incognito window. In Chrome click on the three dots in the top right hand 
corner and click on “Open Incognito Window”. This picture should help you see where I mean. Now you might ask why do you need to do this, put very simply this is a completely clean page which is not aware of what you normally look at. Therefore it is not going to show you your Etsy items in searches because that is what you were hoping to see.
On this page put www.Etsy.com in the address bar this will open the main Etsy
page that you can now use to do some research on. In the Etsy search bar start typing in part of your title, underneath will appear a menu with all the things that customers on Etsy have searched for similar to what you are typing in. You can then use any of the words in that list that are relevant to your item. That is the start of your title and tags. With some items like baby items you may have to look at baby, christening, pregnancy to get a range.
The other approach is to have a look at what tags other Etsy listings have used and see if you can incorporate any of those into your listings. Again using the incognito window that you used for the searching above look for an item similar to yours but by another seller. On their listing scroll all the way to the bottom and you will find a section that says “Related to this Item”. Have a look through these and again see if you think that any of these would apply to your item as well.
Now from these two approaches you should hopefully have collated a list of a number terms that could apply to your item. Now it is time to write your title, basically list all these terms with a comma between until you have used up all the available characters (or as close as). There is no need to repeat words for example instead of writing “Teacher gift, teacher present, teacher tag” you would write “Teacher gift, present, tag”.
Unfortunately this is not the work over, this process will need to be reviewed to ensure you are keeping up with search trends and possible new uses for your item. This whole process will need to be repeated on a regular basis to ensure that you continue to have the best possibility of being found and sales occurring as a result.
I am not saying that this is the only way of finding tags and titles I am only letting you know the approach that I take to finding ones suitable to my items. Hopefully this post will help you get started and give you an idea of what approach to take. Thank you for reading please let me know what you think or if there is anything else that you would like me to cover in this post or in any others.
