Anna White - Decoding Etsy SEO: How to Get Your Shop Seen by the People Who Want to Buy Your Products

Decoding Etsy SEO

By Anna White

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2014 by Anna White. All rightsreserved.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoymentonly. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people.If you would like to share this book with another person, pleasepurchase an additional copy for each recipient. If youre readingthis book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for youruse only, then please return to Smashwords.com andpurchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work ofthis author.

Table of Contents

Foreword

You opened a shop, you've got gorgeousproducts, and nothing happens... It's a story I've heard fromsellers over and over in the Etsy forums, on Facebook, and in myemail inbox.

It's discouraging when you don't know what todo next, but here's some great news. It's probably not aboutyou!

Let's be real for a minute. It could be about you. You could be getting seen all over the place and your product is quirky orunusual or maybe just not quite perfect yet, and people are votingwith their silence. They're telling you that the world isn't readyfor your product.

That's probably not the case. A quick look atyour shop views probably shows that your shop isn't getting seen.And it's so simple it's a no-brainer, but it's really, reallyimportant. It's not enough to have amazing fantastic products. Etsyis packed full of unique products and one of a kind designs. Tosell, you must be seen.

That's what this book is about. It's not apromise that you'll sell like mad, quit your day job, and appear ondaytime talk television as an Etsy breakout rock star. It's aboutlearning some very practical information about SEO and the Etsysearch so you can get seen by more people and start being indexedby Google.

It's not a one step process. It takes time.If you're anything like me you did it all wrong the first time soyou'll have to redo lots of things you already spent precious timesetting up. I've been there, and it sucks, but it's necessary toget seen.

Once you're being seen, if you also have thatamazing fantastic product, it will sell. This happened to me, and Iwas so used to having no sales that I was shocked! Overnight I wentfrom wasting time on Pinterest to working my tush off.

Are you ready? Get some tea, pull up a chair,and let's dive in!

Chapter 1
What is SEO?

When I started my online shop I knew photoswere important. That much was obvious. I didn't know what SEO was,so I Googled it and got buried under lots of long wordy obscurearticles aimed at large companies and keyword writers. There werealso lots of links to people selling SEO services. The bitsrelevant to me and my little Etsy business were rare and hard tofind.

So I'm going to save you some time and cutthrough the crap. SEO simply means search engine optimization.

Search engines are everywhere, on almostevery website, and each one uses different algorithms and methodsfor sifting through the thousands of available options and decidingwho shows up on the first page and who comes in dead last.

The good news is that we only care about twoof them: Google and Etsy. Google's algorithms are complicated andconstantly changing. There are people who make careers out ofanalyzing and interpreting Google's methods. Etsy, on the hand, ismore straightforward. It is set up to put the products people mostwant to buy right in front of them because that's how they makemoney.

So when we're talking about SEO, don't thinkof it as a nebulous mysterious internet secret or something hackersand lowlifes use to game the system. It can be that.

But for you and I, small business owners withawesome products to promote, it is just tweaking details of ourshop so that when our ideal customer searches for what we sell,they can actually find us.

Chapter 2
Keywords are Your Friends

The first step to getting your shop seen isto create a list of great keywords. Great keywords describe yourproduct, make sense for your brand, and help people find you thatmaybe didn't even know you were just what they wanted.

The way to do this is to make sure that thekeywords you are using in your shop are one that people aresearching for. Instead of writing how to do this, I'm going to doeven better. I'm going to show you. So come on over to my studioand let me show you how to use Etsy to find great keywords for yourproduct.

CLICK HERE TO WATCHTHE VIDEO!

There are other tools that you can use tofind strong keywords. This is the method I like to use for a fewreasons.

First, it's free.

Second, it's easy to use. You're not going toget a graph and a pie chart and metadata stats that you don't careabout and don't know how to read. (Or maybe that's just me...)

Third, and most important, it's going to giveyou the strongest keywords for Etsy . Andthat's what matters most because that is the platform we're using.If you choose to sell on other platforms or from your own website,these keywords may or may not be strongest for you. They will,however, be very useful in getting seen on Etsy.

Chapter 3
Scope out Success Stories

Have you got a list of keywords? If not, gotake a few minutes to do that now. I'll wait, and it will makeworking through the rest of this guide much more useful.

Once you've got a list of 10-12 keywords, thenext step is to scope out some successful sellers in your area,other portrait painters or hat knitters or people that make potterymugs. The goal of this search isn't to see which items are theirbest sellers so you can reproduce that and pop it into your ownshop. It is to see what they are doing well so you can apply thoseoverall techniques to your shop.

This is one thing I love about the Etsycommunity: no matter what you sell, you have sisters doing similarthings. No one does everything well, but by checking out a fewstores you can start to get some ideas for improving your ownproduct staging, item descriptions, or search tags so you canimprove.

Instead of talking about it, let's go visit asome shops together and see what some of the top sellers getright!

CLICK HERE TO WATCHTHE VIDEO

Chapter 4
Carve Out Your Own Niche

Most of us crafty people are multi-crafty, sowe probably could reproduce a lot of what we saw when we checkedout our competition. That wouldn't be true to our own passionsthough, and also in the long term makes it even harder to get seen.If you're doing the same thing as someone else, not only are youcutting into their business, but you're making it hard for acustomer to pick you.

You don't want to blend in; you want to standout!

Take a few minutes and think about thesuccessful shops you just saw. There are probably one or two thatcome to your mind first. What makes that particular shopmemorable?

Think about the rest of the shops that are alittle less memorable. What did they all have in common?

This is the place to get brave! It's alwayseasier to follow along with what seems to be working for everyoneelse, but to make yourself the memorable shop, you have to create away distinguish yourself.

There are many ways to do this on Etsy. Somesellers have products that aren't out of the ordinary, but theyphotograph their items in a very unique way so they get featured inlots of treasuries.

Some sellers are masters of staging orlifestyle product photography. They have their jewelry artfullydraped onto a shabby chic display or on a beautiful girl dancing ina golden meadow. They're not only marketing their product, they'reselling a beautiful lifestyle.

Some sellers have truly one-of-a-kindproducts. I fall into this niche. Even though there are otherportrait painters, no else paints portraits on customizedbackgrounds. I am memorable because my work looks different.

It's a bit less obvious, but some sellershave built a strong niche around customer service and amazingproduct packaging that elevates receiving their product into an"event."