Etsy SEO 2019 Superstar Keywords

When we are talking about Etsy SEO what on earth are Superstar Keywords?

Etsy have mentioned ‘Superstar Keywords’ before I explain what they actually are we have to talk about what keywords are.

Many people mistakenly think keywords are your tags, or your titles or what you put in your description, but this is not the case. Keywords are simple the terms, the words that BUYERS type into the search area of the search engine.  

In General, there are two types of keywords

Broad and Narrow keywords.

Broad Keywords

These are not particularly descriptive, they are words like ‘ring’ these are words that are going to have massive competition and quite a high number of people searching for them so you might look at them and think that is something you should be aiming for, lots of people are searching for it so there are lots of chances for people to find your items.
The things is this term is not very specific, a person searching for the word ‘ring’ does not really know what they are looking for, this might just be possibly to narrow down their ideas or have a look at the competition on Etsy, but they are not thinking about the occasion, what material, what type of ring so that search term is going to return a whole load of random rings and the chance of any of them being the one you want to buy is pretty low.

So a searchers behaviour could quite often be they would search for this broad term to get some ideas of what they are looking for and then narrow down and refine their search term until they get an idea of what they are really looking for.

Narrow keywords

Narrow keywords are often called longtail keywords. These are the more specific terms with the narrower focus.

They tend to have more words in their phrase (but not always) but if you imagine instead of ‘ring’, ‘steampunk emerald engagement ring’

This is much more specific, the person searching for that has a fair idea exactly what they are looking for so when they see the items, they are much more likely to be buyers rather than just browsers. So actually, it is a better strategy especially for us little guys.

If you go for too broad keywords then you are up against a majority of shops, for example anyone that has ‘Emerald steampunk ring’, ‘Wedding ring’. ‘engagement ring’ will also all rank somewhere for the term ‘ring’ they all contain the term ‘ring’ so the competition is HUGE but your chance of ranking on the front page, your chance of ranking somewhere that someone can see you, is pretty low.

Whereas when you narrow it down to something way more specific your chance of ranking for it is much higher and the chance of someone seeing your item and then clicking on it and BUYING IT is equally much higher so we want to find those most specific phrases that really identify what the searcher is searching for.

This is very different for every different shop, niche, for every customer, for every time period, and for every season.

Its always different, its always fluctuating so what Etsy mean by ‘Superstar Keywords’ are the keyword phrase that you have identified that does the very best for your shop, it’s the very thing that resonates the best with your customers and once we have identified what our superstar keyword is we want to use our titles and our tags to explain to Etsy that that is exactly what our item is.

The most important way to do this is with our title, this superstar phrase is descriptive of your item so chances are the best thing to do is just put that entire phrase in your title, then you can add anything else that explains it a little more if you need extra added, but don’t go crazy trying to ‘keyword stuff’ the title. You only need the one or two really descriptive superstar keywords.

With your tags you want to focus again on explaining a little more. If you can use the superstar keyword as the whole phrase in your tag then that is the best way to explain to Etsy that your item is very ‘relevant’ for that phrase then that is the best, but its possible that the keyword phrase might be longer than tags can allow but that’s OK because everyone else will have the exact same problem, so you can chop up that phrase and pop it into a couple of keyword.

Then for your other keywords you can look at synonyms of the same word (personalised or custom) the people who will use it (bride, mother, sister) and of course what materials and what occasions.

But the most important thing is that you are specifically telling Etsy in all the ways possible that this item is exactly what you say it is.

Don’t try and spam, don’t try and fit in different keywords that are not quite related. There is no point putting ‘necklace’ in your keywords if the item is a ring. You might sell necklaces but that is not what this item is.  Similarly, do not put other peoples shop names in there hoping that you will rank because they are doing well.

Do not try to game the system, just put the most descriptive things to tell Etsy what your item is. If you are correct and have found good phrases that resonate well with people and we tell Etsy exactly what it is then Etsy will likely give us a chance, show us, and our item could do relatively well. If your item starts to do well for one keyword phrase then it might actually rank for other phrases as well that you hadn’t even thought of.  

Check back often into your Etsy stats and make sure that everything is still working, tweak when necessary and make sure that your superstar is still a superstar.

Etsy have told us enough times now that they don’t want a keyword stuffed title. They have even given examples of decent titles in some of their latest articles

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