How to write titles and tags for SEO – Craft Keyword Research for Etsy and Amazon Handmade

Best ways to write product titles for Etsy with SEO Craft Keyword Research for Amazon Handmade and Shopify

By Chris Tailby from CraftLife.Academy

Becoming very good at writing titles, tags and descriptions is a must learn skill for anyone selling crafts on Etsy, Amazon Handmade or Shopify.  Chances are,  you know that already!

It’s the one topic that all craft selling coaches agree on and yet we still see listings in huge numbers with poorly written titles.

So,  in this article,  I’m going to break it right down from the bottom up whilst showing you where many Etsy sellers are still going wrong. 

Becoming an expert at keyword research and writing titles is your opportunity to differentiate yourself from other sellers.

So,  let get started!

It’s good to break this down through the eyes of the buyer experience and to use it as an example.  Take a look at the info image below.  Lets say you’ve created a silver daisy necklace and want to write the perfect title for it.

 

If you’d prefer to watch this article in video form,  see my YouTube channels video – How to write titles and tags for Etsy HERE.

My advice is always to start with a quick brainstorm as to what you feel are the biggest craft keywords / names that buyers are going to type into the Etsy search engine to find what they are looking for.

Step 1

So,  your initial thoughts may come up with something like this:

SILVER NECKLACE

FLORAL SILVER NECKLACE

DAISY SILVER NECKLACE

STIRLING SILVER DAISY NECKLACE

Mistake number one would be to put “Silver Necklace” on its own at the start of your title and also to repeat it several times in an attempt to emphasise it.  The term silver necklace is huge with the biggest of sellers all competing to be seen for it.

So,  silver necklace would be the Etsy “category” that you would place your product into and your focus should be on populating your available 140 characters within your title with buyer related keywords.

Buyer related keywords are the keywords which closely describe your item of which their may be several different ways in which searchers are using words to find the same product.

For example,  they could use “solid silver” “pure silver” “925 silver” “simple silver” “light silver” “cute silver” before the word “necklace” or “daisy necklace” and so you need to spend at least 1 hour on this research for every product that you introduce so that you can “craft” your titles and descriptions to get views from the biggest potential buyers.

 This is key,  because you might be tempted to write “gift for mum” after “silver necklace” in your title,  because you know that there are thousands of searches for “gift for mum” daily.  But here’s the truth.  Even if Etsy placed your item at the top spot for “gift for mum”,  if the listing failed to record any or many click throughs or sales,  the listing would be bumped down and eventually out of site completely.

 And so my advice is to follow the 80/20 rule.  80% of your title should be using less searched for but highly targeted to your potential buyer whilst 20% should be used to insert one or two “heavy hitting” keywords,  often to finish a listing off.

 And so,  the brainstorm above started with the biggest searched for keyword that describes your item and moves down to a less searched for but highly accurate description of your item which is sterling silver daisy necklace.  If someone is searching for a sterling silver daisy necklace and types that into the search engine and your product is returned for this search, the chances of both a click through and a purchase are much higher than if someone had just typed in silver necklace.

So,  step 1,  do the brainstorm,  coming up with a few popular and more descriptive names to describe your product.

Step 2

If you have not already done so,  I recommend you download the free google chrome extension called “Keyword surfer”.

After downloading,  start typing in the keywords that you came up with originally to see what else it can tell you.

So,  you open your Chrome Browser and do a search for “silver necklace” as normal.  But this time,  scroll down and look to the right of your screen to see a new box open up with a list of keywords people are using to find items related to the search.  The estimated monthly search volume is next to each search.

At the bottom you’ll see other pages to click through.  Click to see more pages of results until you get to around 100 search per month for keywords.

Start by typing in your first four search terms that you originally came up with and then for each search take a look at the results and start writing down the “buyer keywords” so “Sterling Silver Necklace Women’s” would be one.  “Mens necklace silver” would not.

And you can see that every search term is written in blue right?  This is because you can click onto it to conduct another search around “that” keyword.  So,  do this for every buyer keyword you come across.

Within the hour,  you should have many buyer related keywords that are scoring between 100 and 3000 each and quite often 3 or 4 words in length which we call long tail keywords.

When you have your list,  you’ll be ready to start writing your ideal title and tags.

You’ll also be able to assign a “score” to your title so that you know its full of potential having been made up of the less competitive but more targeted keywords.

And this is important to understand because it’s the CTR (click through rate) which is recorded by Etsy and Amazon for every search and so your listing is more likely to get that click when your item closely matches what it searched for.

For example if you sell as sterling silver daisy necklace,  it may only have around 100 searches per month but you are more likely to get the click through and the purchase than if your title has “necklace gift for mum” in it because even though the search volume is much higher it’s more competitive and also less relevant to your item.

So,  remember 80% buyer keywords 20% heavy hitting keywords at the end of the title.

The reason why I include the 20% bigger volume keywords in my recommendations is because as you record sales and reviews for your buyer keywords you’ll become more likely to start showing up for the bigger volume searches over time.

Step 3

Start crafting the perfect listing with your buyer keywords.  Each keyword has a score from keyword surfer so add them up! And make sure each title you write has a few thousand searches from the less popular but more targeted keywords.

It could start to look like this:

So,  for each of the keywords on the right,  I did a search.  Also,  from the searches,  I clicked onto some of the blue buyer keywords to conduct extra searches.  Every time I saw what I would consider to be a close match to the product,  I wrote it down,  above and on the left in white.

Next to each search term is the number of typical searches each month for that keyword.  We want to populate our title now with as many buyer related keywords as we can whilst still being able to read the title easily.  Don’t forget,  its actually your products image that will draw in a person’s interest first so you don’t need to waste words that are not buyer keywords inside your title.

If I were to write out the title,  it would look like this:

Daisy Necklace Silver Floral Necklace

Flower in Necklace Daisy Chain Jewelry

Daughter Gift from Mom Gift from Daughter

Flower Pendant

So,  my title scores 5,900 searches each month just for 80% of the keywords I’ve added,  the total doesn’t include the big ones like Daughter Gift or Mom gift. 

Most of the added keywords are a close match to what’s being sold and what I would consider as being a search term used by a buyer of this item.

Take a look below at what I have covered:

DIRECT MATCHES

Daisy Necklace                        Daisy Necklace Silver              Necklace Silver            Necklace Silver Floral

Silver Floral Necklace              Necklace Flower                      Flower in necklace      Necklace Daisy

Necklace Daisy Chain              Daisy Chain Jewelry                Flower Pendant                                  

 

INDIRECT MATCHES

Daisy chain jewelry                 Silver Daisy Chain                    Flower Jewelry            Silver Necklace Jewelry

 

HEAVY HITTERS AT THE END

Daughter Gift from Mom        Mom Gift from Daughter

If this is the first time you’ve ever seen anyone score a title,  remember you read it from me first!

When introducing a new product I do include one or two big keywords at the end.  It’s like putting some money in the bank to accumulate in the future. 

Over time as you record sales and reviews your item will turn up for more searches on the bigger keywords and if you record sales off the back of those searches you can soon find yourself turning up for big searches and watching your business transform very quickly…so do be careful what you wish for 😊

Now,  let’s take a look at the actual Silver Daisy Necklace listing on Etsy:

This next bit is really important to learn.  Take a look at the actual listings title:

Sterling Silver Daisy Necklace, Gift for mum, Christmas Gift Necklace, Best Friend Gift Neklace, Multi Daisy Necklace, Disy Flower Necklace.

The above screengrab was taken from my YouTube Video on this topic.  If you take a look at the title for the product,  you can see that it has been written with “keywords” in mind but the “choice” of keywords could be better in my opinion and here’s why:

The listing starts out with 1 fairly low traffic but still a good keyword choice “Sterling Silver Daisy Necklace”  - It would be my opinion that this one keyword is probably responsible for most of the item’s sales through search.  This is because of 3 reasons:

1 – It is an exact match for the product

2 – It is a buyer keyword (based on being a long tail keyword that is a match for the item)

3 – It has less competition so it stands a great chance of turning up high in search

So,  my advice is to include more of them,  as per the title example that I wrote earlier which included lots of closely matching longer tailed keywords.

After the one good keyword,  the title above launches straight into a massively competitive keyword, “gift for mum” – this is a waste of prime title real estate because of 2 reasons:

1 – Due to the competition it’s unlikely that you’ll place inside the first 4 pages of results.

2 – It’s not a close match to the product.  You are literally competing with every product that could be a gift for mum.

The rest of the title is also full of keywords that the product just isn’t going to turn up in search for.  Even if it did turn up in search,  if the product does not get click throughs,  both Etsy, Amazon and Google will bump it down the listings. 

There are also two misspellings in the title “disy” and “neklace” – My guess is these were deliberate but all search engines will auto correct any misspellings these days and so my advice is not to do this.

And so,  this is why I see writing titles and tags as a very important skill to understand and more importantly deploy correctly.  Most sellers understand the term “keyword” but they are still making fundamental mistakes in large numbers.  But after learning this, you don’t have to be one of them!

If you want all of my fast track advice,  take a look at my 1hr training video which has three craft demonstrations using some cool products to make hand made items along with lots of tricks, tips and sales hacks to become a successful seller on Etsy, Amazon Handmade and Shopify.

Watch my craft selling training here.

See my YouTube Channel here

Craft Life Academy You Tube Channel.