Etsy Seller Tips – Google SEO for Etsy Shops

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This week’s installment of my Selling on Etsy series focuses Google SEO for Etsy Shops. Throughout the post, I will refer to Google SEO, although this applies to various search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo as well.

This week’s installment of my Selling on Etsy series focuses Google SEO for Etsy Shops. Throughout the post, I will refer to Google SEO, although this applies to various search engines, such as Bing and Yahoo as well.

In order to understand the concepts spoken about, you need to read up on my previous article, explaining how SEO works on Etsy. This will help you understand exactly what SEO is, and how to choose your keywords.

Google SEO for Etsy Shops – Adding in your Keywords

To optimize both your listings and your shop for Google search, you will need to understand how they’ll show up in Google, and that will help you understand where to place your keywords. Fortunately, Etsy has a handy feature that helps with that.

1.  Listing optimization: Your key elements here are the listing title and the first sentence of the listing description.  Your title not only shows up as the title in search engine results, but also works as the “alt text” of your images, adding to relevancy. Your first couple of lines in the description show up as the description in the search engine results as well. Make sure your URL matches the keyword results as well (as determined by the first words in the title) and add tags and other keywords in the listing for more relevancy on the webpage.
2. Shop optimization: This works in the same way as the listings. The shop title is what makes up the search engine results title, and the beginning of the announcement is what makes up the results description. Using only the shop name, over here “Menucha Designs” would not help me be found by people who Google it. By including my keyword, here “original handcrafted jewelry”, I can be found. My announcement used to be a call to subscribe for updates on sales and such. I changed it to start with an actual description of my shop, and moved the other information lower down.

You can add more relevancy by using keywords in your shop sections, although I find this hard to do as characters are very limited. You can though, use keywords that are relevant such as “bracelets, necklaces” as opposed to calling your shop sections by nicknames. I do try to include this as much as possible in my listing text, where it makes sense, and in my shop policies and such.

Google SEO for Etsy Shops – Creating Backlinks

Backlinks are links to your shop and listings on other websites. When the search engines see that lots of websites refer to yours, they assume you are popular and push you up on the list. There are a few ways you can do this:

• Be active on social media. I will elaborate on this in a future installment of this series.
• Start a blog.
• Get featured on other blogs. I plan to write more about this and what it can do for your shop, including how to do it effectively, in a future installment. In the meantime, you can learn about getting featured on my blog here, or contact me.
• Comment on blog posts. Most blogs give you the option to insert a “website” when you comment. Place your Etsy shop URL in that space.

A great way to spread out links is by linking to your shop sections. This is a very much neglected route of publicity, but it can be powerful, especially as those are more permanent than listings and link to a webpage with lots of relevant content, working much as landing pages work in search engine optimization.

If you are getting discouraged, and thinking of giving up – stick with it! It’s such a shame to give up on the end because of the challenges of the beginning. (Repin the image below to share this inspiration with friends who may be struggling!)

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