7 Etsy SEO Tips You Should Use Immediately
If you’re selling candles or wax melts on Etsy then it’s imperative you do everything in your power to optimize your SEO.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which essentially means your store is written, photographed, and designed in a way to make the back-end platform recognize it as a high quality, highly relevant place to buy candles.
Many people feel victimized by the Etsy algorithm, yearning for discovery and recognition.
While there is nothing you can do about what the algorithm ultimately decides, you can give yourself the best chance with some small adjustments!
Candle makers are often great at making candles, but not ordinarily cut out to handle the overhead and admin operations of our work.
This guide serves as your “to do” list for updating or creating an Etsy shop if you’re selling there, but the ideas easily apply to other facets of sales too.
Let’s dive in.
1. Niche Down
Search for “candles” on Etsy and you’ll receive about 788,258 results.
Seriously.
Search for “handmade soy wax candle” and that result shrinks to a more focused 25,245.
Obviously still huge, but that just proves how saturated the market is.
If you want to find the people that want to find you, it’s important to take the niche one step deeper. “Candles” is too broad and casts a net so wide all the fish get through the openings.
Building a product and marketing it the right way means putting your message in front of the right people at the right time.
In Etsy, this means hyper-focusing your products within the candle niche.
The word “candle” is short, broad, and impossible to conquer. Instead, build your marketing strategy around a long-tailed keyword describing your candles more effectively.
Long tail keywords play well into almost every Etsy SEO strategy described here.
“Birthday candles” is close, but “Personalized birthday candles” is better.
See what happened there? That’s a niche inside the niche.
There are two main reasons you want to niche down:
- Appearing as a single set of results in a sea of 800,000 others means you’ll never be discovered, especially by customers looking so broadly in Etsy (they probably won’t find what they need that way anyways)
- Appearing as one of a micro focused search means you’re showing up in an area where your customer has already narrowed down. This is your target audience. Now you can compete!
How To Niche Down
Rebuild your listing titles.
Outside of photography, your title appears in search results.
About 30-35 characters before it’s cut off, so make the most of your message and purpose right there.
Keywords are important, and you want to convey how directed your work is at the search term.
Overhaul your Shop Title.
That little area at the top of your shop?
Make sure it’s clear what you’re selling, the problem you’re solving, and why you are the right choice. Odds are good if a customer is actually browsing your shop, they’re interested in your work.
It also probably tells Etsy more about the niche you’re competing in.
Re-write the skimmable parts of the description.
While most people don’t read descriptions that close, they do skim them.
Technically, Etsy doesn’t base SEO on the description, but making certain parts stand out as potential customers briefly check if your product is for them helps.
At the end of the day, your organic platform sales come from convincing Etsy to show your listing, and demonstrating your value to the customer.
Defining and refining your niche is critical to building a successful foundation in the platform.
2. Design An Atmosphere
If you’ve ever visited an Etsy store with atmosphere then you understand the heart of this tip.
Every store has the concrete metrics – keywords, titles, description content, etc, but there’s also the intangibles of the store that introduce emotion into the visitor’s experience.
The atmosphere is your subtle message to the buyer that this ain’t a typical Etsy experience and it gives you and edge against every other seller that simply lists their products and crosses their fingers.
Your ability to create a unique experience elevates your chance of making a sale and boosts your Etsy SEO strength.
Why?
Etsy secretly ranks your store based on how long people hang out.
If they leave, or “bounce”, Etsy measures the amount of time they spent and factors it into your score (the bounce rate).
Designing an inviting and interesting store helps people stick around and actually leave through the cash register instead of the back button!
How To Build Atmosphere
The final impact of your intended atmosphere is ultimately up to the visitor in your store.
While you can do everything to create an interesting taste, if your visitor just isn’t really that into it then they’ll leave anyways. It’s not meant to be, and that’s okay!
While there are hundreds of ways to invoke an emotional journey in your Etsy store, these are only a few that anyone can incorporate.
Maintain consistent, niche-aware colors.
Consistency drives home a point, and colors are the point!
Anywhere you have a chance to use color, select one from your palette.
Most niches have popular colors, and starting out it’s useful to try and play nice with those because that’s what the customer shopping in your niche expects.
If your business or personal branding doesn’t jive with typical colors in your niche, don’t try and tease a palette that isn’t yours.
Embrace your palette with zest!
Typically you’ll have a main color, a secondary color, and a tertiary color. Be mindful of how easy text can be read, and stay creative with how you paint your store front.
Set the stage with a unique banner.
The Armatage Candle Company shop is not currently a good example, but it has a banner.
Sometimes banners do more harm than good, but leveraging colors consistent with your brand starts you out on the right foot.
You’re able to customize banners and even upgrade to different banner styles if you so choose:
You should incorporate a banner with graphic design that compliments the rest of your brand without distracting visitors.
Treat your store like a… store.
One of the Etsy SEO requirements is that you create a valuable experience for the right people.
When you enter a marketplace, every item is organized and displayed to show off the best angles. Why not your virtual store too?
This means:
- Incorporating featured items that quickly tell a story about your work
- Organizing your listings into appropriate Sections, if you can
- Crafting clear titles that match the style of other titles and don’t look spammy
3. Add Video
Possible the most important element for boosting Etsy SEO is incorporating unique features of your listing.
Etsy introduced video for individual listings in 2020, which changed the landscape for listing design.
As with every other social media platform, integrating all features ensures Etsy recognizes your shop as an active member of the platform.
Their algorithm will naturally gravitate towards users that promote new features and take advantage of everything offered in the platform.
How To Integrate Video
If you’re not sure how to “video” your work, consider approaching it from a different angle. Candles are relatively tame, but think about:
- Angle, lighting, and story your video tells
- Colors present and whether they agree with your photography and branding
- Setting for your candles or melts. Can the user see themselves in it? Are the props appropriate?
Whatever you do with video, make sure you film in 1080p HD and 30 fps if possible and crop to the recommended dimensions.
Etsy currently recommends matching the dimensions of your primary listing photo.
Most work can be done on a smartphone, even with just native apps! Otherwise, the top apps for editing videos are easily searchable in other places (remember, this is a candle education blog – not a tech blog!).
Don’t be afraid to throw a few dollars into your content strategy at this point if it makes sense, even if that means paying someone on Fiverr to handle it on your behalf.
Review this guide in Etsy’s Sellers Handbook for more information.
4. Overhaul Your Photography
We’ve talked about product photography on this blog before.
Crafting a story-line that compliments your brand and work is incredibly difficult without understanding basic picture taking.
Fortunately, learning good practices is easy, and Etsy SEO appreciates it too.
While the individual photos and filenames (which get renamed on Etsy’s servers) aren’t directly measured by Etsy’s platform for SEO, the amount of time visitors stay on your listing and store are.
The more you can build engagement and high-quality “window shopping” the better it will serve your store’s score because people aren’t bouncing from your listing super fast.
Photography is a deep subject you can easily spend a career in, but the basics to help your listings compete in the saturated candle making niche aren’t too complicated.
How To Improve Your Photography
If we split photography skills into four levels:
- Amateur
- Novice
- Journeyman
- Master
…then moving from amateur to novice is relatively easy.
That stage requires a basic understanding of light, prop design, staging, and a smartphone.
The following tips will help boost the way your pictures impact SEO:
Create accurate thumbnails.
If your listing represents a single candle, don’t include other candles in any of your photography.
Accidentally putting a gathering of combustion machines in a single picture may look impressive, but is ultimately misleading since you’re only selling a single candle.
Stick to the basic picture types.
Give each listing a unique set of pictures.
Reusing the same photos for all candles in the same collection might stretch your digital dollar further, but it’s kind of… sloppy.
This is when you have a primary photo of the candle flavor, but the listing includes a few of your other stock photography options of the candles.
You don’t want a visitor to be confused by what’s being sold in the listing, so if you’re unable to produce a unique set of pictures then… take more.
Your storage probably won’t complain about a few extra pixels.
Follow best practices for your primary thumbnail photos.
You may like one photo more than another, but make sure the primary photo type and style compliments all the other listing primary pictures.
This goes back to building a consistent appearance and story-line for your work.
Use the latest recommended photo dimensions, and take HD pictures without exception.
If you don’t have a smartphone, find a friend that does.
They’re everywhere (smartphones, not friends).
5. Gather Customer Feedback
Amazon’s decision to allow unfettered feedback on their products forever changed the buying experience.
Many were against it, believing that any feedback should be moderated and censored if it could harm the experience, but they kept on.
Today, customer reviews are invaluable to making a purchase decision on most every platform.
Etsy is no exception.
It’s probably obvious to say that Etsy SEO uses your stores rating in the assessment, but building a presence that garners good reviews is daunting at times.
How To Get Customer Reviews
Receiving a prestigious 5-star rating means someone else rated your store positively.
Getting to a point where people want to provide feedback requires a bit of work.
The bottom line is no one will ever leave you a positive review if your work isn’t outstanding to begin with.
No strategy outlined here or anywhere else can substitute for mediocre products and poor customer experience.
That being said, here are some ideas for gathering feedback.
Be memorable.
In the way you write, photograph, title, and operate, create a memory for your customers.
After all, they are literally paying you money in exchange for your product.
But are they really?
Well, yeah, but you’re selling so much more than a collection of supplies.
From before they’ve checked out to after they receive their treasure, engage them with humility, respect, and an attitude of exceeding every expectation and assumption they might make.
Maybe other candle stores would treat the order as a number, but you don’t.
You know there’s a person and a story on the other side, and you’re crafting an experience for them to share. People who like what you do tend to tell other people about it.
Remember that.
Be transparent.
Sure, the Etsy platform notifies the customer of a few things, but going the extra mile and giving them updates takes their experience up a notch.
Don’t be annoying, but don’t be afraid to send them pictures of their literal product where it makes sense.
This works really well with customizable items.
Also don’t be afraid to honestly own up to delays or problems that may impact their order or delivery.
It’s poor practice to make excuses, but letting them know when their expectations may be broken actually builds trust with many people.
Some people may still want to scream a little, but at least they won’t be surprised by it.
Be valuable.
It goes without saying that you need your advertised work to astound, but value goes beyond simply meeting expectations.
Even in life, you should prioritize taking initiative and doing more than the job asks for.
Depending on your interpretation of those, you may find opportunities in and around to ask for feedback and reviews.
Performing well in every category almost guarantees customer’s will leave a review because they want to!
6. Fill Out Every Field
Like it says above, if a platform you’re using offers a field for you to fill in, you should!
In this day and age every social media and selling platform evolves constantly to meet demands and remain competitive.
The Etsy platform has always been one of continual improvement, meaning they introduce and test features all the dang time.
Along with adding new features, like video, they also update the algorithm responsible for helping your store be discovered to compliment those changes.
Why is this important?
The algorithm needs data about your listings and store to help connect you with potential customers.
Recent updates to the platform removed a traditional front page in favor of personalizing your experience with products they think you want to see or buy.
Etsy literally rearranges the entire store for every customer that virtually visits.
If you leave information out of a listing, Etsy won’t be able to connect as any dots for highly valuable customers.
Bottom line: leave no field, feature, or area of your listings or store barren.
No matter how hard or seemingly inconvenient it may be to populate, don’t do a mediocre job “for the sake of doing it”. The Etsy SEO chief will know if you’re doing sloppy work.
Put your heart into it, and Etsy will happily connect you with high value people that want your work.
7. Optimize Your Title
If you’ve worked in a corporate environment you probably know that most people don’t read email.
They usually skim or ignore them. The fun part of Etsy is how similar that experience is – most customers skim the product description.
And that’s okay, because Etsy SEO allegedly doesn’t account for words in your description, but the title is another story.
Generally speaking, you’re doing something ill advised if your titles are jam stuffed with keywords.
Not in a complimentary and subtle way, but in an extremely forced manner a la 2006 SEO strategies.
Your listing titles need to be consistent and attractive.
The number one tactic is to ensure you’re building titles on a long-tailed keyword, but that you re-use that across multiple listings.
Etsy SEO recognizes that your shop is all about that thing if you consistently preach it in your title design.
Back to the description – you should still write the heck out of it.
Write it for the people who read it AND the skimmers.
Provide digestible sections that aren’t overwhelming but answer every question gracefully and you’ll please your people in full.
Conclusion
Building a convincing product listing and store-front for Etsy SEO to recognize as valuable takes time and energy.
Think about it like a real store though – even if some of the work to keep the lights on and the shelves stocked isn’t glamorous, someone has to do it.
Walking into a store that hasn’t been swept, or has outdated fixtures and a bunch of expired or confusing products hurts more than helps.
It doesn’t help!
Your Etsy store is no different – it deserves an incredible amount of love and investment to produce results that bolster your bottom line and tells the story of your craft to the people that matter.
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