Tagged

How strong are your tags? 

Etsy has gained visibility in Google Search. This is good news for Etsy sellers. It means more people can find our shops.

But no one is going to find your items or your shop if your search terms aren't strong enough.

I've mentioned Marmalead before. They just recently came out with a tutorial to help us all create stronger tags. (Which I won't rehash here. If you're interested, I'd recommend checking it out.) Better tags lead to better visibility in searches, first in Etsy and perhaps in Google as well.

How do you create good tags? 

You want to

1. describe your item
2. using terms people are actually searching, and
3. use words that have minimal competition.

Because if you're using tags with lots of competition, your item might get buried where shoppers rarely go. And we don't want that. 

Constructing tags is a challenge for me. But lately I've been playing with it a bit. For example, I've been working on the tags for my knitted cell phone holder... 

When I put "cell phone holder" into Marmalead, I get a cloud of tags that looks like this...

Lots of search terms. And I notice that many of them aren't describing what I'm selling. Which is bad. Because that means that people who find my item probably are looking for something different. I need to figure out how to describe my item in terms that people who want this type of item are using.

So, I break this up into parts. 

Firstly, people aren't really searching for cell phone holders that necessarily are knitted, so while I may still want to include this in a tag, I won't use it more than once. Which means I want to play with the idea of a cell phone holder, finding ways to describe it that a buyer would use.

There are several ways that someone might search for "cell phone"...

• mobile phone
• iPhone
• Samsung Galaxy
• Android

...and I'm sure you can think of some others. Then, "holder" is probably not the best term to use. I could use...

• dock
• stand
• cushion
• caddy
• storage
• bedside
• prop
• station

(Most of these other ideas I got from those tag clouds after searching my tags.) 

So, now it's time to mix and match. Tags are limited to 20 characters per tag, and there is a limit of 13 tags. The trick is to find the tags that are getting the most searches and views, but that don't have so much competition that your item will get buried on page 20. (And remember to use CCCOE Team as one of your tags so you can be found for team-related compilations.)

This is going to take some time...

Do you have any good tagging tips for us?