Imagine this: you have superb listings on Etsy that need further reach. What do you do? Do you bribe your customers? Or do you learn how to hack the systems? Or perhaps, you build your own website to sell stuff? We have an easier alternative—you learn what Etsy users are looking for and target that.
Wait a minute—does that even work? Well, not directly. But if you can feed enough data to Etsy about your product, Etsy will show it to the world for you. How? This is where tags come into play.
Tags are not meant to be confused with keywords. Tags are relevant pieces of information you feed to Etsy SEO. It is the metadata that you feed Etsy which pertains to your listing. With the right tags, you become all the more visible.
Where keywords are relevant with regards to how the customer perceives your listing, tags are important with regards to how you want Etsy to market your listings. Both are different but in their own ways.
Using Tags to Get Found in the Search
As stated, an Etsy tag is a short but relevant keyword that describes your listing. In order to provide the most relevant products, Etsy looks for the customer’s keywords or what they are using to look for their desired product. After this, Etsy looks for relevant information that you have fed through your tags. It’s all a game of matching from hereon.
Tags for Etsy
Now that you know how important tags are, you should get right at it. Before you start creating the crispest content, there are a few things that you ought to be aware of. These are pivotal in order to make your tags more relevant and easier on the eyes.
How Many Tags per Listing?
In order to make your tags more efficient, you need to make them crisp and clear. When it comes to the number of tags per listing, you may put up to thirteen (13) per item listing.
Keep in mind that each tag itself is a small phrase, so you can put thirteen of them. So, if you are selling oranges, “juiciest oranges” seems pretty apt, right? You get the drift.
How Many Characters per Tag?
Having the maximum number of tags in mind isn’t enough. Each tag itself should be bound within a character limit to make itself relevant. When it comes to Etsy tags, you may add up to 20 characters. This might be subject to slight changes if there are lingual and translational barriers.
Don’t Match Your Title to Your Tags
This is a pretty controversial matter. Let us tell you how—by first, taking excerpts from Etsy’s own website:
“The most descriptive and relevant keywords for your listings should appear in both your titles and your tags.”
This makes it sound like your tags and title should be overlapping, right? Wrong! Don’t make the most commonly-occurring mistake of matching your titles and tags. This is wrong on two levels. Firstly, Etsy’s algorithm sees it as mere trickery. Etsy’s algorithm thinks that these matching tags and titles are meant to bypass the system itself. That would put you pretty far away from the target.
Second—pragmatically speaking, if you are using the same characters for both title and keyword, you automatically paralyze yourself with more keywords and characters. Seems like a missed opportunity when you can clearly stuff in different but just as (if not more) relevant keywords.
In order to avoid making this mistake, you can think of prioritizing the content of the tag first and then the title. The title is more or less generic—one that covers what you think the customer will look forward to. The tag, on the other hand, should be as crisp as possible as well as cover all possible (and preferably different) ways in which the listing can be described.
Repeating Keywords in Your Tags
Speaking of all possible ways, the other important thing to keep in mind is the fact that you need to avoid the repetitive use of keywords in your tags. Firstly, as we have mentioned, you miss out on great opportunities to find good and relevant alternatives.
Secondly, Etsy itself gives you relevant and related tags that you can use to demarcate your listing. Coming to the previously-mentioned “juiciest orange”, you don’t need to use “fruit” or “juicy” or “succulent” anymore. Try “citrusy”.
Think of it this way. Your tags are the absolute best selling point of your product, but you can only sell it with so many words. As a vendor, you HAVE to think in a multi-dimensional way and brainstorm into thinking what the customer might think of as a relevant or related tag.
Consider Synonyms as Keywords in Tags
Repetition is the gateway to boredom. There, we said it. You need to understand that using synonyms as keywords is just as sinful as it can get. These are often called LSI or Latent Semantic Indexing. After all, you are wasting precious tags!
In order to avoid making this mistake, you need to think of terms that mean the same but aren’t even related, and of course, aren’t even synonyms. Confusing, right? Take an example of the said, yes, orange.
Say there is a picture of an orange that can be both printed and framed as art. You don’t have to call it “orange frame art” and “orange art”, but instead use words like “print” and “décor” to make it sound finer.
