Complete Guide to SEO for Etsy in 2025
A few months ago I got an email from the Etsy team saying they wanted to do a video call with me to help me improve my shop. When I first saw this, I didn't think it was really Etsy. I thought it was a scammer pretending to be Etsy so that they could hack into my account or something.
Anyways, it turned out to be legit. It was an employee from the Etsy Sellers development team and during the call she gave me some great information on how to improve my SEO and I thought I'd pass that information along to you guys to maybe help you guys with your SEO too.
I'll also be sharing some general non SEO related tips that she shared with me too. So follow the article with us to the end.
SEO for Etsy
So I didn't record the call because I don't think I was allowed to, but I did take some good notes while having a conversation with her. But pretty much what she did was go to my shop page and all my best selling listings and just gave me some pointers on how I could get more traffic to my store.
She told me that one of the most important things that I could do to improve my shop is to optimize my SEO. But first let's explain what SEO? actually it's a rather new word, but basically what it is in simple terms is the process of increasing both the quality and quantity of traffic to your website or in this case, your Etsy shop.
So a huge part of this process is to choose the right keywords or tags that will help potential customers find your shop. And while on the video call with Etsy, they really stress that two to three word phrases are way better than single word tags in terms of what the algorithm likes.
So for example, if you're selling jewelry, keywords like gold necklace or dainty gold necklace are much stronger keywords than for example, the tag necklace by itself. She also stressed that since these tags are so valuable in helping potential customers find your shop, it's super important that you use all 13 available tags in every single listing that you have.
When coming up with tags you want to put yourself in your potential customer's shoes, try to imagine what they would type in the search bar to find the products that you're selling. Let's say you sell a mug that says "Best Dad Ever" on it. It might be a good idea to have some tags that are "Father's gift" or "Gifts for Dad" or "dad mug". You don't want to put just any tag that you think is popular, you want it to be relevant.
When it comes to SEO, we're looking to improve the quality of the traffic to our store too, not just the quantity. The more relevant your tags are to what you're actually selling, the more customers will be buying your item after they search. This is what's going to lead you to a higher conversion rate, which is going to help your ranking with the Etsy algorithm.
If you need some ideas coming up with tags, you can actually view other stores tags by clicking on a listing and scrolling to the bottom of the page. You'll see all the tags for that item under the "Explore Related Searches" section.
She told me another thing that you can do to improve your SEO is to add attributes to your listings. A lot of people overlook these because they're not as visible as tags are, but if you really want to have an optimized shop, you'll want to add these as well.
Attributes are things like color or holiday or special occasion. By adding these things to your listings, it's just another way for customers to find your shop.
The last important part to optimizing your SEO is to take a look at your titles that you're using for your items. Titles are what the customer sees right next to the main picture whenever they're browsing on Etsy. And when I was on call, she told me that the first three to four words were super important because as you all know, most people these days are online shopping using their phones.
This means that a lot of the time when customers are shopping, your titles are going to get significantly cut off, leaving just three to four words for your customers to see. Also, the Etsy search algorithm uses the words in your titles as potential potential search terms too. So you're going to want to make sure that whatever you're putting in your titles are searchable terms, just like you did with your tags.
So for example, if you sell wall art and you have names for your art pieces like maybe they're Sunset, Sorrow or something like that. Since it's very unlikely for someone to search for that, it's better to put those things in the description instead. You only get 140 characters to use in your titles, so you want to be sure to use every character you can wisely.
But yeah, that's pretty much it for the SEO information. I know it can seem daunting the first time you learn about all this stuff, but it really isn't as complicated as it seems.
What it really comes down to is knowing your customer, putting yourselves in their shoes, and trying to figure out what they would type in the search bar to find your products. And it's okay to experiment with different tags from time to time. If you have some products that are not selling, it might be a good idea to look at the tags that you have and experiment with some new ones to try to figure out something that works.
So now that we're done with all the SEO stuff, I'm going to be going through three more tips that the Etsy employee gave me during our call.
3 Tips to SEO for Etsy
Make sure all your listings use all 10 of your available images
Etsy has done research and they found that listings that have more photos sell better. And if you think about it, say you were shopping for clothes or something like that, if a website only gave you two pictures to look at, you might be more hesitant to buy it versus a website that gives you more views and angles of the product.
And if you need more ideas of pictures that you could take for your items, Etsy made a pretty good article about it. They break down seven different types of photos that you can add to your listings:
- A studio shot: which is your product on a plain background with good lighting.
- A lifestyle shot: which shows your product looking good in a natural environment.
- A scale shot: which is a photo that visually shows how big or small your product is.
- A group shot: which is good for products that are sold in multiples. You can show everything that's included in one order.
- A packaging shot: which gives your customers a sense of branding and it tells them what they can expect in the mail.
- A process shot: which is pretty much just a picture of you making your product.
There's a lot of people selling dropship products from China on Etsy now, and a lot of customers these days are looking for proof that an item is actually handmade. And showing them in a picture is a really good way to prove it. But yeah, in general, the more pictures the better. So try to use all 10 pictures for all your listings if you can.
Fill out your "about" page completely
Customers these days want an idea of who they're buying from, especially on Etsy. When customers buy on Etsy, they're looking to support small business and independent makers. I know it's not the easiest thing, but try to write a compelling story about yourself. Talk about your background, how you came about starting your store, and what you hope to achieve in the future.
Sharing your story will help customers feel more connected to your brand itself, and it's the first step in building brand loyalty. Successful businesses know how important this is. That's why you can always see them working on their image and their brand.
Think of a company like Nike. It's very rare that you find them talking about how their shoes have the best features or that their clothing has X or Y technology. When you watch their ads or commercials, they're more often talking about what it actually means to be an athlete. It's more about the story than the actual products.
Use A/B testing to find out what works best
So now that you have all this information, you're going to want to experiment with a bunch of tags, titles, and photos to see what works best. But she strongly advised me not to touch any of my listings that were doing well. According to her, when you change the titles and tags in your products, Etsy may take a while to update these changes and run them through the algorithm for your shop. And this might cause your visits to temporarily slow down.
So as you're running your shop, you should have a good idea of what's selling and what's not selling. For the items that are not selling well, it's okay to change the tags and titles directly on the item itself. But for items that are selling well, she suggested that I make copies of them. After you make copies of them, you can test out new tag tags, titles and photos on that copy.
That way you don't disturb any of the current stream of visits that you're currently getting to your shop. I don't know how true this is, to be honest the Etsy algorithm seems pretty complex to me, and it does make me feel a little safer because the last thing I want is to change the tags and titles on my best sellers and then they suddenly stop getting sales. So, yeah, this is a really safe way of experimenting with your SEO.
So that's everything I learned from my Etsy call. Honestly, I think it's a pretty cool thing that Etsy does and apparently they don't reach out to everybody. From what I hear, they only reach out to shops with a certain amount of growth in a certain amount of time, so I'm really grateful for that. Which is why I'm sharing everything I learned from it to hopefully help you guys out too.
Would it be better to have a shop on Etsy or have your own website?
So this is a really good question and I think I have a short term answer and a long term answer. I think in the long term you eventually want to have both. We don't really know what's going to happen to Etsy in the future. Maybe a new platform comes out and it's more popular than Etsy, or maybe Etsy just comes out with policies that are not really good for sellers.
With Etsy, there's just so much that's out of your control. That's why I think it's so important to build more than just a shop on Etsy. It's so important to build your own brand. And part of that is to eventually have your own customers and your own website. In the short term, if I had to choose one, I would probably go with Etsy first. I really don't think I'd be where I am today if I had made my own website first.
The good thing about Etsy is that they already have a huge customer base that's coming onto their site and looking for things to buy. When you make your store on Etsy, you get access to those customers.
An analogy that I like to use is that being on Etsy is like being in a shopping mall and having your own website is like having your store in a detached building by itself. People go to the mall already looking to buy things. Someone who's never heard of your store before might be walking by and something in your store catches their eye, they might walk in and then buy something. When you're out on your own, you really need your customers to know who you are first, because they have to drive specifically to your store to buy something.
So, I feel like being on Etsy brought me a lot of customers that I wouldn't have gotten if I had started my own website. But in the long term, I think it's important to have both eventually. But yeah, this is just coming from my own experience, I've heard of people who've started using their own website first, and you can get really successful doing that as well every store is different and you really just have to do what's best for you.
