EP 13. How to Get Your Etsy Listings To Show Up in the Search | 3S Listing Framework Part 1

Last week I introduced the 3S Listing Framework: the three jobs every listing has to do to make money on Etsy. If you missed it, you may want to go back and listen to Episode 11 where I give an overview of each job..

This is Part 1 of the deep dive series and we're starting with the first job: Show Up in Search. Because before a buyer can click your listing and buy it, Etsy has to show it to them.

In this episode I walk through how Etsy search works, what drives whether your listing shows up, and how to make sure you're giving Etsy everything it needs to match your listing with the right buyers. I also walk through how to use this information to figure out why a listing isn't getting views.

Mentioned In This Episode: THREE LISTING AUDIT
I personally review three of your Etsy listings and give you a written breakdown plus a short video walkthrough covering all three S's. What's working, what isn't, and exactly what I would change. $27. 
melissacarroll.co/audit 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey there and welcome to the Modern Etsy Seller, the podcast where busy women build, grow, and profit on Etsy. I'm your host, Melissa Carroll, a full-time teacher, a busy mom, and an Etsy seller who's built two successful Etsy shops in the small moments of everyday life. Here you'll find simple strategies, real behind-the-scenes insight, and the clarity you need to stop second guessing and start moving forward one intentional step at a time. Let's get to it. Hey there and welcome back. If you don't know where to begin when it comes to creating a listing, or if you have some listings that aren't selling and you want the first steps in figuring out why, then this episode here is going to help you. In episode 11 last week, I talked about the 3S listing framework. If you missed it, I gave an overview of the three jobs every listing has to do to be successful. Show up in the search, stop the scroll, and secure the sale. This framework can and should be used in two ways. First, use it as a guide as you create each and every new listing. Make sure that each piece of information you input supports at least one of those jobs. And second, use it as a lens to view your struggling listings, the ones that aren't selling or getting views or favorites. These are your dead end listings, and this framework should be used to help you figure out where your listing is hitting that dead end. To figure out which job or job isn't getting done. Today we're going deep on the first part of the framework. The first job your listing has to do, which again is showing up in the search. If your listing isn't showing up in front of the right buyers, then nothing else matters because no one is even seeing what you have. It's invisible to the buyers. In this episode, we're gonna look at what Etsy says they use to rank and show listings and how you can make sure you are maximizing your listings potential to show up in the search. Before we get into what you should do, there are a few things that I want to mention to build like a base of understanding. First, Etsy has a seller's handbook, which is actually just a series of articles that they put out sharing information and expectations for sellers. It's not like a typical handbook where you're giving rules and procedures. It's more Etsy explaining how different parts of the platform work and what they recommend sellers focus on. And in their handbook, they publish how their search works, what factors influence ranking, and what they're looking for in a listing. In the early stages of your shop, you want to ensure that you are doing everything they suggest. And then over time, you'll want to balance it with your own data, what you're seeing in your shop. The information in the seller handbook does change over time and new articles come out. And sometimes what they say feels like a little counterintuitive, and they're not giving us the secret formula here to their algorithm. But they do give us a lot of clues about what matters to them, what they prioritize, and how they think about search and visibility. So we shouldn't ignore it. It's trying to find and show the buyer what they're looking for. And like all search engines, Etsy relies on SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, and is probably something you've heard about many times before. And still it's an area where a lot of sellers are missing the mark and therefore their opportunity to grow. I know that SEO can feel technical or intimidating, at least it did to me in my early days, but at its core, SEO is just the way you help a search engine to understand your content, in this case, your listings. Etsy's search engine works in two phases, query matching and ranking. Query matching is the first phase. This is the foundation of Etsy SEO. It's the part most people are talking about when they say SEO in regards to Etsy. A query is what the shopper types into the search bar. So if someone searches minimalist wall art or teacher appreciation gift or silver birthstone necklace, these are each queries. And Etsy is going to look for listings that match. It'll take a holistic look at your listing, your title and your tags, your attributes, your category, your description, and your first photo to try to understand what your product is and who it's for. If your listing includes the words or close variations of what the buyer typed, it gets added to the pool of results Etsy will show the buyer. If your listing doesn't include those words, then it won't enter that pool, even if your product is a perfect match because Etsy only knows what you tell it. The second and often neglected phase of Etsy search is ranking. Once Etsy has gathered all the listings that match a query, it decides which ones to show first with the goal of showing the listing the buyer is most likely to purchase. And it uses several signals to make that determination. First, and this goes back to the query match phase, is relevancy. How closely your keywords match what was searched. Also contributing to ranking is listing quality. Are there multiple high-quality photos? Is there a return policy? Is the shipping price competitive? Customer service quality factors into the ranking. So Etsy looks at your average review rating, your message response rate, and your case rate. And listing engagement is important here too. Listing engagement is how many people click on your listing and actually buy. Etsy is watching what buyers do after they find you. If people click and buy, your listing gets a boost. If people click and leave, that signals to Etsy that your listing isn't delivering what buyers expected. In your Etsy shop manager, there is a search visibility page. That page is meant to show you how your shop is performing across three areas your shop, your customer service, and your listings. It will flag specific things that you can improve and show you what you're already doing well. When I took a look at mine, the one flag I have is a title recommendation where Etsy is suggesting I update titles on over 400 listings to make them shorter and clearer to buyers. And here's my honest take on that. So far, I haven't followed Etsy's short title guidance, and my shop has continued to do really well. I've tested it on some of my listings and haven't seen a difference, so I'm not ready to make that leap. This could certainly change down the line, but right now I believe the title recommendation is primarily about buyer experience and clarity and not a hard ranking signal the way tags and attributes are. But I will say I don't just load it up with a bunch of keywords. I do make sure that it makes sense and is clear, but it's not sure. So if you have some listings up, go find that page later on. It's personalized to your shop and it tells you exactly where to focus. So now let's talk about the parts of your listing that drive showing up in the search. More than anything else, it's your titles and your tag. Tags and the keywords that you use in both. And before we talk about where keywords go, we need to talk about how to find them. This is where many people get stuck. Here we need to make sure we are thinking like a buyer and not a seller. What is a buyer who would want this item going to search for in that search bar on Etsy? When you create a product, you naturally think in terms of what it is. Buyers are searching based on what they need, and those can be two very different things. For example, let's say I create a notebook with a kayaking themed phrase on the cover. I might think this is a notebook or a journal. But the buyer who would be perfect for this is likely searching for gift for kayaker or kayaking gift. This is going to be especially true if what you sell is highly giftable, but it can also be true in other areas. And that distinction matters a lot when it comes to SEO because your keywords need to reflect the language that the buyers are actually using when they search. Now, once I identify possible keywords, I start researching. And my process is pretty simple. I start on Etsy itself and search the keywords. So in this case, I would type in kayak and gift and then look at listings performing well, especially best-selling listings. I'll pay attention to what language they're starting their titles with and what words keep showing up over and over again. That gives me clues about how buyers are actually searching and what Etsy already understands as relevant. Then I use keyword research tools. I like to use eRank and EverB and I use them to validate ideas even further. I love eRank for looking at search volume and competition and coming up with related keywords that I might not have thought of. And I love EverBe for the Chrome extension they offer that helps me analyze successful listings and see the tags they're using. Okay, so now once you have your keywords, where do they go? They need to go into your title and your tags. Your strongest, clearest phrases should go in your title. The phrases that best explain what the product is and who it's for. For this example, depending on the research, I might start the title with kayaking gift, then put a comma and use notebook for kayaker, then possibly another comma and present for kayak lover. Then I would move on to the tags. With the tags, you are able to expand the ways Etsy can understand and match your listing. You are given 13 tags and should always use all 13 because each one is another opportunity to enter search. Now here's something really important to understand about how Etsy reads tags. Etsy can match listings through exact phrases or through combinations of words, which is known as broad matching. So if someone searches gift for kayaker and your title or tag says gift for kayaker, that's a very strong relevance signal because it's an exact phrase match. But Etsy also mixes and matches combinations of words. So if someone searches kayak gift for husband and you have a tag that says kayak enthusiast and another one that says husband gifts. Etsy can take the individual words from the different tags and match them up, signaling that your listing could work for the buyer. So specifically when it comes to my tags, I reuse phrases from my title, but then I go wider. I'll start thinking about who might buy the item, who might receive the item if it's a gift, plus when and why. So in this example, maybe a birthday gift for a best friend or an anniversary gift for a husband from his wife. I'll think about the alternate words from the item itself. So journal, diary, log, or all things that you can call a notebook. I'll think about descriptive words that might describe the physical features of the item. Is it a leather journer or does it have a hardback cover? Are the pages lined? What color is it? I'll look at the keywords I saw in my research that had higher search and lower competition, lower competition. Maybe I noticed that lake house guest book was a good keyword. So now, with all those words in mind, we're better yet with those words written down. I create phrases that fit in the tags. No single words here because we want to use all the real estate. And if they make sense, like journal for husband, that's great. But I also don't worry about it. It doesn't have to make sense because of the broad matching that I was just talking about. Alright, so aside from titles and tags, you also want to focus on the category and the attributes. Your category tells Etsy the larger bucket your listing belongs in. Etsy requires a category when you create your listing. You want to make sure you're putting it in the most relevant and specific one that you can. And then there's attributes. They are massively underutilized by sellers and they add detail. Things like color, style, occasion, holiday, room, size, material. The list goes on and they are not just filters, though they are used to power the filters that buyers use to narrow their search results, but they are searchable signals. They act like additional tags. Every attribute you add is another signal to Etsy about what your product is and who it's for. If one of my words that I want to use in a tag is already covered with the attribute, like maybe a color, for example, I don't use it again. Then I'll have that tag for something else. Okay, so two more parts of your listing that play a smaller but still very real role in showing up in search. They are your description and your main photo. Etsy tells us that they look at the keywords and phrases in your listing description as part of how they understand your listing. So it matters what you put in there, specifically what you put at the top. The first few sentences of your description carry the most weight. You don't need to keyword stuff it really awkwardly. Just make sure those first sentences naturally describe what the product is and who it's for using the language your buyer would actually search. I often use Chat GPT for this. I use a prompt where I give it my title, explain the item, and ask it to give me an SEO optimized three-sentence description using the keywords and adding other keywords if deemed relevant. And then I copy and paste it to the top of the listing description. And finally, your main photo also plays a role. Etsy has said that they look at your first image as part of how they understand what your product is. A clear image that accurately shows what you're selling helps Etsy confirm what your listing's about. A confusing or unclear main image or something that's kind of busy works against you even before a buyer ever sees it. I'll be talking more about main photos next week in episode 15 when I move into the second job of the 3S listing framework, which is stopping the scroll, because that image has a much bigger job to do in that area. But for showing up in search purposes, just know that clarity matters. Etsy needs to be able to look at your first image and understand what you're selling. Now, everything we just went over needs to be considered as you build your listings. But as I mentioned earlier, we can also use it to figure out what's going wrong with a listing that isn't performing. If you have a listing getting very few views or no views at all, then showing up in search is likely where your dead end is. So here are some questions that I want you to ask yourself as you look at the listing. First, are my keywords actually relevant to what buyers are searching? Am I describing the product the way I would describe it or the way a buyer would search for it? Am I using all 13 tags? Did I fully fill out my attributes? Is my category the right one? And specific enough? Am I creating enough different entry points into the search through a variety of keywords? Would Etsy clearly understand what this product is and who it's for just from the information I gave it? Because remember, Etsy only knows what you tell it. And this is why Etsy SEO is not an exact science. Sometimes improving your visibility involves tweaking and testing over time. Maybe you test different lead keywords, a stronger main photo, more specific phrases, better attributes, different pricing, clearer language, and then you observe what happens. Because Etsyo is not just about setting up a listing, it's also about paying attention to how buyers respond to it over time. And honestly, I think understanding that helps take some of the emotion out of the struggling listings. Because a listing that's not performing does not automatically mean that the product is bad or your niche is dead or Etsy hates your shop. Sometimes Etsy simply doesn't fully understand the listing yet. And sometimes buyers are not responding strongly enough for Etsy to confidently rank it higher. And both of those things can be improved. Now, if you're confident that you are showing up, then it's time to consider that the dead end might be happening in the next job stopping the scroll. And next week we're gonna get into that. And if you want someone to look at your listings and help you figure out exactly where your dead end is, I offer a three listing audit where I personally review your listings and give you a written breakdown plus a short video walkthrough covering all three S's of the framework. I'll tell you what's working, what isn't, and exactly what I would change. All for just $27. The link is in the show notes, or you can go to melissacarol.co forward slash audit. Thanks so much for joining me today. I will see you next time.