Day 19. Use Keywords Wisely.

OK, I think I got it. Search engines help us find information online, which means they help my customers to find my shop. So I’d better help them to help me :-) The best way to do it is to use proper keywords, because keywords are used to communicate with search engines like Google. It immediately raises two problems I have to solve: what keywords to use and how to use them.

Let’s start with the list of keywords.

Of course, there are many places where you can find tools to keywords analysis. One of the easy to use, and understand and also free is Google Keyword Tool: https://adwords.google.com. It has all bunch of different reports and even suggests its own “keywords ideas”. It is cool and really interesting.

I noticed that more popular keywords are specific. For example, instead of using “bracelet”, keyword “ men's bracelet” produces better results; “pearl necklace” seems to work better than a generic keyword “necklace”.

But how to identify exact wording which will be used? How someone is going to search for a new jewelry piece? I have not cracked that one yet. I think I will keep experimenting and keep an eye on the google’s tools. One thing I know for sure, no matter how much I want to see my listing on a first page of the google search results, I want to keep all my listing titles relatively short, meaningful and may be even funny; I do not want to include all my 20 keywords in the title only to help boost the search results.

By the way, even unusual titles may work just fine – I was really surprised to see links to my necklace “Tiger” on the first page of Google! Well, I guess, nobody will ever search by the whole title, which is “Long Multistrand Beads Crochet Necklace “Tiger”, but it is there:

How to use keywords.

After all the research I've done, the answer is really nice and simple – Etsy does the entire job for me! Here is why.

Search engines are picky, they have their own rules I have to follow (this is what SEO stands for – Search Engine Optimization). They “weigh” all words on each page and decide what is relevant and what is not. Interestingly enough, they think that most important words are those that presented in the URL (the link itself), in the page title and in special tags like H1. So, Etsy is placing my listing title into all those places!

It means, that my listing title is the most important search engine optimization (phew!) tool I have!

Of course, there is a bit more to that. If I just use all bunch of “relevant words” or keywords in my listing title, it probably will not do much good, because Google wants to see the same words at least few more times in the text on the same page. Therefore, it seems that having listings with several sentences using the same keywords is a good idea. Frankly, I think everything we were talking about in the “Day 12. Complete Copywriting for Your Listings” is still valid and should help to boost search results.

Speaking of Etsy, it has “tags”, which is equivalent of keywords. Every listing may have 13 (such a nice number!) tags associated with it. Usually, I include there keywords from a title, color (quite frequent in search requests on Etsy, especially for treasury), teams I’m involved in and such. Some authors suggest including my name in tags as well, because people may forget the name of my shop. Well, after I renamed it, I think it will be easier to remember “So Me! Jewelry Shop” than my name :-) But I’ll give it a try too.

If you’re just joining me, you can click here to catch up from: Beginning,  Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8, Day 9, Day 10, Day 11, Day 12, Day 13, Day 14, Day 15, Day 16, Day 17, Day 18