Keyword research can be daunting. How do you know when a popular keyword is good to use and when it’s oversaturated? That’s what we’ll be talking about in this post!
When it comes to your SEO strategy on Etsy — you really want to focus on the whole picture and not just ONE keyword. For instance, if you find a high quality keyword that has great engagement and search volume, but the competition is super high — do you use it? The answer is, “Yes!!”, but as a mixed strategy with your other keywords! Etsy gives you 13 tags or opportunities to add keywords to be found in search so don’t get super hyper focused on any individual keyword.
Remember the difference between long tail keywords and short tail keywords and their importance in SEO? Let me refresh your memory, long tail keywords have lower engagement and search volume, but a much higher conversion rate. Competition is usually lower for these words because they’re niche keywords and are very specific. Short tail keywords are the opposite. They have much higher search volumes and competition but don’t have great conversion rates.
Let’s look at a specific example:
Short tail keyword: Shelf
Long tail keyword: Industrial Floating Shelf
So, your short tail keyword, “shelf”, is going to have high search volume and is going to have a lot of competition – does that mean we’re not going to use it? No! We’re going to add niche keywords to it to make it a long tail keyword and capture different segments of the market based on what we know of our specific item and our customer base.
There are a lot of niche keywords we could use to add to our keyword, shelf, to make it a niche, longtail keyword. Typically, when you’re using niche, long tail keywords — the competition isn’t going to be too high that it doesn’t make it worth competing for. That being said, every market is different and you should always test your keywords.
Get a list of 3-5 high quality, long tail keywords and test them in your tags and use them in different orders in your title. Remember, order of importance matters in your titles but not your tags. You want your “Focus Keywords” and most important keywords at the very beginning of your title. This will help you figure out which keywords are going to work best for you and get your listings the most attention from your ideal customers!
Want to learn more about how you can be successful on Etsy? Download my free listing audit worksheet here!
