In my last post about critiquing each others Etsy shops I mentioned that I traded critiques with Susan from gentleadornments. When I first looked at her shop she had a very nice, and nicely short, shop announcement and shop title. However, I noticed that they didn't contain any of the keywords she really needed for her shop. Looking around at other CAST Team shops I've noticed the same thing.

When you are writing your shop title and shop announcement you should know that keywords in your shop title and first 150 characters of your shop announcement are how you get found on search engines. It's not something that is intuitive, unfortunately, so most of us don't realize this. When I Googled Susan's shop name, her facebook, blog and twitter came right up on top of the first page, but her Etsy shop was no where to be found--even when I added "etsy" to the search. She changed her shop title right away to contain a few keywords and before she could even change her shop announcement Google indexed her shop. I checked again and just that one tiny change brought her up to the top of  page three in the results (a few days later and it's on the first page where it ought to be). That's how important a good shop title and announcement are!



The same holds true for each and every item description and item title in your shop. Using descriptive keywords in the title and first 150 characters of the description will help people find your items from Search Engines. Your Etsy tags are mostly for Etsy searches. Your title and descriptions are for Search Engines. That's also something that is not intuitive. I've recently started to pay more attention to that in my shop (I had really good sales in May by the way and I'm only starting to change them).

by Sue of SueRunyonDesigns