A sweet secret to SEO and Etsy happiness

OK, so the person who just claimed she’ll never mass-produce popular new products for her Etsy store has a confession to make.

I’m still going to try to find a sweet spot between my love of vintage, my complete inability to sew the same things over and over, and actually making stuff that people will buy. I’m not doing this entirely for my health! There is a certain satisfaction in knowing someone likes what you did, after all. And the money ain’t bad, either.

Luckily for me, I think I know how to do it.  As it happens, I’ve spent the last two years working for a guy who’s a genius in pretty much everything he does, and I’ve learned his secret to wildly successful search engine optimization. It works spectacularly well for the company’s clients, so I’m going to apply it to my Etsy shop. Bonus: It’s also helping me figure out what people really want to buy, and which of those things they want to buy that aren’t being oversupplied.

And once I settle on a few of those products, I’m going to inject my own vintage vision into them!

Here’s an example, starting with my research process. First, a disclaimer: No company secrets are revealed in this post. This information is readily available on our website. We make money doing this in mass quantities — Excel spreadsheets that would make your head spin — for clients who don’t want to do it themselves. And yes, I do it for paying customers myself — if you want to become one, contact me!

So: Everyone on Etsy who tries to optimize their listings for Google uses the Google Keyword Planner. That tool tells you how many people are searching for certain keywords, and also suggests related keywords. Google wants to sell you pay-per-click ads, but the tool is free anyway as long as you have a Google account.

The only problem with doing that is you end up competing for keyword attention with millions of other websites. Because most of the time, the products associated with those keywords are so popular, everyone and his brother are selling them. You wind up on page 49 of Google search results, while the top spots go to Amazon, Nordstrom’s or Pier 1.

A better plan is to find keywords and products that are in demand but aren’t being supplied enough to meet that demand. How do you know what those keywords and products are? It’s incredibly simple, yet so few people grasp it.

Google one of your keywords right now. Put quotes around it so you only get results that use the specific keyword phrase, not the trillions of others that use the various words in your phrase scattered around the page. Those results are irrelevant to your research.

See that results number at the top left of the page? That’s who you’re competing against for that specific keyword.

Now we’re going to not only compare supply and demand, we’re going to quantify it in a simple number. Next, take the annual number of searches that you get from the Keyword Planner for that keyword (the number the tool gives you is monthly) and divide it by the number of results Google just gave you.

The resulting number is your Keyword Competitive Index. If it’s over 1, that means demand is greater than supply, and you’ve just struck gold. If it’s under 1, supply is greater than demand. Usually our company focuses on numbers higher than 0.5 for our clients, though some markets are so saturated you have to make do with what you can.

Here’s what it looks like in Excel. The first column is monthly searches from the Keyword Planner, the second column is the the number of existing pages, the third column is the number of annual searches, and the last column is the Keyword Competitive Index number.

You can see that “seventies fashion” is a pretty darn good keyword. “Vintage fashion?” Not so much. And markets on Etsy such as jewelry and handbags, like I’m in, are lucky to exist on keywords over 0.3.

So now that I’ve researched all of the products I sell, my next step is to blend popular products with my own, um, peculiarities. While researching throw pillows, I discovered that “chenille pillows” has a KCI of 0.17, and “chenille throw pillows” has a KCI of  0.13. Not so hot, but I also checked out those phrases on Etsy itself, and discovered that on Etsy, only  3,329 products right now are using “chenille pillows,” and another 1,114 are using “chenille throw pillows.”

Compared to the six-figure results you get on Etsy for other kinds of pillows, that competition is practically non-existent. Combined with my careful research for related keyword phrases, I should be able to get fairly close to page 1 of Etsy search results for chenille pillows.

Bonus: I have a gorgeous vintage chenille bedspread that has a few holes in it, making it unusable as a bedspread, but a veritable bonanza for pillow making!

Guess what I’m doing today?

This is a long post, but if you’ve gotten this far, you already know how to improve your Google and Etsy visibility. If you want a free analysis of your keywords for one of your Etsy listings, I offer them here:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/198312846/how-to-sell-on-etsy-the-best-etsy?ref=shop_home_active_1

And I welcome questions and comments, of course! Next time I’ll go back to ranting about vintage stuff, and hopefully have some photos of chenille pillows. And turquoise purses. Remember turquoise purses?