Brushing up tags - how to sell on Etsy?

If you are here on my MinkuLUL blog for the scarfs and painting on silk, this post might not be interesting.
There will be some 'Etsy seller' slang.
You have been warned.

Here's a cute pic I did some time ago to make it up for you ;)

If you already have a shop on Etsy...

... and if you feel as overwhelmed with Etsy constant changes as I am, you might think this is a good moment for brushing up your tags.
Oh, they do change. All the time. They changed the search engine.
And now it is...

... a tag - war! 

 oh yes, it is a battle against time (where to get some free time, huh?) amd a battle against all you already know about search engine on Etsy.

Do you know what they did?

No low-profile hearts or favs, please. 

That's what the Etsy people seems to be saying to us. No low-grade links. No heart-ing games, no "fav and run" games on Teams, just social media or google ad links.
I have seen it happened during last two months. Last year I would start promoting by putting my new listings to my favorite teams, to play some games with them... no more! I have stopped doing that.  
I do believe that low-grade clicks, hearts and favorites makes my listings perform worse in the search engine.

Let us see your tags!

But no one - word tag. They do prefer us to be more specific now, like using "silk scarf" instead of two separate tags "silk" and "scarf". I know this is not so new but I feel like lately only the two or more word tags are working.

Let us see your title!

No more crowded, long titles, it seems. I think that shorten ones work better. No repeating (this is specially hard). I had listings with titles like "silk scar with strawberry scarf with fruit red strawberry scarf' and so on... of course it had more sense than this ;) but you get my drift. Now just one 'silk scarf' for me in the title. JUST ONE!
And of course you have to put tags all around your description. But don't simply copy the title. Make it more real - time speech. Make it 'organic'

Finally, the listing itself.

I am trying to promote my Waterlily silk scarf. I have tinkered with the description, tags and renewed it.

Water Lilies silk scarf - on ETSY

I have read the seller guide about improving your SEO on Etsy seller handbook (HERE) - it is a great read, along with other articles.
I have checked my Waterlily silk scarf status on EtsyRank (HERE) - fantastic tool! You can (among other things) check the tag popularity, search for synonyms or compare it with other tags!
I, being not native English speaker, would not think that 'water lily' would be more common than 'waterlily'! huh!

ufff... finally, my work was done. Now off to social media, to promote... but that's a topic for another post.

Etsy search clumping issue - solved? What now?

Please note: this post probably will only be interesting for Etsy Sellers :)

In the begging of October a glitch on Etsy search appeared - the 'uber dominancy' or 'clumping' called in forums by sellers.

The 'uber dominancy' of search results by just a few shops made lots and lots of other sellers lacking of views, and in consequence, sells. I've seen it myself, using 'silk scarf' term for search. It was madness. Pages after pages of similar scarfs from one shop... for the customers? that was really bad. Imagine you want to buy but there seems to be only one type of scarfs available on Etsy from only one shop. I guess many potential buyers just gave up and moved to another on-line shops.

The issue of 'uber dominancy' was resolved in the end of October (at least on 10 first search pages for every search term) by using good old 'relevancy'. There is an engine that decides which item is relevant - accurate for the specific term that can be searched. 

People around Etsy Forums reports that now re-listed or recently listed items don't get theirs '5 minutes' in the searches. I confirmed it, only my oldest items, the ones with most 'hearts' and 'treasuries' get into first 10 pages of Etsy search.

So what can we, sellers, should do?

• There is no first page Treasury anymore, instead there is the Activity Feed. That means we need more hearts :) and treasuries, but with a place in the fist row (the first row is visible in the Activity Feed).
• We need links and backlinks (links to our items from blogs, pinterest, facebook and our internal links from our shop from one item to another)
• We need good SEO and good tags, as always.

But do we still need re-listing?

To get into the Activity Feed of our friends (ppl who favorited our shop or are following us) yes, But for now it seems re-listing won't get us into search result.

***

This info I gathered around Etsy Teams and Forum. I hope it will help! If you wish to discuss or have some other news for us, please feel free to contact me or to leave a comment!

To learn more:

• CLUMPING - Etsy Forum topic
• SEO & RELEVANCY -  great Etsy Team
• PROMOTING - Etsy Team for promoting your items