How To Use Stats To Increase Your Etsy SEO Efforts

Etsy stats are a wealth of information that you can use to improve your Etsy SEO keyword effectiveness! That said, unless you know what you are looking for, it can seem totally confusing and useless.

Today we are going to look at some of the stats available and how we can use them to pick new keywords or dominate old ones even more!

Vintage Versus Handmade Versus Supplies Versus Digital

Before we get started, let's just talk a wee bit about how the stats will change depending on what you are selling! Vintage sellers and some handmade sellers are doing OOAK (one of a kind) items. But that doesn't mean that you can't use stats. It just means that you have to be a little more creative in how you think about them. Instead of a straight, this keyword equals that sale, you might need to find some top level keywords that will make a big difference. For example, “metal box” is a keyword that I get clicks for. As a vintage seller I know to source for that kind of product.

As a digital, supply or handmade seller, your keyword research is a little easier. You have accumulated information that can show which EXACT keywords over time help drive sales. That said, don't get complacent, make sure you are check regularly (say once a quarter) as search terms go in and out of favor. For example, “crochet hats” have given way to “crochet bun hat”! Watching for those tweaks can make the difference between a great month and just an okay month!

Top Level Etsy Keyword Research

(Stats > Top Keywords)

So this is probably the keyword search that we are most used to seeing! It sits on the front of the stats section and is super easy to scope out. Generally I pull one week of stats when I doing research as a longer timeframe could give me wonky results. Think of doing a month long review on January 5th, you would be getting all kinds of Christmas terms that would not translate into info that would be good for another year (more about this later).

This is actually good information to know what your top keywords are, but is a bit of a self fulfilling prophesy. Of course you rank well for some of these terms as they are probably ones that you are comfortable with and have sold a bunch of. Make sure you take the time to drill down a little and see some of the further back words to check things you might have missed!

 

Drill Down – Metal Box

(Stats > Top Keywords > Click Keyword)

So if you click one of those search terms, you will start to see which of your listings are showing up for that term. So a little bit about the drilldown from my store.

1. The box at the top sold last night so I have lost one of my metal box listings. That means I need to get my butt out there and source some more as it is a top keyword for me!
2. I have a really cute red tackle box that would fit into this search perfectly. I am not sure why it is not showing up, but I am headed over to my store to make sure I include “metal box” in it's title and tags. (I changed out “red storage case” for “red metal box” as storage case does not rank high for keywords people are using in my store!)
3. I have at least one red metal box in a cupboard that I am not using much which I can list sooner than perhaps some other things I have to list. Prioritizing items that are good sellers is one of the ways that you make more revenue faster!

Etsy SEO Keywords For Standard Products

(Stats > Top Keywords)

If you are selling digital, supplies or handmade items that you sell in multiples, you will have much more longevity to your keywords. These are the keywords that bring the most clicks to my store.

Now, it can get really depressing when you see that you only get 9 clicks to a keyword, but remember that you have 10 PAGES of keywords which add up to lots of clicks.

Dominating keywords that match your products is important when you have long lasting, multiple products, but so is varying your keywords. Just because “real estate” is a good keyword for me, doesn't mean that I should make every one of my products for real estate agents match that term. Don't forget, you only get one listing per page so getting super focused with your keywords can sometimes bite you in the butt.

An interesting sidenote… 15-20% of searches each day in Google have never been done before! That means that people are unpredictable and as Etsy sellers we probably want to do a nice mix of “safe and steady” keywords mixed with some different terms that are more conceptual rather than factual. For example, I have a pair of weird statue things made of brass… I have “weird” and “unique” in the title, hoping to catch someone looking for something a bit different and outside the norm.

Promoted Listings – Clicked Versus Sold

(Promote > Advertising Dashboard > Sales From Ads)

I know that not everyone is doing promoted listings, but it is worth it to do them for a little bit so you can get some data about your store's keywords. Seeing the clicked-vs- purchased is one of my favorite parts!

See that top one? They clicked on one product and wound up buying two! That gives me a clue that I could “bundle” my SEO products and maybe generate more sales that way. Thinking about WHAT the data implies is as important as just looking at the data!

Using Your Own Stats To See Keywords

I often find that I can get clues about good keywords from the stats on my own sold Etsy listings!

Etsy Promoted Listings Keyword Research

(Promote > Advertising Dashboard > Manage > Click Search Terms)

In the promoted listings, right underneath the word you can see all kind of keywords that are associated with the search product. For this one I clicked the keywords under my red tackle box and found that “vintage tool box” had a high number of impressions (which implies that many people are searching for this item). BUT Etsy added that it has a high click rate too… whoo whoo,

Not only are they seeing my tool box, but they are interested enough in it to click through. With that in mind I thought that maybe I had done a great job of styling the picture or that it must be super cool, but not so much.

My red tool box is the one on the top right. It is a weird angle and not a great background, but it is doing the job for sure since people that see it are clicking through.

The nice thing about this though is that I got a whole bunch of other keywords for this type of item including “vintage tool box”, “tackle box”, “tool box”, “vintage metal box”, “metal tool box”, etc. Since I sell a lot of this kind of thing, I used a keyword brainstorming worksheet to write all of these down to use the next time I list a box like this!

Hot tip… make sure to write down your keywords or put them in Evernote or SOMETHING to save them! You don't want to have to keep researching the same products over and over again. Say you sell a cute silver jewelry charm, do some promotions, find out your keywords and then stick to those when doing further listings. No need to keep reinventing the wheel or paying for promoted listings if they are not cost effective for you!

Interesting Bits – Google Shopping

(Stats > Traffic Sources > Google Shopping)

Okay, one last thing before we go and this is just a little outside Etsy SEO land. I like to check and see what is going on with Google shopping. This data is coming from outside the “normal” Etsy search and gives a feeling for people in the “real world” are searching for.

We get so tied up in our Etsy SEO that we forget that millions of other people are looking for what we are selling. In the past, you needed to do your work to show up in Etsy search since Google tends to rank whole category pages rather than individual Etsy items. BUT the tides are turning a little bit!  For long tailed items like “vintage metal frogs”, Google is showing individual items in the shopping tab of search.

This is a big change from just a few months ago and is a very interesting development!

How To Use Stats To Increase Your Etsy SEO Efforts Wrapup

Okay, if you made it all the way down here you are probably a bit nerdy/geeky like I am! Hopefully looking at this a little bit has gotten your wheels turning and you can now take a look at your stats and see what else you can figure out from all the fun data you get!