Three Important Tips for Product Tagging on Etsy

Three Important Tips for Product Tagging on Etsy
By Ashley Pahl

website: http://AshleyPahl.com
blog: http://IndiePretty.com
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Product tags on your Etsy listings are one of the best ways to get visitors to your shop through search. To make sure that you are using your tags to their fullest potential, there are three main points worth checking.

Make tags relevant.

Themes, events, and popular color schemes fluctuate throughout the year. Periodically check your tags to make sure they are updated and relevant to what shoppers are looking for at a particular time of year. Tag “Independence Day” or “Fourth of July” for your red, white, and blue items in early summer, but you may want to remove these tags after the 4th and replace them with other relevant tags.

Certain color schemes, textures, and motifs are more popular during certain times of the year. Think: springtime is graduation time – make the most of gifts suitable for grads; summer is the time for weddings, so personalized gifts can be catered to couples and love; Fall is a great time to tag any item with acorns as “Autumn”, and so on. Etsy’s Merchandising Desk posts in The Storque are a great resource for relevant and seasonal tagging.

Check your tags for errors.

Tags are often changed for certain events such as sales and specials, so make sure to check your items and remove these tags after the sales have ended. Taking a glance at tags while re-listing an item is great chance to check for accuracy.

Also, check for tag mis-use. Sellers are never supposed to tag with possible uses for items. For example, don’t tag your beads with “necklace”, just because they can be used to make necklaces. Don’t tag a blank greeting card with “Birthday” just because it could be given to someone for their birthday. These sort of tactics seem to irritate buyers more, as they clutter up search results and make it more difficult for buyers to find what they need.

Finally, check for tag-stuffing. Multiple words can be used together in a tag if they are meant to be together, such as “robin’s egg blue”, but unrelated words should not be stuffed together in one tag, such as “Purse handbag clutch” or “light yellow banana”.

Find the most-used phrases.

Only 14 slots are available for tags, so make sure to use tags that are most likely to bring in shoppers. Shoppers search by product type, but also by color, texture, theme, style, motif, size, etc. What if you only have one tag left, and you’re stuck between “wall graphic” or “wall decal”; “peach” or “apricot”; “animal” or “fauna”? Google Adwords keywords search is a great tool for determining which words and phrases are most often searched for on Google. Free Keywords at Wordtracker.com is a similar tool. Either can help you find the most widely-used keywords relevant to your products.

More resources about tagging on Etsy:

Descriptive keywords

Increasing item views, with tags

The Art of Tagging – Etsy forum thread

Tagging guidelines

Etsy Merchandising, month-by-month