How to Get Started With Etsy SEO and Marmalead
Are you completely new to Etsy SEO and have absolutely no idea where to start? You wanna make sure you can get the absolute most out of Marmalead and set your listings up for success. Well, that's exactly what we're going to cover how to do in this episode of the Jam. What is up? Welcome to the Jam. I am Gordon from Marmalead. And I'm Richie from Marmalead. And what are we talking about today, Richie? So today, we're gonna talk about if you are new to SEO and you want to fire up your Etsy shops sales, so you wanna use Marmalead for that SEO, and we're gonna tell you where to start and walk you right through it.
Absolutely. So, the first thing you're gonna want to be able to do is find which listings you should be working on. Where do you even start? And there's a few places in Marmalead where you can really get a good sense of which things could you get the most bang for your buck for first, where is your time best spent when you are getting started with things. You can use Marmalead to see if any of your listings are missing tags.
You go to the screen where all of your grades are, and on the right hand side, there's a filter to be able to see if any of your listings are missing tags. That is an awesome place to start, because those are real easy, quick wins. Obviously, you wanna use all the tags on all of your listings because you're casting the widest net for shoppers. So, by identifying any listings that are missing tags, you can go in and fill those things up right away. Yes, and along those same lines, you're gonna wanna see which listings have zero title and tag match. We also call this focus keywords inside of Marmalead. So you're gonna wanna see in those listings if you have tags over here for these keywords, title over here using these keywords, but none of them actually line up.
Folks, keywords are gonna send a much stronger signal to Etsy search, letting them know that your listing is really about this right here. You can also sort by lowest grade and look at your listings that have the lowest grade inside of Marmalead. So, while grades don't tell you what listings are performing the best or performing the worst, they're really geared to tell you which listings you have set up in the best way according to how Etsy recommends to do SEO on their platform and how what we have seen on Etsy seems to work best for SEO.
You can really easily just find your lowest grade listings and start looking into those first and what you might be able to improve on those listings. So where else we recommend looking as well is Etsy stats. So in Etsy stats, you wanna see which perform… Listings are performing the worst, that's a great spot to start. When listing your best listings, sure, might there be a little bit more ceiling you can improve upon? Sure, but the lowest hanging fruit is probably gonna be your worst performing listings. Alright, so we have identified listings that we think would be awesome to work on. Maybe we found some that we're missing tags, and we've got a handful of tags that we can start filling up on our listings. What's the next step? Well, the next couple steps are going to be to build a massive list of keywords and then, figure out which of those keywords we want to apply to our listings. For generating that big list of keywords, there's also a few ways to do that inside of Marmalead, and a great place to start is the Storm tool.
Now, this will do a lot of the work for you. You can go into the Storm tool inside of Marmalead, put in a seed keyword, and it's going to start returning keywords that are syntactically similar to that keyword, that have been found to be useful by other sellers, and keywords that shoppers have also searched, who have searched for the keyword that you entered. And so this will build a giant list of keywords for you.
You can click through those, and every time you add one of those keywords to your bucket that you wanna keep inside of Storm, it will use that information to add even more keywords to your Storm list. So it's kind of this way of just brainstorming repeatedly and finding more and more keywords that are related to the ones that you're saying, "Yes, this could be a good keyword for my listings, this does a good job of describing things." Now, even if you find keywords that don't have really good scores inside of Marmalead, maybe that doesn't have great search and engagement and the competition is super high, I would say that's still okay.
As long as it's a relevant keyword, add it to your Storm, 'cause later on, we'll figure out how to look at whether a keyword is good or not. Right now, we just wanna collect a bunch that are very relevant to our listings, and by adding the most relevant ones to your bucket, Storm's gonna keep giving you even more relevant words associated to that one that you just added. Yeah. Keywords are a lot like panning for gold. You're gonna have to look through a lot of dirt, and when you find the gold, it's very well worth it. Another spot to find keywords for your list is in similar shopper searches, and you're gonna find those when you run a keyword search inside of Marmalead. You're gonna scroll down to similar shopper searches, and here you're gonna find keywords that shoppers that search for this are also searching for, things that are very similar.
So, take the ones that are relevant to your listing and throw that into your list as well. And on that same page of the keyword search inside of Marmalead, there is an area for long tail alternatives. If you search for a more generic keyword inside of Marmalead that is not a long tail keyword, we will look and see if there are any long tail alternatives to that keyword, which include that keyword, but are also more specific and still have pretty good traction in the Etsy marketplace. So, that's a great place to go when you're trying to brainstorm keywords, too. As you're doing this research and you're building out your Storms and you're looking at keyword pages, you can add these things to a keyword list, which is kind of a fantastic way of collecting these keywords when you're in this generate a big list of keyword phase. I wanna take a moment to thank you for tuning into the JAM by Marmalead. Marmalead helps guide you to keywords that real Etsy shoppers are using, so you can get more sales doing what you love.
Check out Marmalead in the link in the description or at M A R M A L E A D dot com. Another great source of keywords at the bottom of search is gonna be the word cloud, and the word cloud is gonna take all of the tags from listings that come back from the top 100 search results, and it's gonna make a nice word cloud. If you know what word clouds are, basically, the bigger the word, the more frequently that pops up, so you're gonna be seeing what other sellers are using on their listings for that given search and what's coming back. So again, throw those on your keyword list. Yeah, and so now you've considered all these sources and hopefully you've built up a massive list of keywords that are very relevant for your listing or listings that kind of all fit that same space.
Now, what we need to do is start to pair down that list and figure out which of those keywords are the best ones to try on our listings that are missing tags or don't have tag title match, or maybe you've found that listings have keywords that are not really performing that well on them. Well, now we have to filter through that list., So, a great place to start with this is if you've added your keywords to a keyword list inside of Marmalead. The stats on those keywords are always updating. Every single day when you come into your keyword list, those are updated, so it's not like a list that you've exported from a platform or printed off that it is immediately out of date. Those are always going to be up to date when you come back to look at those. So you can use the ranking of those keywords right inside of keyword lists and sort by engagement, and say, "I wanna pick the keywords that have the strongest engagement and see those things right at the top of my list.
I don't wanna mess with the things that don't have great search or great engagement at this point." And something else that you're gonna use is the keyword comparison, so that way you can compare four searches or four keywords at the same time side by side, and actually, I guess it could be more, 'cause you could search them, you can clear one if you don't like it, and then just kinda keep comparing. But four on the screen at a time, and you can compare searches, engagement and competition right there side by side, which is a really nice way to kinda, I'd say, middle of funnel, kinda start to weed out which ones are gonna work and not work when you start to drill down. Hopefully between those things, you can kinda get it down to maybe a handful of keywords that look like they could be potential fits for you. And maybe you have room for all of those. But it's also a good idea to take those keywords, those, kinda, the select few that you think might be a good match and run them through search just to verify some other things about those keywords.
You're gonna wanna look at seasonality on those keywords. If this is a keyword that you wanna put on your listing and leave it there long term, you're gonna wanna make sure that the seasonality supports that, that it looks like that keyword is gonna do well into the foreseeable future. You're gonna wanna check out the pricing break down to make sure that you're not throwing a keyword on there that's like way out of whack and it…
And people are not gonna be expecting your product's price point to be in line with the other things that are coming back for that keyword. You're gonna wanna check out what the shipping landscape looks like and make sure that you fit in with what other people are doing for shipping for that keyword, and it's always a good idea to spot check the images that come back in a keyword search, just to kinda do that little gut check and say, "Okay, does my listing fit in with these other ones? When a shopper comes and does a search for this keyword on Etsy, are they maybe expecting to see something else because look, all these images are something completely different than what I'm trying to list." And then with all that, a couple of key tips that we want you to take away from this as well, kinda tried and true. Don't change what's working. So, if you have a list and it's selling well, things are doing great, let's say you've set up your listing, you're like, "Hey, new to this SEO thing, but here you go, this is my listing and it's, say, a C grade wise." Alright, so it's selling, it's doing well.
Don't fuss. Don't fuss too much. Okay? Work on the other ones, work on listings that have low grades and aren't selling well. When something's working, and you don't really know why, that's fine. Let it go. Let it work. I have no idea what I'm doing, but I know I'm doing it really, really well. Yeah, and the other thing, you wanna make sure that you're not changing too many things at once.
It's kind of easy to get in here, and once you hit your stride, just wanna keep rolling and like, "Oh man, I've updated five listings already, this is actually kind of fun, let me keep chugging along here", and before you know it, you've redone most of the keywords throughout your entire shop. Well, you're probably gonna have a bad time if you're making sweeping changes to your listings. What you build up inside of Etsy, like keyword cred for some of the keywords that you have been found for, and so if you're changing too much at once, you're resetting your keyword cred from Etsy basically to ground zero, and then you have to build it up for those new keywords. Totally fine to do on a small scale and then a little bit here and there at a time, but if you're changing massive things all at once, you're probably gonna see a dip in your visits for a while before you start to build up credibility for the new keywords that you've just added, so that's something you wanna be aware of and careful not to change too much stuff at once.
So there you go, if you're brand new to Etsy SEO, this is a good flow to use inside of Marmalead to really get started and identify your listings that need work, start coming up with a massive list of keywords and how to pair down those keywords into the ones that are most likely to bring your shop success. We'll see you guys next time on the JAM..
