step 3: tweak (and keep tweaking!)

There is nothing more depressing to a shop owner as inexperienced as I am, than searching for your own items on the open marketplace that is Etsy. For example, if you type "baby quilt" into the Etsy search bar it fires back at you with 63,171 results. That is a ridiculously enormous number of pages that no-one in their right mind is going to sort through to find what they want. Are they? I would love to say that my quilts jump right out at you from page 2 or 3 but, sadly, they don't. In fact I have never persevered for long enough in sifting through pages to find out where they do in fact turn up. Like I said. Depressing.

So, what is to be done? Tweak, of course! Go into your listings' descriptions and "think like a buyer" as one article put it. Each listing has a number of tags that can be added to it (13 to be precise), to aid the search engine in picking it up. The first time I listed a quilt I used four of them. I couldn't think of a single other word that could possibly describe my creation. Nowadays, 13 seems pitifully few. The idea is that you think of every  permutation of 'baby quilt' and use it to tag your item, along with words that buyers might use if they were loking for your item in particular. That way, when a buyer types in 'camo crib quilt', mine should be nearer the front of the line than one that isn't tagged with those words. I have experimented with this and found the key words that other quiltmakers tend to use (bedding being one I hadn't thought of) and tweaked and tweaked and tweaked......

The title of your listing is another element that can be tweaked. This one is a little more tricky. This is the description that will appear to a regular search engine, and appears on your item's page in your shop. It needs to be to the point and attractive (to a search engine) without looking like a thesaurus exploded. For example, I might write:

                 Camo crib quilt Real Tree Blaze orange perfect for a nursery with a camo theme

which highlights what it is with a couple of my more obvious tags to make it searchable, but isn't just a long list as some tend to be.

Does any of this actually make a difference?  I don't know yet. I'm keeping a running total of the number of views each month. If they suddenly jump up into the millions I'll be sure to let you know what did it!