A little while back someone posted this in my Facebook group:
"To invest in my shop, I signed up for Marmalead, I have watched the tutorials, I have spent
6 hours trying to get two C+ ratings to at least B. No luck. I consider myself a relatively
smart woman, however, I am just not understanding. Deb, do you have any video?"
First let me tell you - the seller who initially asked this question - IS a smart woman, just
like yourself - so if your eRank or Marmalead grades are making you feel a little dumb - I
hope this video will make you feel better, because it’s not you, it’s them!
Now at the time she asked this question, I didn’t have a video about this but now,
I do. And this IS this video. Let’s dive in.
Hi, I am Deb, founder of Tizzit.co, a membership community for makers and handmade shop owners
and it’s time we talk about the grades you get in Marmalead and Erank when trying to
improve your Etsy SEO.
Look - quite simply, you must not obsess over those grades.
This isn’t to say they are not useful tools…. But trying to get a listing from a C to an
A without understanding what goes INTO the grading system of those 2 platforms is not
what I’d call a super smart move and here are 3 reasons why:
REASON #1: They can not give you “strategic” advice.
Marmalead and eRank are both great tools to help you brainstorm, research keywords and
get data from Etsy - but they can NOT make the strategic decisions for you. They are
just tools that should help guide your decision, but you can not base your strategy solely
on them. Both Marmalead and eRank have detailed articles (that I'll link below)
explaining what goes into their ranking system...and essentially those A, B, C letter-based grades
only represent how closely they think you adhere to Etsy’s best practices.
So what does that mean? Well, for example, they know if you've used
all your "13 tags" and so they would see this as a green light and the sign of a healthy
“optimised” listing, and put your grade up because of it, but they don’t know if
those 13 tags are good or bad tags. They don’t even know how relevant they are
and how accurately they describe your product. You could sell a pair of socks, for example,
and have all your 13 tags be about jewelry and they would still think you’re doing
great simply because your 13 tags slots are being used. Deciding if a keyword is “good”
- as in likely to bring the right kind of traffic to your shop and to lead to sales
- that's your call 🙂 Similarly, your ratio of longtail VS broader
keywords might differ based on your niche and based on your products and you could have
a great combination of keywords in your title and tags that's a C grade but that’s still
bringing in tons of traffic and sale, in which case, do not touch that listing!
(more on that in a second).
Reason number 2 for not relying too heavily on those grades is that there is so much more
going into the search algorithm on Etsy than what’s used in the calculation of those
grades. If you need a refresher on how the Search
algorithm works and exactly what Etsy takes into account to decide how to “rank” search
results, I have a video and a free PDF guide where I break down how the algorithm works
and I’ll link to it below if you’d like to watch it but for now all you need to know
is that Etsy doesn’t JUST look at your keywords, they also take into consideration things like
* Your Listing quality score; * Your Customer and market experience score;
* Your Shipping price; * Shoppers habits.
* And more. So a listing could be performing really well
because of any of those other factors and these are NOT reflected in the SEO grades
Marmalead and eRank are giving you. Based on all of this, 2 things could be happening:
* You could have a listing with a GREAT grade which is not selling.
Why? The main reason is what we mentioned just before: you could be using all your tags
and respect Etsy’s SEO best practices but if your keywords are not relevant or not bringing
the right kind of shoppers to your store - you won’t get sales.
* On the other hand, you could have a listing with a BAD grade that’s selling really well
Which is the perfect segue to reason #3 you should not take those grades too seriously.
REASON #3: Fixing what’s not broken to get a better grade will KILL your views and traffic.
It’s entirely possible to have a listing with a D grade that’s actually doing ok
and bringing views and/or sales to your store, in which case - you must leave this listing
alone. I know it’s so tempting, specially if you’re
a perfectionist to want to get that D to a A+ but you must resist this urge.
There’s no need to fix what’s working, if you go changing up all your titles and
tags just to try and get your grade up, you risk seeing your views drop VERY seriously
which is the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve … but also sadly a mistake I
see too many sellers make.
I actually have a video about this exact issue that you can watch by clicking right here.
I hope this was helpful, please remember to use those grades as guides but not as a decision-making
tool - thanks for watching and AUREVOIR.