Etsy SEO in 2019 what is SEO hey I'm Pam Duthis and today marks the start of a
series of videos deep-diving SEO on etsy to really help you boost
your sales so if that's something you're interested in you're gonna want to
subscribe and come back often for more videos so what is SEO it stands for
search engine optimization now your search engine is what people type into
the search bar on etsy they type in their query they type in what they're
looking for and the search engine goes and finds the listings to show them so
Etsy has to go and find all of the listings that it thinks might even
slightly be relevant to what the customer is searching for and then show
them to the customer and the order it ranks these in it depends on so many
factors and SEO search engine optimization is just simply us trying to
tell Etsy what we think our item is so it gets an idea of where to place us
when people are searching so they best know where and who to show our items to
and there's commonly talked about two different types of search engine
optimization there's white hat and there's black hatwhite hat search
engine optimization simply means following the best practices which we're
lucky because Etsy actually lays them out for us if you look at it see
articles such as the ultimate guide to SEO or your search questions answered
people from the Etsy search engine team give us an idea of the things that
they're looking for so following these best practices to try and tell Etsy
exactly what it is that we have so that they can understand so much better is
the best practice in the long term and black hat SEO is you trying to game the
system it's trained to figure out loopholes
that'll work in your favor and I know I did this myself many many years ago when
I was trained to rank a website on Google Google search engine optimization
is super difficult but way back then I learnt a little bit and then I thought
is the most genius person in the world so I learnt that tags your metadata
these words that you're telling in that case Google are super important so I
figured out on my website if I put in the background if I put a layer of all
these keywords that I wanted to rank for hundreds and hundreds of keywords and
repeated them all the things but did it in the exact same color as the
background there would be there for the search engine to read but not for the
person and what happened there was I was lucky that Google didn't catch on to me
when Google find loopholes that people are exploiting they can penalize your
website but what they also do obviously is change the algorithm they they're
trained to keep one step ahead of us to prevent us being able to game the system
because quite simply I could have made my website rank really highly but when
customers search for it when people looking for my website searched for it
it wouldn't be what they were looking for so they wouldn't enjoy their
experience and searched on Google and the same is the same with Etsy search
engine optimization way back pre 2010 recency used to be the most important
thing whatever you put in your tags and your title the newest item that was
created the newest item that was listed would show up first in the search so
people learnt very simply to keep relisting their item that would keep you
at the front to search it also used to cost a lot of money to keep doing that
and Etsy realized that didn't give the best experience for a shop post they
were only seeing the listings that people have detained to sit and renew
and renew and renew so they changed the search algorithm to prevent this and
what they wanted to look into is things like how often people viewed and hearted
an item and the black hat SEO people tried to stay ahead of the system there
as well and what popped up was games games and teams where people would join
in and every day would promote one of their listings and then go and view
everybody else in the team games thing so you could join in the game and
your listing would get hundreds of views or hundreds of lakes and for a while
again this worked in boosting items up the search for certain search terms
however again Etsy realized that the item that the person has got the most
conned the most people from their teams come in having a look at isn't
necessarily the item that a person is searching for wants to purchase so they
again had to tweak to stay ahead of the competition to stay ahead of the black
Hatter's and what happened in this case was they put much less weight on
searches on views coming from people within teams so harps and views from
your teams are less important because they're not buyers they're gamers so
that's the reason why black hat SEO is just not such a good idea because the
platform's always trying to keep one step ahead of you
so it'll always be shutting down these games that you're trying to do these
cons that you're trying to trick the search engine into ranking you better
for now the best-case scenario when this happens is that your shops gonna die
your items aren't going to be seen anymore when the practices that you were
using to try and rank your items when they stopped working then your shops
just gonna die the worst case is they might realize that you've been gaming
the system and penalize you for it you could get a shop or a website closed
down because you're cheating basically so what you want to be thinking of doing
is you're in your search engine optimization you just simply want to be
finding the way to tell the search engine this is what my item is and you
want to be trained to make your item the best item there that customers are going
to want so you just try and make your stuff more appealing in decent manner
and the more people organically find your items they find it through search
they find it because friends have shared it they find it organically and interact
with it organically the better you'll do so search engine optimization is not
anymore trained to trick the system it should just be about trying to tell the
system what Euratom is and the best items will do well so I hope that helps
our next video in this series is going to be why the search engine why Etsy
search is not for you so don't forget hit subscribe and come back for the next
video thank you so much