Etsy Shop Case Study

I found in a recent, 2-month-long case study that Etsy SEO is the BEST way to grow your shop. My name is Roggie Clark, I am an 8-year SEO veteran, Etsy SEO specialist, and a successful seller myself. With over 2000 sales and 200+ reviews, I know what it takes to build a shop. In this case study I show you how I helped a friend grow their Etsy SEO traffic almost overnight.

Here are some key highlights from my study:

  • Revenue: $664.95
  • Total Orders: 178 
  • Customer Reviews: 60
  • Conversion Rate: 12.4%
  • Shop Visits: 1,386

You might be wondering:

Will this work for me? Is this long-term? Is it easy to do?

In this case study, I hope to answer all your burning questions and then inspire you to try these methods out for yourself. SEO is not as complicated as you may think.

Okay here’s what I found:

Premise

My friend and Spiritual Life Coach: Renee’ Clark asked me to help her grow her Etsy shop.  At the time, she had zero customers, and was only getting a few views per month.

This is a screen-capture of her shop:

Etsy SEO Case Study - Bounce Rank

Having already grown a shop myself, I knew SEO was the best way for her to grow.

Before getting started, I worked with Renee’ to come up with some metrics to track to see if the SEO is working or not.

Here’s what we came up with:

Conversion Rate 

  •  How many customers completed checkout?

Order Total 

  • How many total listings sold?

Revenue

  • Total Amount of sales minus Etsy fees (listings, transactions, off-site ads)

Reviews 

  •  What did her customers think about her services?

Shop Visits/Traffic

  •  How many people visited the shop?

The reason why we chose these metrics was to be able to clearly see if the tactics were using are actually leading to more money.

Okay now for the strategies I used:

Methods Used

Keyword Research

Keyword research is defined as “identifying popular words and phrases people enter into search engines to find products and services” (MOZ).

In other words:

What specific words describe your products that people actually use.

I worked with Renee’ to identify a list of keywords that matched her unique services. I then used the search bar.

As you can see when I typed in her service more suggestions came up. I wrote down these suggestions as well as keywords from her competitors too.

 

Etsy Search bar - Bounce Rank

I then worked with Renee’ again to narrow down the list of keywords based on these criteria:

Search volume:

    • (How popular is the keyword?)

Total competition: 

      • (The number of sellers already selling the product, less than 1,000 sellers)

Relevancy/Search Intent:

    •  ( Did the keywords match the services she could effectively provide?)

This was the list we came up with:

Etsy SEO Case Study - Bounce Rank

I know what you may be thinking:

Why did you use this criterion?

I used this criterion as it was based on an SEO best practice of utilizing “holy-grail keywords”.

A term coined by Search Engine Journal writer: Daniel Lofaso.

These are keywords that have a high search volume and low competition.

Because of that, they are much easier and quicker to rank listings for. 

Okay let’s move on to my next method:

Front Loading Keywords in the Title:

Once we had these keywords I advised Renee’ on what listings to create. Once the listings were created I again utilized another SEO best practice of “Front-Loading” the keywords in the title. 

Here’s how Kendall Copywriting defines what Front Loading is:

“Front-loading means putting the important details, special information and keywords at the front of sentences, headings, paragraphs, links, buttons, list items and calls-to-action. (Kendall Copywriting)

Here is an example of the listing created and optimized:

Optimized Listing - Bounce Rank

As you can see in the screenshot, I front loaded the main keyword: “same day channeled message from spirit”

Okay now my last method:

Filling out all the tags.

Filling out tags

Etsy is a bit different from other search engines like Amazon and Google, in the sense that they still use “meta-tags” to help match buyers to products.

So in addition to putting the keywords in the title, we also put them in the tags, and description.

You can see in the screenshot that the keyword: “channeled message” was implemented there as well.

Etsy Tags -Bounce Rank

Again this is an SEO best practice, but rather so an Etsy best practice.

Here’s what Etsy’s help page says about tags:

“A tag is a word or short phrase that describes your item. Etsy matches tags with shoppers’ searches to find relevant results. To improve where your items are appearing on Etsy, be sure to use your tags when listing your items”(Etsy help)

Here’s some additional things we did:

Additional practices

  • Viewed competitors listings for more keyword examples
  • Viewed Instagram and Pinterest for more keyword ideas

Now let’s move on to my favorite part:

Results

Date: November 1st – December 22nd

Conversion Rate: 12.8%

We found on average 12 out of 100 visitors became buyers.

This is amazing as the average Etsy conversion rate is 1 – 3%.

Conversion Rate - Bounce Rank

 

Order Total: 178 Orders

We were finding that people were ordering more than once.

One customer had ordered 3 times in the span of a week.

Order Totals - Bounce Rank

 

Revenue: $664.95

Minus Etsy fees of ($120.97 )

We ended up with $543.98 profit.

Revenue - Bounce Rank

Store Visits: 1,386

We noticed a “snowball effect”.

As more people visited the shop, Etsy began recommending it more.

Traffic - Bounce Rank

Reviews: 60

This a sample of the reviews that were left:

Reviews - Bounce Rank

What we also found was that as we received more reviews,  everything else increased such as orders, visits, and favorites.

Now you may argue that these results were rather small. I did only run the study for 2 months, but let me now explain to you further why these results demonstrate that this can be replicated.

Here are some more of my conclusions:

Conclusions

It doesn’t take long to start working

What I found was SEO can honestly start taking effect in as little as a week. It does take Etsy some time to properly index your listings, but once you start getting a few visits you will see a snowball effect:

In November we saw roughly 84 visits, but by the first week of December we had 351 visits: A 400% increase in traffic.

By campaign end, we received 91% of our total traffic just from Etsy.

I believe that had the campaign continued to January, Renee would have seen a 500% increase in traffic.

The results are long-term

I think the most amazing thing about SEO is the results are long-term. What we found was that Etsy was recommending the listings to more and more buyers as time went on.

Essentially once I set up the SEO, there was nothing else I had to do.

For instance:

Even though Renee, unfortunately, shut down her shop in December for health reasons. The shop still receives 14 views a week even though it is closed.

A beginner can use these strategies

Another rebuttal for this data may be that these results may not work for what you are selling.

But I want to point out that these best practices are based on human psychology.

For instance: front loading

In a 1997 study: Norman Nielsan observed how a group of people read and interpreted web content:

Nielsen found that “79 percent of test users always scanned any new page that they came across; only 16 percent of users read word-by-word”.

So essentially as humans, we are more likely to skim content.

So by front-loading keywords it is easier for searchers to find your listings and visit them.

Wrap Up

So to conclude, we found that by first choosing relevant keywords with high traffic and low competition, front loading them and then accurately placing them in the listing tags.

We can achieve, in 1-2 months with Etsy SEO:

  • 12.8% conversion rate
  •  178 orders 
  • Over $500 dollars of clear profit 

If you are looking for more great content, visit our Etsy seller tips post. Also get a free Etsy shop critique.

Raj Clark is a 9 year SEO professional & career mentor. He is also the author of the books ABC's of SEO: Search Engine Optimization 101 and The Technical SEO Handbook He has worked with a wide range of clients in many industries including B2B, SaaS, Fintech, Home improvement, Medical, and E-Commerce. He started the company, Bounce Rank, as a way to help business owners grow their website traffic and to help people who want to get a job in the SEO career field.

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