A few weeks ago I decided to revamp my Etsy shop. These days my creative time is focused on fine art so I made a few large changes: I removed all craft items from the shop, uploaded a new shop banner, and changed my shop name from Reclaimed To You to Jessica Burko. Shortly after I made these changes, Karen of City By The Sea Ceramics, and fellow member of BostonHandmade, told me about a free way to have Etsy shops evaluated: http://etsyshoptimizer.com. I ran to the URL as fast as my typing finger could take me and here’s what I found:
My report card was not stellar. The Shoptimizer recommended that I make changes to my Etsy shop to help my SEO. A moderate amount of changes to my product listings, and a few additions to my shop policies and the claim was that I'd see improvement in traffic and sales. I decided to try it out and you can too for your own Etsy shop by going to the Etsy Shoptimizer website: http://etsyshoptimizer.com. If you’re curious about what I did in my shop to make improvements, read on…
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| Boom, Boom. Encaustic collage by Jessica Burko |
The grade I got on my Etsy shop announcement was a: C. Shoptimizer said, “When Google displays your shop announcement in a search result, they will only display a maximum of 160 characters. If your announcement is less than 160 characters, this means the full announcement will be shown in a Google search result. If it's longer than 160 characters, you should either shorten it OR make sure that the important, keyword rich information is found in the first 160 characters… Your shop announcement is currently 372 characters.” I took the advice and changed my announcement from:
“Artwork, wearables, & paper goods created by Jessica Burko, made with found, recycled, and reclaimed materials. Reclaimed To You treasures what other people may toss away and turns it into something new. Proud Member of Etsy Team Boston Handmade http://www.bostonhandmade.org For a list of upcoming live shows visit: http://www.jessicaburko.com/FANews.html”
to:
“Original, one-of-a-kind encaustic collage and mixed-media artwork created from found, recycled, and reclaimed materials along with original photographs.”
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| Encaustic collages by Jessica Burko |
The next thing I learned from my shop evaluation was that my listings weren’t “fresh”. The Shoptimizer said, “Etsy's search results are based on relevance and freshness. The more you update your listings, the more likely they are to be shown higher in Etsy search results… It looks like more than 50% of your listings haven't been updated in over a month.” I took this advice and did things like changes item titles and the wording in item descriptions. This took some time because it turned out I needed to update most of my listings.
More difficult, was to add multiple images to my listings, another one of Shoptimizer’s big comments. I found this tricky because my items are 2D artwork - - how many different views can I have of them? After some contemplation I realized that I could add a few detail images to each listing and also show the pieces of art displayed at recent exhibitions. This also took a while because I had to look through all my photos from past exhibitions for certain works of art on display. The nice thing about doing this though was that I got to revisit past shows, and it wasn’t really that difficult because I photo-document all my exhibitions and keep them organized on my computer by show name and year (you should too).
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| Artwork by Jessica Burko on view |
The next low grade I received was a C in Attributes. Explained as, “Each listing can have attributes like recipients, occasions, and styles associated with it. These are all optional fields you can add when creating a listing and although not currently used in Etsy search results, Etsy says they may be using these attributes soon to help buyers find your items… We recommend you start with the listings that don't have any attributes and update them first with relevant styles, recipients, occasions, etc.” Ok Shoptimizer, I was working with the program so far but, “Etsy says they may be using these attributes soon…” I decided to skip this one for the moment.
The final aspects of my Etsy shop that needed changing were my posted Refunds & Exchange Policy and the freshness of my Policy Page. “Changing” might not be a strong enough word; I actually didn’t have these elements in my shop at all. Oops. Since I never wrote these policies I looked at a few other Etsy shops to see what they had in place. After gathering some ideas, I wrote my own. Poof! Shoptimizer took me from an F to an A! If only sophomore year biology was so easy. A nice feature of Shoptimizer is that you can refresh your grades as you work. It’s positive reinforcement that as you update, fix, add, and edit you can see your grades climb up and up. And yay! After some dedicated fix-it time my grades are now all As.
Has all this improvement actually shown positive results in my Etsy shop? It’s only been about a day since I made all the changes, but my stats for views and items favorited by other people have definitely gone up. I also plan to add some new work into my Etsy shop soon, so that should help move things along.
Have you tried the Etsy Shoptimizer? How is YOUR Etsy shop doing?
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