Day Two

Yesterday after I published this blog, I went into Petunia Magpie's shop too look at the statistics and was shocked to see that a mere two hours after posting without really promoting anything there had been ten shop views and one person had added an item to their "favorites".

Today I want to make sure I talk a little about SEO tags and statistics.

First, a progress report.

The weather this morning has been rainy and cool enough for a sweater and warm fuzzy socks. I get my warm fuzzy socks from Mast General Store. Their buy three get one free promotion is always a fantastic bargain when you're in the market for a good pair of socks. The grey, gloomy day didn't slow me down. Once the dog was walked I got to work editing photographs and writing copy. Between 6:00 a.m. and 8:00 a.m. six items had been added to the shop. Only ten more items to upload and I can work on putting finishing touches on other projects. My "To Do" list has grown. Added to it are the creation of a shop Facebook page and Pinterest boards.

Search Engine Optimization. Surely you've heard this term over and over again with regard to how your item is ranked when a potential customer enters a search term in one of the many available search engines. There's all sorts of hoopla about it. People telling you "you must do this" and "you must do that" in order to have your product listed on the first page of found product links. There are so many people that know how to trick the search engines that the algorithm gets changed periodically.

Best business practice: Honesty. Don't load your product with trendy words simply to get results. Trends are always discovered and accounted for when re-programming an algorithm. Creating tags (keywords) should only be done once. Keep them simple.

Etsy allows only thirteen "tags" per item. But search engines look at page titles, product titles and text. The more you repeat the same phrase on each product page the better off you are. Your best bet: make your text relevant. Name your product appropriately. Repeat the name of the product in the body of the description. Use the name of the product as one of the tags.

For example, one of the products for sale in Petunia Magpie is a Daisy Clutch Purse. The name of the item (Item Title) is Daisy Clutch Purse. The Description contains the Item Title, "Evoke the magic of a meadow with this whimsical Daisy Clutch Purse. " One of the tags is Daisy Clutch Purse. Of the remaining links I chose several that are important to me as a shopper: cotton, made in usa, yellow and white [some people are looking for a specific color], gifts under 20 and the intended audience women and children.  Once I have joined a team or two I'll add team tags to the items. [More about Etsy Teams at a later date.]

Now for a brief word about statistics. The statistics provided by Etsy are pretty simplified. They give you page views and counts, but can't tell you the paths that your visitors have taken while viewing your shop. It's always helpful from a marketing perspective to see where your viewers are coming from, what they're looking at and how long they are on each page. If you want to understand why leave a comment and I'll get back to you with specific examples. I'll also talk about statistics in more detail in a future post (that to-do list just keeps growing and growing).

The good news is that there are a lot of free statistic applications out there. My preference is Google Analytics - free and easy to use.

It's lunchtime here so I'm signing off for the day to grab a bite to eat and publish some more items. Until tomorrow remember to try to find the sunny side of life. Click here to listen to the song.