Etsy Listing Titles, Etsy’s new search settings, spelling & SEO

If you don’t subscribe to Etsy newsletters and are not aware, this week they changed the default setting for searches to finding ‘relevant products’ first. This means that items with your search terms will appear at the top, not necessarily in the order of most recently listed. I have also been trying to revise my listing titles and tags to optimize for searches. Yesterday, I was revising a set of pillows I have relisted numerous times. The pillows are fuschia in color. I changed the listing title and then did a search on “throw pillows fuschia”. To my surprise it didn’t find my pillows at all. After numerous tries at revising and searching on a few different terms, I discovered that my title had the spelling for fuschia as “fuchsia” because that is the correction that Microsoft word gave me & is the actual spelling of the color & flower (named after a man named Fuchs). On my search, I had spelled it the way I assumed it was spelled, which also seems to be the way the rest of the world prefers to spell it “fuschia”. After revising my listing for the pillows with the incorrect spelling, I finally found them on the search along with everyone else’s fushia pillows. I hope this helps them get more views now.

I guess the moral of the story is - it’s a good idea to find out alternate spellings on your titles. I wonder, if Etsy had a spell check in the search would everyone else’s pillows get lost.