Etsy's SEO Strategy

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I've had to buy a lot of gifts lately for the family who will be at my wedding and one of the best places I've found for personalized gifts that are high-quality come from Etsy. I just purchased a pair of Yeti cup holders for my brothers to ask them to be a part of our special day. When I typed in "personalized Yeti cup", the Etsy listing that I ended up purchasing came up first in Google. Etsy is clearly working on search engine optimization to make sure that their seller listings are well-optimized for consumers to find.

 

Company History

Etsy is one of the largest ecommerce marketplaces and focuses its products on handmade items, sold by individual sellers and craftspeople. The company was founded in 2005 and was created to be an online platform for craftsmen to sell their wares, outside of craft fairs and the like (Majewski, 2015). Today, the company has an estimated over 4 million sellers and 80 million buyers on the platform (Todorov, 2022). One of Etsy's unique differentiators is that the company is well-versed in understanding customer search behavior and SEO.

 

There are other competitors in the same space as Etsy, including Amazon, Alibaba and eBay, with Alibaba being one of the biggest eCommerce giants (Comparably, n.d.) Etsy carefully differentiates itself versus other competitors by offering seller advantages like on-page data and analytics for each seller, as well as information and resources to make Etsy sellers improve their own listing traffic. One way that they do this is through SEO optimization of listings.

 

SEO Analysis

Etsy provides resources for sellers to learn how to rank for SEO. This article from the Etsy Help Center talks sellers through how to improve listings by providing high-quality keywords, descriptions, long-tail keywords for titles and more. Etsy recognizes how providing more information around SEO can help to improve not only the seller’s results (and subsequent profits), but also improve Etsy’s overall search traffic. 

 

By using SEMRush, I was able to find that Etsy has around 120M organic search visitors in a month and holds an Authority Score of 83. They also are utilizing an intense backlinking strategy, with more than 250M backlinks shown using the Domain Overview feature on SEMRush. 

 

Etsy.com analysis on SEMRush

 

They have 14M visits from branded traffic, like etsy.com, etsy hats, etc., but more than 100M visits from non-branded traffic. This shows that Etsy is investing in ranking for non-branded keywords like “handmade hats” or “personalized lighters” that do not contain any Etsy-related terms. These non-branded terms are where competitors like Amazon and eBay would rank against each other for the same types of products. It appears that the majority, or about 82%, of Etsy’s total organic traffic comes from these non-branded keywords. 

 

Many of the tools that Etsy is using in the research I found was specifically around title and section page optimization, where Etsy suggests strong search keywords for listings. Even shop titles and tags can be optimized, according to the Etsy article that I had linked prior. This process helps buyers find the exact listings that they’re interested in, overall improving seller’s profits on their shops.

 

Website Analysis

I conducted a deep-dive of the Etsy.com site to see what website optimization the company is using to track web visits, on-site behavior and more. The tool BuiltWith.com provides the back-end information of any online URL and crawls a website code to find out what softwares are installed. When using BuiltWith.com for Etsy, I can see that the company has the following website optimization tools enabled:

  • Google Analytics

  • Fastly

  • Segment

  • Google Tag Manager

  • And several others!

 

It's clear that Etsy is paying attention to what consumers are doing on their website. One of the companies that I found that Etsy uses, called Fastly, is a web analytics platform that helps to offload security and provides image optimization, load balancing, and more. This could assist Etsy with technical SEO to improve overall website load times.

 

They’re also likely utilizing Google Analytics to determine traffic sources, conversions, page views and device usage. One way that Etsy could utilize Google Analytics would be to identify intelligence events. This article explains more in-depth how to set up Intelligence Events, but essentially, businesses like Etsy.com can set up notifications when Google sees expanded web analytics spikes. Once you get notified, you can perform a root-cause analysis to understand where the spikes came from. This tool would be exceptionally helpful for Etsy as they look to understand where traffic spikes come from and if other websites like TikTok, Snapchat, or news websites, are impacting overall website traffic.  

 

One of the other factors of web optimization that Etsy utilizes is around their mobile site. One seller mentioned in 2015 that more than 50% of their Etsy shop’s traffic was coming from a mobile device (Jurdi). Etsy then requested that sellers start to optimize their shops for mobile device usage, which in turn, helps improve Google search results. An area of improvement for Etsy would be to stop pushing users and buyers to the Etsy.com app. Mobile apps traditionally have not been included in SEO optimization, therefore some users could be missing critical results by only using the mobile application. Plus, it’s a better customer experience when a customer is searching on Google to go to the website version on your mobile phone versus having to jump to an application. On the other hand, Etsy’s primary goal could be repeat customers and it’s possible that customers are more likely to come back if they utilize the mobile application. 

 

In conclusion, on Etsy website optimization and SEO are required to have successful listings and increased sales. This assignment was exciting to research, as I didn’t understand how intelligent Etsy’s own SEO platform was and how they encourage sellers to improve listing criteria to rank on search. Luckily, as long as Etsy continues to educate its sellers, I don’t imagine that their organic search traffic and website analytics would decline, especially as the “creator economy” continues to grow more popular. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 References:

 

Majewski, T. (2015, November 5). A Brief History of Etsy. Built in NYC. Retrieved June 20, 2022, from https://www.builtinnyc.com/2015/11/04/brief-history-etsy

 

Todorov, G. (2022, April 13). How to promote your blog. Learn Digital Marketing. Retrieved June 20, 2022, from https://thrivemyway.com/etsy-stats/#:%7E:text=Etsy%20connects%204.36%20million%20active,active%20users%20to%2086.26%20million.


Comparably. (n.d.). Comparably: Etsy & Competitors. Comparably.Com. Retrieved June 20, 2022, from https://www.comparably.com/companies/etsy/competitors


Jurdi, S. (2015, March 10). Is Your Shop Optimized for Mobile? Etsy. Retrieved June 20, 2022, from https://www.etsy.com/seller-handbook/article/is-your-shop-optimized-for-mobile/22858082407

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