Google pick me please!

When you start out in the world of selling your beautiful handmade goods it can seem like a really big learning curve and a massive struggle to get everything just right. Add to that the huge amount of ways you can now sell and sometimes you can feel like you are drowning in information. My advice is, take each bit of advice you are given, learn from it and evolve how you sell as you go along. Don't think you have to fully act on everything all at once. Concentrate on one aspect of selling at a time. Perfect that and then move on to the next thing.

This week I have been concentrating on getting my goods seen more often and in a higher spot on search engines like Google. I knew that where you come in the ranking on Google within any one search is made up a complicated algorithm, but I wasn't all that sure what things, other than back links, that affected it. I knew titles and descriptions played some part but I wasn't sure just how much. My search for information happened to coincide with a bit of advice given by Tony Ford over on Artfire. Tony linked a fellow seller on Artfire to something called Google AdWords: Keyword Tool. This is a tool designed for people using AdWords advertising to increase the effectiveness of their ads, but we can use it to find out what words people have used in their searches and change our listings titles and descriptions so they get pulled up more often in searches.

So in the top box you type in words that you have used to describe your goods , fill out the "I am human" box and the press "Get Keyword ideas". You should end up with a page full of words, numbers and little teal coloured boxes like this:-

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I typed in 'baby hat' and these are the Keywords related to term(s) entered. So what does it all mean? The words on the left are words used in searches by the general public. The teal coloured boxes indicate the number of people already using those keywords for their adverts. The next 2 columns of numbers refer to the number of searches done using those keywords. The first is those that have been done in the month of February and the second is the average number of times a month those words were used in the past 12 months. The second column is what we are interested in.

So there are no great surprises in the results for this. Lots of people searched for baby hat, but what you can see from the figures is that people also searched for specific styles of baby hat and you can see the more popular terms used to describe certain types of hats.

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I make baby hats with what I would call a bobble on the top that also have ear flaps. Now I would normally have titled this as a 'Babies bobble hat', but as you can see in the results more people refer to what I call a bobble hat as a pom pom hat, also there were more searches for hats that have earflaps than either bobbles or pom poms. From now on I will be retitling my hats of this style as 'Baby earflap hat with pom pom' and then in the first 2 lines of the description I will use the words earflap, pom pom and bobble to increase my chances of being pulled up in a search.

Under the 'Keywords related to terms entered' box you will find another box titled 'Additional keywords to be considered'. Take a look through these also. They might help you to find words that are relevant to the goods you are listing and had never thought of using.

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As you can see by the words that came up as suggestions in my search 'knitting' is one that is searched a lot, so I will also be adding sentences like, "I enjoyed knitting this hat so much..." to the start of my descriptions. It may not make a huge difference, but every little helps.

So do you now see just how important it is to get good titles with words in them that people actually search for? This tool is really useful in helping you to decide what words to use that are relevant to your goods.

Thank you Tony for tipping me off to this tool!

Written by Lynne of the PiratePixieCrew and Hyperloop Hoops