Thirteen tags. Nine of them wasted.
Etsy gives every listing thirteen tag slots of up to twenty characters each. Most sellers fill them with words already in the title, which buys nothing, because the title was already matched.
The gap is almost never the writing.
Sellers who come looking for help with a quiet listing usually want the description made more appealing. It is very rarely the description. Etsy's own handbook says shoppers see only the first few words of a title in search results, and its keyword guidance treats a tag as a full search phrase — "gift for new mum" — rather than a label. So the two fields carrying most of the weight are the opening words of the title and thirteen phrases nobody thinks of as writing at all.
Spend all thirteen on synonyms of the title and you have covered one query thirteen times. Spend them on distinct phrases — recipient, occasion, style, material — and you are matchable against thirteen different searches, at no cost, using space Etsy has already given you.
The second thing that turns up constantly is not a ranking problem at all. Etsy's house rules require a production partner to be disclosed on a handmade listing, and require an item to be at least twenty years old before it can sit in the Vintage category — "vintage-style" is a different thing and has to be labelled as one. Sellers get both wrong innocently, and a rewrite that made the copy warmer while leaving either in place would have polished a policy breach.
A real listing, before and after.
From the Etsy rubric the job is briefed with. Just the tag field, because that is where the argument lives — a wooden sign listed as "Handmade Boho Wall Art Rustic Wood Sign Home Decor Gift Present Unique Wall Hanging Farmhouse".
wall art · wood sign · boho · decor · gift · home · rustic · wall · sign · art
family name sign · new home gift · rustic wall decor · personalised wood sign · housewarming gift · farmhouse wall art · wedding gift wood · engraved family sign · [ADD FACT: 5 more distinct long-tail tags — recipient/occasion/material combinations not yet covered]
Every word in the first row is already in the title. All ten of them. Three slots were left empty and the seven that were used bought nothing that the title had not already matched.
The second row shares no word order with the title at all. Housewarming, wedding, new home — occasions Etsy indexes as separate queries, sitting in the field built to hold them. And it stops at eight rather than padding to thirteen, because the last five have to come from the seller: a tag invented to fill a slot is the original mistake with better vocabulary.
The same pass rewrites the title and the description, and every fact it does not have — the dimensions, the wood, the personalisation character limit, the processing time — comes back as a gap rather than a guess. But the tags are where a quiet listing usually turns.
Three steps, and what the money buys.
- Paste the listing. Title, tags and description as they stand today — not a tidied-up version. A public link works too. The tags matter more than anything else you paste, so include all of them even if there are only four.
- One payment of £7. That is 7,000 points, and this job reserves a ceiling of 3,500 of them. It spends only what the finished report costs, and the difference goes back to your balance, so one payment usually covers two listings. Three revisions are included.
- You get a score and a rewrite. A score out of 100, the problems ranked worst first, a rewritten title, description and tag set, and a list of things to go and do away from the keyboard — measure it, photograph the flaw, confirm the postage.
If the job fails to generate, it spends nothing.
Who should and should not buy this.
Worth it if
- Your listing gets views and no sales, or no views at all.
- You have never filled all thirteen tag slots, or you filled them in a hurry two years ago.
- You sell something personalised and the listing does not say what can be personalised or how to ask.
- You list genuine vintage and are not certain your age wording is right.
- You use a production partner and have never worked out what has to be disclosed.
Skip it if
- Your problem is photography. Nothing written can fix a listing whose first image is dark or has no size reference, and the report will tell you that rather than working around it.
- You want your shop reviewed. This reads one listing at a time.
- You want it to promise Christmas delivery. It will not tie a delivery date to an occasion your own processing time cannot support.
- You are hoping it will write the missing facts for you. It will not state a material, a dimension or a care instruction you did not give it.
Check a listing.
Copy the title, the tags and the description into the box. It reads them as they are and tells you what is missing before it tells you what is clumsy.
One payment, no subscription. 7,000 points; this job's ceiling is 3,500 and it spends only what it uses. Three revisions included.