Free SEO Guide – Improve SEO For Your Craft

Tess Richardson, handmade seller on Etsy.com, was interviewed by Walton.com about her experience using the website’s free SEO guide.

Tess’s Etsy shop started with selling rosaries.  “As a “cradle Catholic,” I’ve always been fascinated by rosaries. I enjoy pushing my designs beyond the traditional to create unique and very personal rosaries,” Tess shares in her Etsy shop profile.   Next, Tess added homespun yarn to her Etsy shop.

Recently, Tess said she found a great niche line of products to sell. The products are centered around “The Hunger Games”, a young-adult science fiction novel written by Suzanne Collins and published in 2008.

“I got a great idea for a charm bracelet based on the young adult trilogy,” Tess, from Wisconsin, said. “A friend turned me onto the books, which are really starting to gain traction and may be the next big thing, like Twilight, but there is almost no merchandising yet.”

Although she hopes to establish herself in the homespun yarn market, Tess has found the bracelets seemed like a way to bring in some early sales. “It was an untapped niche with an eager market,” she said.

To take her shop to the next level, Tess knew she had to look to search engine optimization (“SEO”). After months of procrastinating over SEO for her Etsy shop, she came across a posting in the Etys.com forums for a free SEO download.

“I thought I’d give it a look as it sounded like what I needed,” she said.

Tess downloaded the free guide (called “The Simple Guide To SEO”) and started getting busy. In a short time, Tess saw success with her efforts to utilize SEO tips and tricks to drive traffic to her Etsy shop.

“In the two days I’ve been searching out, and talking on, websites related to my Etsy products, my Google Analytics has shown a jump from 0 to 132 page views,” Tess told Walton.com in her interview.

Although Tess isn’t new to the world of communications and marketing, she found the SEO guide provided valuable insight.

“Until last year, I was a communications and marketing director for an employee benefits consultant,” Tess said. “I am not new to some of these concepts, but I had never tried them before and did not have a comprehensive understanding of them until I read the free download. Before that my knowledge consisted of bits and pieces: use really good keywords, inbound links, converse on other’s sites/blogs in a meaningful way. I never had time to put this knowledge to work at my previous job. I really needed someone to put it all together in terms I understood.”

Tess told Walton.com that one of the first things that jumped out at her was the suggestion to have a blog.

“Since I’d been hemming and hawing for months on whether I should start a blog, what would be the focus, what free blog site should I use, would it be a waste of time (and all the other second-guessing) that was like a bolt from above,” she said. “I set up my blog 2 days after reading the book.”

Tess also picked up another small, but valuable, tip from the guide. The guide suggested using bold and italic. “I had never read that elsewhere,” Tess said.

The guide included a number of features that Tess found helpful including:

• A glossary
• Light, readable style
• The pricetag – “I love that it’s free!” Tess said.

After reading the guide, Tess started to focus on her target market for her Etsy shop. Her target market is tween and teens who love the books her items are centered around.

“I thought about where I could find my target buyer and started Googling for fan sites,” she told Walton.com. “That got me a few hits, so I began visiting them to get a feel for the audience, what was discussed and how open I thought they might be to shameless self-promotion. Some sites I had to join, like Facebook Fan Pages and Fanpop.com.”

“I was afraid I would have to spend weeks becoming a familiar and accepted visitor to these sites, but teens and tweens are pretty open to anyone with something to offer that strikes a chord,” Tess explained. “I seriously just posted once to the sites I visited this week. Since I’m a fan of the books, I was able to “speak the lingo” about characters, and be authentic, not fake. And I tried to be humble, not pushy; just another fan who wanted to share this great tip about something others might like. And if I had to register to post, I chose a fan-specific username.”

Tess found SEO groundwork does not come easy. “It was time consuming,” Tess shared. “I spent an entire morning on it and maybe posted on 4-5 sites.”

Tess found the registration process for some of the fan sites to be one of the most time-consuming obstacles. “I’ve got enough usernames and passwords to keep track of!” she said.

However, Tess found that SEO efforts on fan sites paid off for her more than her Etsy shop posts.  “My Etsy product page doesn’t show up on Google, but my one post on Fanpop.com make it to second place on the first page overnight!” she said.

In the end, Tess admits that the entire process to utilize SEO practices for her Etsy shop was relatively easy.

“I believe in my product and think there are a lot of girls who would love it. Since I am a fan of the books, it was not hard “hanging out” on the fan sites,” she said.

Tess advises other Etsy sellers that some market niches will be much harder than others to see results quickly and without much effort.

“My homespun yarn is going to be an uphill climb because the market is so full of competitors,” she said. “But it’s something I’m passionate about, so it’s no sweat to read and comment on other people’s spinning and knitting sites. Really, the challenge of developing a unique product and finding that “blue ocean” is harder than the SEO stuff.”

In the end, Tess says her experience building good SEO for her Etsy shop made her look at future product endeavors with new eyes.

“I realize, for example, that I don’t really want to spend time chatting on Catholic sites and will probably drop rosaries from my Etsy shop,” she said in her interview with Walton.com. “On the other hand, I’m thinking of maximizing my time spent in finding and joining “The Hunger Games” fan sites by developing other products for fans. New products will give me more legitimate reasons to revisit and repost, so I’m not just the nag who keeps hawking her stuff over and over.”

Tess is already thinking of future projects to test out her SEO knowledge.

“Having tasted just a bite of success, I am in the progress of self-publishing my first novel–a historical fiction,” she said. “My head is already buzzing with ideas for getting out there and making online connections with history fans.”

Keep up with Tess and her new projects by following her on Twitter @HomespunLife and reading her blog.

Thanks to Tess for sharing her recent SEO interview with Walton.com with HandmadeMarketing.org!  Download the free SEO guide from Walton.com here.

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