I make and sell wooden pens etc, so do lots of others as well. When I type in ‘wooden pens’ to search lots of pens appear but I will get to mine some 20 pages later!, above mean pages of listings which have no relationship to either ‘wooden’ or ‘pens’. slightly strange and I wonder why/ what I need to do to list closer to the ‘established’ sellers?
You need to look at your tags. One I checked you had a lot of gifts for … etc but nothing about handmade pen, wood pen, think about what people are searching for. If I was looking for a wood pen that is what I would search for. I just tried searching for one of my items and came up on the front page. Tags are vital but they have to be right.
Totally agree with Caroline here, your tags are one word tags like ‘gift,’ ‘unique’ ‘anniversary’ etc you can use phrases like ’ hand turned pen’ wooden pen’ ,turned wood, wooden ballpoint pen’ and ‘wooden anniversary present’ ,'5th anniversary present , ‘retirement present’ and the obvious single words like just ‘pen.’ Individually you can put things like cherry wood pen etc etc
You could also put more in your materials section where you just have wood , the nib and pen clip bit is metal, so you can put metal or brass or whatever the metal part is too.
I hope this helps.
Because the search isn’t working properly at the moment, if you put in ‘wooden pen’ you get results for wooden OR pen instead of ‘wooden pen’ which is why you have so many things. I searched for pen and found the first of your items on page 4 so hopefully once the search works better you will move up even higher.
Kirsty
Many, many thanks to you all, as a ‘new’ boy I’m learning all the time but your input has been invaluable. I’m spending more time on the site than working on the products !
I’m having the same problem. I don’t know if it’s because I’m pretty new to Folksy so I’m at the bottom of the search list or if I’m getting my tags wrong, but I’ve tried searching for some of my items using my tags and I’m finding them on the last pages with hundreds, if not thousands items (half of which have no relation to the search!) being listed way before mine. It’s very disheartening to know that no one is even going to get to see my items let alone have the chance to buy anything!
Any help or ideas would be much appreciated!
Check your tags, and compare them with tags from top listings
There has been an on going glitch with the folksy search whereby it is using OR logic in the results rather than AND logic (at one point I’m sure it was showing the AND logic results first and then the OR logic ones but they might have made further tweaks). As an example, if the search term is ‘personalised keyring’ it will return results with ‘personalised’ OR ‘keyring’ rather than ‘personalised’ AND ‘keyring’, the results are then shown in recency of listing/ relisting. Unfortunately this means that for frequently used words like ‘personalised’ or ‘keyring’ there are a lot of results (not all of which will seem immediately relevant) but for words like ‘daily’ and ‘affirmations’ there are much fewer - so the more niche your items/ search terms the better. It has nothing to do with being a new shop.
Not sure if that will help you move up the list but at least you now know what is happening.
(The current variant of the algorithm is an improvement over the previous whereby if there were no results for the search term it would revert to the final word of the search term eg if you searched ‘fordite bracelet’ and there were no results it would show you all the bracelets and none of the fordite items)
Thanks for your replies everyone, I’m probably just being a bit impatient! I’ll have another look through my tags though and see if I can make any changes
Could I suggest that you shouldn’t be pointing your potential customers away from your shop on your shop front page with your extra links for more designs to Facebook / Ig comment. Once they have found your shop here youneed them to stay not wander off to one of your other shops
@marklawlessdesigns As Sasha said, if you’re searching by multiple words, the results aren’t currently as good as they should be, as if you search “cocktail stirrer”, the search will bring up results that contain “cocktail” and results that contain “stirrer”. It doesn’t have to contain both words (although from what I’ve seen, often the first few results will contain both).
However, search results are based on relevancy rather than recency, so how recently you listed or relisted the item is a small part of its placing, with title, description and tags being an important factor.
Even with the current problems with multi-word searches, it should still be that the items near the top of the results are very relevant to at least one of the words in your search. So an item that mentions cocktail multiple times in the title, description and tags should show higher than an item that just has it once in the tags (but as we don’t know the exact algorithm used, there can still be times you’re not quite sure why one is showing higher than the other - for example from what I’ve noticed, I think an item with a one word description of “Cocktail” would be a higher match than an item with a lengthy description that also mentions “cocktail” once, because the important word you’re searching for is 100% of the description, rather than maybe 1%).
So right now, it’s easier to find what you’re looking for if you just search by single words (and then you can use the category filters to get more specific results).
It won’t be this way forever, it’s not intentionally this way and hopefully work on the new search should be starting soon to fix this.
For tag help, this blog post can help give ideas on the best sorts of tags to use: How to use tags on Folksy
I notice you’ve got some cut off tags, this will be because you’ve gone over the overall character limit on the tag section (255 characters). If all of your tags are 2-3 words, that con sometimes happen, so it’s good to have a couple of single word tags too. Also, I see on some items you’ve got the tag “fathers day gifts” or “gifts for dad”. As “fathers day gift” is one of the theme of the day tags for next week (Folksy - Sign in on Folksy), it might help to use that, and as “gift for dad” is a tag page on the Father’s Day page (Father's Day on Folksy where it says “more from our sellers”) I would also use that tag rather than “giftS for dad”. That will hopefully give your items a bit more chance of being seen.
If you’re just doing a general search then it doesn’t matter whether the tag is an exact match or not, but when the tag pages are being used (what you get when you click on a tag, used for theme of the day, the stand with Ukraine section and the occasional special event) then it has to be an exact match to be included.
That’s great, thank you so much for your help!