I’ve been trying to play about with my listing titles, to make my items come higher up in the searches a buyer might make, however I’m really struggling with it. It doesn’t seem to make any difference what order I put the words in, my items are still nowhere near the first page, with other seemingly less relevant items coming up above mine.
Is anybody able to offer any advice on this please? For example if I had a bangle and I put the word ‘bangle’ first with the rest of the title after that, why do other bangles come up higher when the word bangle is hidden at the end of the title? (hope that makes sense!)
Also, if I edit a title and then want to do a test search, should I wait a while - ie does it take a little bit of time for the edited item to come up in a search?
I’ve been wondering this myself, been trying to be as descriptive as possible with titles but I think a big problem that we have has jewellery makers is that there are A LOT of us out there all fighting to be seen. I think we need to rely on our promotion to bring people to our stores rather than searches
Oh I completely agree with you Louise, it’s just frustrating! I have a pair of earrings that I just called ‘silver hoop earrings’ and when you do a search for ‘silver hoop earrings’ mine do appear on the first page, but only after an awful lot of earrings which aren’t silver hoops! (although there are some proper silver hoops right at the top, and I’m not complaining about that)
I just don’t get it, if my wording is exactly the same as the search I put in how come my listing isn’t nearer the top?
I always feel I’m missing some magical format to my titles. I’ve tried putting earrings or necklace etc at the beginning of the title using the best descriptive words I can think of for the item but even then I can never get close to the first few important pages.
I did manage the first page with a couple of Halloween items when I searched Halloween, but now its getting closer and more popular I’ve probably slipped right off the radar again.
I do think as jewellery makers it makes it much harder to stand out than perhaps making walking sticks or straw dollies :0)
It’s difficult isn’t it @karenscraftybitz? I’m starting to go through all of my listings and changing the titles to be more descriptive, but it would be nice to know if I was wasting my time before I spend ages on it!
I think there must be some secret magical formula to it! But yes totally agree that with jewellery there’s so much out there that it’s easy to get hidden
I know this is an old thread but trying to optimise for search has been driving me nuts so I was looking for threads about it! I only ever seem to be able to bump my things down in searches … never the other way.
There must be logic behind it since it’s an algorithm, but it seems like it has some weird randomness built into it to try and mix things up and dissuade keyword stuffing.
One particular search I looked at (a search returning over 3000 results) the first item on the first page only mentioned the search term once in the title and nowhere else in the one line listing description (although it did have single synonym for that search term in the description), no inspiration section filled in and no favourites … yet somehow that is the most relevant listing for that search term.
I’ve also noticed that where sellers copy their listings and titles exactly for multiple items it creates a clumping affect in search results … sometimes half a page or more of very similar looking items from the same shop. Not a great look when there also doesn’t appear to be any rotation built into the algorithm.
Things only get shuffled when items are added or sold and I don’t think enough of either happens on Folksy on a daily basis to rely on that factor alone to keep search results dynamic and fresh.
I have a bash every so often at trying to unlock this top secret code of listing items with the best chance of making it onto the first few pages in a search.
Its really hard isn’t it. Also we don’t really know what a possible customer may be inputting into the search tool.
Maybe for example ‘blue earrings’ so I tried this theory and shortened a lot of my titles and still never really reached a decent page (page 6 or something)
Then not long ago there was a new search introduced where making longer more descriptive titles gave us more chance of appearing… The first three words in your title are supposed to be the most important so I try to make them count.
Still not a lot of joy when I enter a search to find my things as an experiment, but then I don’t know what a customer may look for specifically. It really is a tough nut to crack.
I think it is also down to how recently the item was listed. This is why I among others opted for the plus account, so that we can re-list items each day to keep them near the top of the searches. I re-list a few items several times a day - not that its helping sales wise, for me anyway.
Shorter titles still seem to dominate the first pages of a search term though, particularly for wider search terms.
But yes, it is frustrating. I do okay with Etsy relevancy, and that’s obviously a much more complicated search algorithm. But here all of those good SEO practices seems to have the opposite effect. More is, in fact, less when it comes to Folksy search.
I’m bumping this as I’d love some advice on Folksy SEO, if anyone has any?
My sales have pretty much dropped by a half this last six months on Folksy. I think partly because there is more competition now, but I’m guessing must also be other reasons, such as not getting found in search. I promote on Facebook but the effectiveness of that is hard to track.
I’ve read the advice on Folksy blog about optimising titles and descriptions, and have tinkered but to no decent results. I’m wondering if there is something I vital am missing here
I thought I might boost searches for my 3D pictures (who’d search for that?!) by mentioning they can be personalised. I didn’t want it in the title as they don’t have to be, so I put it in the first line of my description. I searched “personalised” and none of my items came up in about the first 10 pages! I expected things with the word in the title to come up before mine, but there were plenty of those way down on the list as well…it’s a mystery…
Louise @Bookity, in the past six months my sales have practically dried up. I can’t help thinking it’s something to do with the changes on the site.
Christine, I think that you need matching words in titles and descriptions to make your results in search stronger. So if you do offer a personalised version, I think you should put that in the title as well as description. It’s something people look really seem to want these days, and at the moment I can’t stop the word in any of your titles. It might help to draw people in! Also your cats are cute
I’m going to do more work on my titles and descriptions over the coming couple of weeks and see if it has any effect, although it will probably be skewed by the increase in sales due to Christmas. HOPEFULLY!
As far as I can tell, if you want to rank near the top for a somewhat broad, competitive search term then you need to optimise your listing for only that particular search term. Use the term in the title with not too many other words in there and then do the same in your listing description.
I’ve done it to a few listings that I really want to get seen right now and it has worked, more or less. But it’s counter intuitive in terms of good SEO (for Google for instance) and counter productive because things really should be able to have good relevancy for more than one specific phrase at a time.
Of course you can use multiple keyword phrases in your listing titles and descriptions that will help them get found for multiple search types but that listing then seems to be less likely to rank highly for any one term overall.
No, that is useful, Melanie! Thanks very much for the tip, and I’m pleased that it’s worked for you. I’m going to experiment and see if I can increase the exposure of one or two listings that way.
Thanks Louise@Bookity! I’ll give that a try, but it’s so hard to work out what people’s first priority would be when searching. I wasn’t expecting mine to be near the top of the search, but I was surprised to see so many with the word in the title so far down the search. I’m wondering if my severe drop in sales might be anything to do with the demise of the “recently listed” on the front page as there is no chance now of anyone coming across anything by chance…
Well I would love to say that since I started this thread I had worked out the mystery of optimising my product titles - but alas I’m afraid it’s still as much of a mystery to me! Well, not quite, as I did read up a bit about it. I think that titles such as ‘silver bangle with hammered texture’ come up better than ‘hammered and textured silver bangle’, (if you search for ‘silver bangle’ that is) but maybe that was common knowledge before! So putting the most important word near the start of the title, and then repeating it in the first line of the description. For those who haven’t already, this is worth a read: https://folksy.uservoice.com/knowledgebase/articles/57288-titles-and-description
Also, I’m not sure if it’s just me imagining it but if you do a lot of fiddling about with a listing - changing title, description, re-ordering photos etc, then it seems to take a while for the changes to take place within the search (if that makes sense) So for example, I changed the title of my amethyst necklace and re arranged the pictures, and when I ran another search for amethyst necklaces it came up in exactly the same place and even with the same picture showing as the thumbnail, when I had changed it to a different one! But when I checked the next day the correct thumbnail was showing and my item was (slightly) higher in the search. So I suppose what I’m trying to say is, don’t be disheartened if things don’t seem to change immediately - go back and check a bit later!
Phew, sorry for mammoth post, got a bit carried away there!
There is endless discussion about this on another craft-selling website based in the US.
I work with data in my day job and that includes a website search related to Education. Folksy is not going to give away all the secrets to how its search works, because like us, they value their IP and want to protect themselves from competitors. So they may give a few simple pointers, like how to write titles and that items should be renewed regularly etc, but they are not going to tell us everything and I don’t think we should expect them to.
There is a difference between where items appear here on the Folksy search, and where they might appear in a Google search. Consider the wider audience, and whether you are making sales or not.
