The problem that I’m seeing a lot of Etsy shop owners that I’m working with struggle is that it can be frankly overwhelming to do the keyword research and decide what keywords you want. 

You may end up with like a million tabs open in the tool that you’ve chosen. And if you don’t have a proper workflow, you can overwhelm yourself with all the data in there and not know what to do with it. You might have spreadsheets with keywords listed, but you don’t even know if they’re good or not. You can’t remember why you’ve put them there. You might even have notes and Post-it notes on your desk. In this case, without a proper workflow, a tool can only get you so far.

If this is you, I’m hoping that this article will fix this and I’m going to offer you my own Etsy keyword research workflow to make the process easy (and even enjoyable!). 

3 steps of effective Etsy keyword research

So, the three steps of the keyword research workflow are:

1. 1. Brainstorm
   2. Research
   3. Scoring

In the brainstorm phase, the goal is to generate as many possible keyword ideas as you can think of, even if they’re not all good. And that’s actually pretty important. I’ll get back to that in a second. 

Then you’ll get into the research. So based on that brainstorm, we’re actually going to look at the data and see, is this a good keyword? Is this kind of interesting, but I’m not sure yet? Or should I not even consider that keyword at all? 

And then finally, the last step is scoring. Once we have a selection of keywords that we’ve kind of already pre-filtered, we want to compare them and decide which ones we actually want to use.

How to come up with Etsy keywords

When it comes to brainstorming Etsy keywords, you need to start by removing yourself from your computer. Seriously, you cannot start brainstorming inside of the tool because you will already start getting into analyzing and looking at the data in there. And that’s not what brainstorming is. Brainstorming is really getting any idea that you might have for a potential keyword on paper. Only then we will look at the data for it. 

So the first issue that you’re likely to run into – at least that’s what my experience with other makers has shown – is that often you get stuck and you don’t have all that many ideas because you’re used to describing your products a certain way. And it can be kind of hard to find another way to describe the product. Like a mug is a mug, so how else are you meant to call it…? And you might have those kinds of issues coming up with a decently long list of brainstorm ideas for your keywords. If that’s the case, I recommend you use a technique called the 5W technique.

And it’s really asking yourself what, why, where, who, and when. What is this product for? What is it made of? Any kind of question that starts with “what”, answer it and it’ll trigger some keyword ideas for you. And then do the same for why, where, who, and when. When is it going to be used? When can it be gifted? Where would it be in the house? Where would it be used? Who is going to buy it? Who is going to use it? Why is it better than an alternative? Just try to find questions that start with what, why, where, who, and when. Write down and answer those questions. You will find new keywords and new ways of thinking about your products. You haven’t thought of them before. 

This is a very quick overview of what this technique actually is. If you are an HQ member, you already have access to my Etsy SEO Blueprint course. I dive a lot more in depth into this technique there and how to use it to generate ideas. If you’re not an HQ member, you can check it out here.

The second issue that I see people run into is disregarding ideas way too quickly. Don’t judge an idea for a keyword before you write it down. Don’t assume few people will search for it. I can promise you, you will surprise yourself. Some keywords that you’re writing down in your brainstorm, thinking they will have a high volume of search, might actually not be searched at all. And vice versa, there may be this random keyword that you jolted down and when you look at the data, it’s actually looking really good and promising. So the moral here is: don’t want to judge too early, and don’t want to judge without the data.