Store Makeover Part 1 - Tags

Sage and Olivia run by Simone and Cara has agreed to let me use their shop for a makeover/ tutorial lessons. SageandOlivia sells jewelry made from semi-precious gemstones such as coral, agate, turquoise and onyx. Their shop has great pictures of the products, and they have a great mannequin for the necklaces (I am actually jealous of the nice texture on it).   Here is the shop home page for you to see:

 

As you can see they have a lot of great products: bold and colourful  necklaces and bracelets plus a few earrings. Now they have a few sales and in January have been adding lots of products, but they not getting a lot of hits to their pages. Why? I think one reason is their tags.  

Let's look at one of their new items:

This is a great piece;  the pictures are clean and well merchandised.  They only thing I would add is a shot with a size comparison, like place the necklace beside a quarter so people can  gauge the bead size. 

If I were looking for an item like this, how would I describe it?

Bold

Chunky

Asymmetrical

Statement piece

Mixed Metal

Black and White

Red Coral

Let look at their tags:

hmmm, Sageandolivia tags are correct, but I do not think they describe their necklace as well as they could. 

The next step is to search Etsy for similar products to yours to see what tags others are using. I entered "Statement necklace" into the search bar and this what happened.

Options popped up underneath with the most common searches on esty connected to what you started to type. I selected the "chunky statement necklace" and found:

Bingo - this more like what SageandOlivia is doing!!! I then looked at these items to glean other ideas for tags. If you click on the tag - it will show all the items with that tag. If it looks like your type of product write it down. I have a list taped to my computer of what tags to use.

There are two important things that I want to share with you about labeling/tagging your items (taken from the Do and Don't section on Etsy Help: http://www.etsy.com/help/article/483).

• You may use a short descriptive phrase as a tag if it accurately describes your item (for example: "sterling silver," "messenger bag," "steampunk cufflinks").
• You may not stuff multiple words into a single tag that do not comprise a descriptive phrase (for example: "beach water sunset," "handbag purse clutch," "green red blue black." 

Previously you were not to put multiple words in a tag but that changed when relevancy became the default search. So now you can use terms like: 

Statement Necklace

Vintage plate

Children's toque

So if I were to change SageandOlivia's Tags for this item I would use:

1) Jewelry

2) Necklace

3) Stone

4) Statement Piece

5) Chunky necklace

6) Statement necklace

7) Black and White

8) Red Coral

9) Bold Jewelry

10) Mixed Metal

11) Winnipegteam<---- Please tag 25% of you items with these--it helps with treasuries

12) Asymmetrical 

13) Coral Necklace

Bonus

Another thing I would do to SageandOlivia's Shop is add more categories to the shop settings (not more types of items). Since they only have three catergories right now - I would put all the bold chunky statement necklaces in one category and all the long or fine chains in another category. This well help the customer find more of the similar products in their shop quicker. If they come and look at one Statement necklace, they might like to see your other options.