Listings & SEO · P-02 — The Title Rewrite

Your Etsy title is keyword soup. Here's how to fix it

“My title looks like word soup. I know it's bad. I don't know which words to cut.”

The prompt

Here is an Etsy listing title I'm not happy with:

[PASTE THE TITLE]

The product is: [one sentence, e.g., a ceramic cat mug, hand painted, 12 oz]
My buyer is: [e.g., people buying a gift for a cat owner]

Rewrite it three ways, all under 140 characters, all front-loading the phrase a
real buyer would type:

VERSION 1 — Maximum searchability. Pack in the most distinct buyer phrases that
still form readable clauses.
VERSION 2 — Maximum readability. Sounds like a person wrote it. Fewer phrases,
each one strong.
VERSION 3 — Balanced. The one you'd actually publish.

For each version give me: the title, the character count, the phrases it can be
found by, and the one thing it gives up compared to the others.

Then tell me: which words in my original title were doing no work at all, and why.

What it produced

Run on `Mug Cat Mug Coffee Mug Cat Lover Mug Gift Mug Ceramic Mug Handmade Mug Cute Mug Kitty Mug Pottery Mug Tea Mug Cat Mom Mug Gift For Her`

Version 1 — maximum searchability (135 chars) Hand Painted Cat Mug, Cat Lover Gift, Ceramic Coffee Mug Handmade, Cat Mom Gift, Kitty Tea Mug, Cute Pottery Mug, Gift for Her Birthday Findable by: hand painted cat mug, cat lover gift, ceramic coffee mug, cat mom gift, kitty tea mug, cute pottery mug, gift for her Gives up: warmth. It’s a list, not a sentence — accurate but charmless.

Version 2 — maximum readability (90 chars) Hand Painted Cat Mug, a Cat Lover Gift in Speckled Stoneware — Handmade Ceramic Coffee Mug Findable by: hand painted cat mug, cat lover gift, handmade ceramic coffee mug Gives up: three or four gift-occasion phrases that only exist in the longer versions.

Version 3 — balanced, the one to publish (118 chars) Hand Painted Cat Mug, Cat Lover Gift, Handmade Ceramic Coffee Mug, Cat Mom Birthday Gift, Speckled Stoneware Kitty Mug Findable by: hand painted cat mug, cat lover gift, handmade ceramic coffee mug, cat mom birthday gift, speckled stoneware Gives up: “gift for her” and “cute pottery mug” — both are broad enough that you’d be competing with everything, and both still live in your tags.

Words doing no work in your original: the word Mug appears 11 times — after the first two, each repeat is spending characters on a word your listing already ranks for. Cute is a judgment nobody searches with intent. Gift Mug is not a phrase a human types. You spent 133 characters to say roughly six distinct things; version 3 says nine in 128.

Pro tip

Change one listing title at a time and write the date in your notes. If you rewrite eleven titles in one afternoon and sales move, you’ll never know which change did it.

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