Last week, one of our community members, Amazing*Taste, let everyone know about a little secret: eBay has keywords and they’re all messed if you don’t updated them manually. She says:
1. Under Account – Click Manage My Store
2. On the left click – Search Engine Keywords
3. For every one of your store categories you need to go through and manually enter the keywords someone searching on Google might use to find items in that category.
4. The key here is that you can’t use the same word more than twice or it won’t let you submit them. This is because Google takes that as keyword spamming. So if you sell iPhone cases and the first word in the top listings are iPhone cases due to the default you are getting kicked out of Google for Keyword spamming.
5. Also remember more than likely no one is searching your store name on Google so if the first keyword that eBay default is offering is your store name you are losing on Google.
6. Last tip: When I do mine I open my keywords in one screen and my store in another. Then I refine the search to highest priced items first. That way I am using keywords from those listings.
So we checked our keywords and they were all screwy. Each field had the same exact words describing a single item in our store. Every category was the same. WTF? With all the engineers eBay has, it’s weird they haven’t created a better default system.
Go here to read how eBay does their Keywords. Why is this important? Supposedly these keywords are one way that Google finds your items.
There’s been a lot of hair pulling and crying about how to write these keywords. So in the screenshot above, we show you how we filled in our fields for our “Lighting and Lamps” category. We just used words for some of our most expensive lamps. No repetition.
Some sellers say their sales shot up after making their keywords more relevant. So far we haven’t seen a huge surge so difficult to know how effective it is. Certainly can’t hurt. For new sellers, we highly recommend not freaking out about this. First it only affects sellers with store subscriptions. And remember too that we’ve been selling for six years without ever having known about eBay’s keywords, and we have a successful full time eBay business. Stuff will always sell if you are listing quality items.
As Amazing*Taste commented:
You are definitely over thinking this. Honestly just throw some keywords onto each line that reflect that store category and then let it go. Maybe it helps, maybe it doesn’t. The important thing about testing new business strategies is to not let them take up so much time that you neglect the proven strategies – List more = Sell more.
+1.