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We’ve discussed this here before, but thought I’d bring it up again.
eBay has a weird page that lets you add keywords to your store:
http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?StoreMgmtViewCustomKeywords
If you’re logged in, this is link should take you to the proper page.I guess these are the meta tags that search engines crawl. Our keywords were auto-filled and basically non-sense. I dont know if the keywords I added were better, but it cant hurt.
I also dont know if it matters. We sell iteems everyday even with the nonsense keywords.
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Apparently, for clothes, you can use the keywords that eBay uses here, just pick the items you sell most often.
http://pages.ebay.com/buy/csa/apparelguide/stylesGuide/Another rabbit hole to disappear into! T-Satt and Jay told me about it, and now I’m finding a lot of info. Some sellers adjust theirs on a monthly basis. Apparently the benefit of adjusting your keywords is for Google search to find your eBay listings, as well as Cassini.
According to Emma Tamkins, use terms that come up when you do research and eBay auto fills your search line. Those auto fill words are often meta tags.
Sheesh. So much to learn and do. I need to clone me!
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No disrespect, but I have been following this site for almost 2 years now and this is the first I have seen it mentioned. I was shocked that it is not even a key topic. I would love to see the topic gain traction… But then again, if you don’t believe in or concerned about SEO, then this area is not for you. Passive sellers need not apply.
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Feel free to enlighten us on specifics that you use.
Many of our keywords were automatically set by eBay that were really just nonsense. But yet we still sell items each day. I’m resetting them all now so we’ll see if any more items sell.
If these keywords are so important, I would think eBay would make these front and center on the new seller dashboard. Because this keyword page is in the old eBay style, my gut is that it’s useless and that hasn’t been deactivated yet.
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Wrong on all fronts.
Here again you are looking for something that is measurable when all you need to do is believe that SEO works. Sales is just a numbers game. The more you list the more you sell. SEO is an art and science of getting your listing seen more frequently with the expectation that your item will sell faster.Quickly reacting and changing your keywords without this belief or knowledge of what or why you’re doing this may very well harm your search result than help. Then you will jump to a conclusion and say it didn’t work. I’ve already proven in the past that you can get entirely different search results just by changing the order of your search keywords.
This area has only become bigger and more detailed since the introduction of Cassini, a data and values-driven search engine, in addition to the move to product catalogs and meta tags. Like eBay itself, this section is always changing and is not going to be depreciated any time soon.
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Uh, okay.
If you have any specific advice about this specific eBay page. Cool!
If not, I agree with your statement, “SEO in general is important”.-
Hey Jay.. Yes we did discuss it back on Friday 4/3/2015. I just searched and found it among all of the 2,500 or so discussion of my saved favorite and interesting topics of yours. If you can search back through the old archives you will find several posts / discussions of key word updating. You even have a link to some Ebay pages that Amazing Taste posted that has the “rules” sort of how to do it properly, not get caught in spamming, how to list them and also the answer to other peoples questions on how to do it correctly.
I gave up on the discussion back then because proper SEO is a fairly deep and somewhat complex subject as e-commerce has suggested in past posts and I agree. I spent several years taking SEO courses, using SEO Utility Tools, KW Ranking, while building a few web sites and studying how Google reacts to them. Also Googles Panda and Penguin changes to it’s algorythem’s roll out caught a lot of people using black hat tactics and got rid of millions of garbage web sites.
Also many peole don’t kow, but Googles “spiders” and “bots” crawl the web constantly and there is som much out there it takes Google months to get around to crawling a web site or changes to it’s content. Don’t expect to change some keywords and then go and look on Google to see if you appear. It doesn’t work that way.
It may take 2 to 3 months for Googles “spiders” and “bots” to even find your site and meta tags. Then it will analize it for content. Then “proper” content, then once found will start to post it in results. Then if it will start to look for fresh content, thus “changes” you make. Google likes to see changes to content it has found by you so you can get an Alexia Ranking. Then They will also look for spamming, repeated words, no relevant content and just on and on.
Knowing just tons more on SEO that is one reason I dropped out of the discussions years ago, because proper SEO, site building, and the logistics is something that just can’t be taught or explained in a forum post.
As E-commerce is indicating between the lines, before making too many strong statements about SEO, I suggest that if interested you make yourself a student of it. Maybe take a class at a local community college or better still, pay some one to optimize your own domain web site.
It is a whole topic unto itself. This is one reason I have not proceeded with my Shopify Store as of yet. I own my own domain name and have it parked. But to go live with owns own web site you need to speed a lot of time and have the knowledge to drive your own traffic to your store, then convert it. It will take a lot of upfront work, then constant working your store by writing new, and relevant content almost daily. I am too old now and choose to work within the confines of Ebay’s infrastructure.I use Ebay because that SEO is already being done for me, but it is still Ebay’s traffic not mine. Ebay closes down, we all close down.
I think I will jump out for now.
mike at MDC Galleries in Atlanta
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Thanks for providing the link to our previous conversation. It’s funny because we just changed the keywords on a couple categories back then. Until I did them today, most of our categories still had nonsense keywords that eBay had autofilled. It was just words pulled from titles in our store that had nothing to do with those categories.
We’ve been selling plenty since 2015 even with wacky keywords, which makes me think it’s a dead end on the eBay website. As I said earlier, if these keywords was that important, I’d assume they’d put this front and center on the new Seller Hub.
I will disagree with your approach on SEO. If someone asks “What’s a good way to fill in these fields” and you answer “Take a college course”, then I’d say you’re making it too complicated. I know you’re a completist/perfectionist, but ultimately you got to get stuff done. As they say “perfection is the enemy of progress”.
If I needed to be perfect before I did anything, I’d get nowhere. We wouldn’t have this eBay business. We wouldn’t have renovated houses and started a rental business. We wouldn’t try to do some of the secret stuff we’re planning now. I think some amount of naivete is actually really important. I’ll gladly let others debate how to be perfect, while I build stuff and learn from mistakes.
Anyway, here’s a video on how one guy filled in those SEO fields:
Seems easy enough.-
Oh I agree with you Jay. I meant and maybe wasn’t clear, if you have your own web site and have to SEO it from scratch, you are your own web master, then it is a fairly in depth endeavor, that I feel needs a good amount of study to be good at it. But not just for Ebay and filling in the keywords in the categories. In that respect you are correct. Pretty easy is correct. And I agree about it being low on one’s to do list if listing needs to be done.
Back then, I like Linda states below, changed a few back then and never got back around to it. It is still on my old “to do” list and still I haven’t gotten back to it. At least it is just the categories and if one doesn’t have too many then should not take long.
Sorry I wasn’t clear about that.
mike in Atl.
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Jay here is the link to your posts about Key Word use back in 2015 along with some links that hopefully will still work.
Hi-de-Ho Scavengers…
mike in Atlanta
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Ecommerce, you are very knowledgeable and you have a ton of information to share – it is truly appreciated. Having said that, I don’t think you are fully aware of how you are coming off here. It seems that you are talking down to everyone. It really isn’t necessary and it undermines your valuable input.
You know what would be cool? A podcast interview where you can explain SEO in-depth.
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Jay, a perfect question to ask EBay about in an interview!
The effectiveness of the keywords is very difficult to measure, although once we updated them the first time, it did appear that our sales increased in the later months. Not very scientific, but it does seem to be important.
We haven’t change them after the initial set up, we just make sure they are correct once we set up a new category.
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Already on the list:
When we discussed these eBay meta tags or keywords last time, we kind of fizzled on specifics. Everyone agreed that SEO is important, but what are appropriate keywords?
http://cgi6.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?StoreMgmtViewCustomKeywords
You get a Primary keyword and six Secondary keywords. Each keyword can be 60 characters long.
–Do they want a single word? or an entire phrase?
–Can you provide an example of one of your categories and its keywords?eBay doesnt give examples of what its looking for or the format of how they want keywords.
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This is the sort of thing that I suspect is much more helpful for sellers of multiple item listings. I feel pretty much the same way about spending a lot of time on SEO in general. With multi-item listings, you can test the effectiveness of this stuff with some degree of certainty, but with one offs? I could change the order of the words (or the words themselves) and if the item sells….does it mean I finally had the right title, or does it mean simply that the right buyer showed up now? Very hard to say. I must also ask: is it worth the effort? It’s one thing to devote time to this for a listing that might ultimately result in 100 sales; it’s another thing to devote the time for a listing that will result in one sale.
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I agree. I think the hard thing is to really get good data on the effectiveness. I know that it is important to have them be correct, as when we updated ours, we started seeing more impressions and ultimately sales. But how much the keywords were part of that is a mystery.
We look at it this way. When we set up our categories, we make sure that the keywords for that category are correct, and then we never touch it again. We know that having the right keywords helps (though hard to measure), it takes 2 minutes, so we do it.
Maybe asking some of these questions to eBay would be worthwhile. It could be that these were important when eBay listings were largely seen on Google. I know that at least for us, we have very few O/S eBay views in the last two years. If you look at our Page Views in the Performance \ Traffic section, we average about 650-690 page views per day, but only 10-12 are from O/S of eBay. It may be because we use 30-Day listings rather than GTC, but we do that as a conscious decision to see what hasn’t sold, refresh the listing, change pricing, etc. In the end, we aren’t in the inventory business, we are in the selling business.
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