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What is your “SEO IQ”?  Do you know your best KP’s?  How do you fare in SERPs?  How do your listings fare in eBay Best Match? Don’t worry, if this is all gobbledegook to you, here is a walk-through to tell you (and even expert users) what you need to know quickly.

The SEO rage is here.  We can help! SEO means search engine optimization;  KP’s mean keyword phrases, and SERP means search engine result pages.  So far, simple enough…  let’s look at a series of charts and graphs that help us decide what to do instead of guessing.

Why Optimize?

eBay’s titles are very SEO-worthy these days.  Search any title today and you will see the entire item number, title, categories, and keyword show up in the description.  (In general don’t waste time making descriptions and titles too big, as examples, you only get 70 characters for Google and 80 characters for eBay.)

What have you done for your SEO self lately?  Mainly, to optimize your listing title and descriptions?  Are you monitoring trends carefully?  Search engine optimization is getting popular, so if you aren’t scrambling to do everything you can (like reading this article) to learn how to optimize and monitor trends, then you are missing out big time.  But have no fear, Sellebrity Analytics can help.  This article will show you how to use our software to improve your product placement in eBay’s and other search engine.  This information applies to anyone looking for traffic.

Use this information to optimize not only the titles of your listings, but descriptions as well.  For simplicity, we will just work with the title, just to show you the impact it can have on your listings.  If you execute all of these steps, it only takes a little bit of patience for a LOT of reward.  This should definitely lead to an increase in traffic.  How much increase depends on you and your products, and what kind of shape your listings are in now.

Here is a walk-through of how we can improve on one of our favorite customers’ titles, who sells bedding.  He sells mostly beds-in-a-bag kind of stuff.  Lots and lots of them.   This customer lists at least 2,000 listings a month, and so a very small improvement could result in a big reward.

As I browse his listings, I see that the most typical format is:

Step 1.  Find your best Keyword Phrases (KP’s).

First we log into the account and click on SEARCHES.  Here is what we see:

Search results

Anyone can plainly see that “bed in-a-bag,” with dashes in the last three words, is the top term.  About five terms dominate, so we should mainly consider those. And from this, I would suggest using the term “bed-in-a-bag” in every listing, perhaps in the title, plus the name of the product (curtains, drapes, or bedding).

Therefore I would modify the title to say:

Old title:  “7Pcs Queen Bed in a Bag Beautiful Comforter Set”

Revision 1:  “7Pcs Queen Bed in-a-Bag Beautiful Comforter Set”

Step 2.  Monitor for unique KP’s and misspellings.

After a few months you will think you know all your keywords, but new ones pop up all the time; that’s why there is a UNIQUE search feature.  If you want to know the UNIQUE keywords that have appeared since the last period, click “Newest Unique.”

Make sure you look for misspellings too, as those can be seeded discreetly at the bottom of your listing.  Even smart people misspell words by accident and you can get all their business!

"Unique" search results

Step 3.  Get your best keyword (not phrases).

Ok the next step is fun:  The actual keywords themselves.  Click on “Keywords” and you are taken to a page that looks like this.  These are all of the individual keywords that people used to get to your listings.

"Keyword" search results

You can notice a few things from the above table.  ”Comforter” and “Bedding” are critical terms.  And also from this table you can see what the favorite colors of comforters are, in order of preference:  Gold, Green, Brown, Black, Purple, Blue, and Velvet.   And they are all fairly popular, with Gold being the best color.

So now we modify our title again to remove the word “Beautiful.”   The picture already shows that it is beautiful, and you can use that huge word in your description as many times as you want.   But for the title it just wastes valuable SEO space.  So, we replace that word with the names of the colors, since they are obviously important:

Original title: "7Pcs Queen Bed in a Bag Beautiful Comforter Set"

Final revision:  "7Pcs Queen Bed in-a-Bag  Beautiful Blue Gold Bedding Comforter Set"

Step 4.  Look for Trends.

You can also spot trends in this data by changing the date range.   It’s possible that Gold is replaced by Purple as the favorite color from one month to the next.   This tool helps you monitor trends like that.

Step 5.  Don’t rely just on Google.

Remember, eBay is indexed (searched) by sites like Google.  If you click “Engines” then you will see a list of search engines that send traffic to your site:

Don't rely too much on Google

In my opinion this seller is too dependent on Google.  Google is great, don’t get me wrong, but my recommendation to this seller would be to start a Facebook site as well as a Twitter account.   They are very easy to set up and it is free advertising and more SEO placement.  (Hop on Twitter to watch us for articles on those subjects.)

So now, we know exactly what search terms and keywords and phrases to use in our titles, and we have many more ideas to sprinkle in the descriptions.   You don’t need my help or anyone else’s to do that.

Step 6.  Do It Yourself.

Unless you are handicapped or your helpers know your product like you do, then you cannot possibly hire someone else to do this.   You have to use your gut and measured data.  Remember, most of the people that you would hire in a professional marketing firm are just fresh college grads.   Hiring those kind of companies is nonsense (I learned the hard way) because nobody knows your product like you do.  Nobody – period!   Always remember that because it is always true.

Even after you explain everything, they still won’t understand implicitly like you do.   By the time you have critiqued all the third-party work and spent all of the time training them, you could have done it all yourself using our free trial and saved a bundle.   If you hire someone from the yellow pages, regardless of who they are, you are going to waste a fortune.

Just work hard and remember that cream always rises to the top.   So just use the terms exactly as you see them in your analysis reports, and you will increase your traffic quite a bit.  Next: How to perform A/B testing on different ad types.

More Information

Please see links at the bottom for the demonstration site and sign-up for the free trial of the software.

You can easily apply these concepts to your own situation and decide what states, countries, or continents you want to sell in!

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