Etsy Listings on Google: What Google Reads Differently

Nearly every piece of Etsy SEO advice you have ever read — including most of ours — is about one search box: the one on Etsy.com. But your listings are public web pages, and they get found by people who never opened Etsy at all. Etsy’s own Help Center is explicit that this is a separate discipline with its own rules, and it names them: Etsy SEO, meaning searches on Etsy.com, and Google SEO, meaning searches on Google.

Etsy’s framing of the second one is worth sitting with: optimizing for Google searches can unlock another audience of potential buyers. Generally the optimizations are very similar to the ones Etsy recommends for Etsy search — but, in Etsy’s words, with a few extra considerations. Those extra considerations are where sellers lose free traffic, because they are not the numbers you have memorized.

Google shows 50–60 characters of your title, not 140

Start with the fact that reframes everything: your item title is used to create the page title for your listing page. That is the blue clickable line a person sees in Google results. And Etsy states the constraint plainly — search engines only show the first 50 to 60 characters of a page title, so you should include the most important traits upfront, like your item’s colors, material, and size. Etsy’s companion advice is to consider using fewer than 15 words in a title.

Now hold that against the on-Etsy rules you already work to: a 140-character title whose first 40 characters carry the most weight, the limits we break down in the tag and title character guide. The good news is that the two rules point the same direction rather than fighting each other. If your real keyword genuinely sits inside the first 40 characters, it also sits inside Google’s 50–60 character window. Front-loading serves both search engines at once.

Where they diverge is the tail. On Etsy, the back half of a 140-character title is quiet keyword surface — nobody is really reading it, and it can carry secondary phrases. On Google, that same tail is a truncated sentence hanging off a search result. Etsy’s guidance is that your title should sound natural, and that a buyer who sees the title on Google should quickly be able to read and understand it. A title stuffed with eleven comma-separated phrases still ranks on Etsy. On Google it reads like spam to a human deciding whether to click.

The one thing you can never edit: your listing URL

This is the single most useful sentence in Etsy’s SEO article, and almost nobody knows it: your listing’s URL is based on the title you enter when you first publish the listing — and once it’s published, the URL won’t change again, even if you edit the title later.

Every other field on your listing is endlessly revisable. Tags, title, description, photos — you can rewrite all of them at 2am and Etsy simply saves. The URL is different. It’s stamped at first publish and it’s permanent. So the title you type into a half-finished draft, the one you were planning to fix properly later, is the one baked into the web address Google will index for as long as that listing exists.

The practical rule that falls out of this: get the title roughly right before you hit publish the first time, not after. Not perfect — you can still fix the title itself, and you should. But the noun a buyer would actually type should be in there at first publish, because that part is the one decision you don’t get to take back.

Etsy adds a genuine exception here, and it needs care because it brushes up against advice we have given elsewhere: if you make major changes to a listing, consider creating a new listing so the URL better reflects what’s being sold. That is not permission to relist as a refresh trick — relisting throws away the accumulated quality score a listing has earned, which is exactly the expensive mistake we walk through in whether renewing boosts your ranking. Etsy’s exception is for when the item has genuinely changed into something else, not when you want a cleaner web address. Etsy also notes that URL has less impact on SEO than the listing title and other information, so this is a tiebreaker, not a reason to burn a performing listing.

Your photos do carry text after all — it’s just called alt text

We have written that photos contain no keywords Etsy’s search reads, which is true of Etsy’s own query matching — the full argument is in do Etsy photos affect search ranking. Google is the exception, and the bridge is alt text.

Alt text is a written description attached to each listing photo. Its first job is accessibility: it describes the image to buyers who can’t see it. But Etsy states the second job directly — adding a text alternative to your listing images also means that search engines outside of Etsy can read your listing images, and might positively impact your listings’ SEO. Etsy’s SEO guidance adds that accurate alt text helps Google better understand what’s in an image, which may also help your page appear in image-based searches. Given that people genuinely shop through Google Images, that’s a real doorway.

Two specifics worth knowing before you write any:

• Keep it to 250 characters. Etsy’s guidance is to describe the item’s details — what it looks like, the texture, the scale in relation to other items in the photograph — and keep the description concise, up to 250 characters. A useful test Etsy offers: think about what buyers would lose out on if your images didn’t load.
• Don’t paste your keywords in. Etsy is unusually direct about this: adding your shop name, listing title, listing description, or other attributes such as tags and SKUs to the alt text won’t be an additional benefit to your listing’s SEO, because those things are already part of your shop or listing pages. Alt text describes the photo — that is the whole job.

That second point kills a popular piece of internet advice. Dumping your 13 tags into the alt text field is not a hidden keyword slot; it’s a wasted description that helps nobody, sighted or otherwise.

If you leave alt text blank, Etsy writes it for you

Here’s the part that turns this from optional to worth an afternoon. Etsy says that if you don’t provide a text alternative for an image, Etsy will automatically add a description to your listing using AI-generated text, and that Etsy might add alt text to US sellers’ listing images to make them more accessible. Images that already have alt text are not altered by Etsy, and anything Etsy added can be edited at any time.

So the real choice was never "alt text or no alt text." It is your description of your product or a machine’s guess at it, on the page Google is reading. Nobody knows the texture of your linen, the actual scale of that pendant, or what the third photo is even showing better than you do. Writing your own is the difference between a description that names your material and one that says the visual equivalent of "a brown object on a table."

One scope note from Etsy: you can add image descriptions if your default shop language is set to English — which pairs with Etsy’s wider guidance on keeping one clean language per field set, covered in does Etsy translate your listings.

The shop-level fields Google reads once

Your listings aren’t the only pages Google indexes — your shop page is one too, and Etsy names four elements that matter on it. Unlike tags, these are set-once fields, which makes them some of the cheapest SEO work available:

• Your tagline (55 characters). It appears under your shop name on your shop homepage. Etsy’s advice is to use it to briefly describe your shop and the items you sell, because this can help Google better understand what kinds of products your shop sells. Fifty-five characters is barely a sentence — spend it naming what you actually sell, not on a mood.
• About your shop. Etsy’s reasoning here is interesting: use the space to go in depth about your background, creative process, and years of experience, because Google likes to see your expertise and trustworthiness as a seller — and it matters to buyers too.
• Images and video in the About section. You can add a video and up to 5 images there. Etsy suggests highlighting your workspace, process, or range of products.
• Shop policies. Fill out as many details as possible — shipping, payment options, returns, exchanges. As Etsy points out, this isn’t only an SEO move: shoppers weigh your return and exchange policies when deciding to buy.

None of these take more than an hour, none of them expire, and most shops have at least one of them sitting empty.

Two smaller levers: video and backlinks

Etsy notes you can add up to 2 videos to each listing, and that beyond bringing products to life they could increase your visibility in Google — those videos may appear in the Google Video search tab. That’s a search surface most handmade shops have never competed for at all.

Backlinks are the last one, and they come with a warning worth repeating exactly. Etsy explains that the number and quality of links pointing at a page signals to Google that it contains helpful content, and suggests linking to your Etsy shop from your own website, personal blog, or social media pages. Then the caution: avoid buying link placements — working with third-party agencies to buy and build links may affect your Google rankings negatively. If someone is selling you backlinks for your Etsy shop, Etsy’s own guidance says that’s a way to get hurt, not helped.

And an honest ceiling, stated by Etsy itself: there isn’t a way to promise your shop will appear at the top of a search engine results page. Google tweaks what and how results come up constantly. This is a set of best practices, not a lever with a guaranteed output.

Where this fits with the rest of your listing

The useful mental split is this. Your 13 tags are an Etsy-search instrument — they are how you get matched inside Etsy’s own two-phase search, which we cover in whether descriptions affect search. Notice that when Etsy lists what matters for Google, tags aren’t among the four elements it names — the load there is carried by your title, your description, your images, and your videos. The description does double duty: it feeds Etsy’s query matching and it is the full page content Google reads, which is why Etsy’s advice for both is the same — clearly describe the item in the first sentence, use words shoppers would search, and avoid repeating the same phrases over and over.

That overlap is the good news. A listing written properly once satisfies both search engines, because both of them want a title that leads with the real noun and a description that reads like a person wrote it. ListingLoom writes exactly that: a front-loaded title inside the 140-character limit with the keyword in the first 40 characters — comfortably inside Google’s 50–60 character display window too — 13 distinct tags each under 20 characters for the Etsy side, and a plain readable description that opens by naming the item. For a print-on-demand catalog, the bulk generator does the same across up to 25 products in one submission.

Then do the three things no tool can do for you, because they’re about your specific item and your specific shop: write your own alt text before Etsy’s AI writes it for you, fill in the tagline, About section, and policies once, and get the title close enough at first publish that the permanent URL isn’t something you regret. That’s the second half of Etsy SEO, and hardly anyone is doing it.