How your Etsy SEO report works

Every report has two parts that arrive together:

1. An email — sent to the address you chose during signup. Short summary: how many listings were analyzed this cycle, average title and tag scores, the lowest-scoring listings.
2. An Excel attachment (.xlsx) — one tab, one row per active listing, sorted by lowest title score first. Open it in Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, or any spreadsheet app.

Auto-Apply is included with every subscription: from your dashboard you can click “Apply” on any listing and we push the new title, tags, and description live to Etsy for you.

One tab named Recommendations. Each row covers one active listing, sorted lowest title score first (most urgent at the top). Columns:

• Listing ID + Etsy URL — direct link to the listing
• Gap Summary — 2–3 sentences explaining the gap between what you wrote and what buyers search for
• Current Title
• Title Option 1, 2, 3 — three rewritten titles ranked by SEO impact, each with a one-sentence reason
• Current Description / Description Rewrite — full new description (100–180 words), ready to paste into Etsy, with the current one alongside for comparison
• Current Tags + Tag 1 through Tag 13 — exactly 13 new tags, each within Etsy's 20-character limit

This is also where the Auto-Apply dashboard reads from when you click “Apply” on any listing.

This is the methodology. Understanding it tells you why our advice is different from generic SEO tools.

Step 1 — We pull your live listings

We connect to your shop through Etsy's official API and read every active listing: title, tags, description, photos, current price, view count. Draft, sold-out, and expired listings are ignored.

Step 2 — We scrape Etsy's autocomplete for real buyer queries

For each listing, we build 3–5 “seed” phrases from your existing title and tags, then we query Etsy's own search autocomplete (the dropdown that appears when a buyer starts typing). We collect what real buyers are typing right now, not what a keyword database thinks they might type.

This is the most important step in our methodology: every recommendation we make is grounded in actual live buyer searches, not invented “trends.” If a phrase doesn't appear in real autocomplete data, we won't suggest it. Period.

Step 3 — We compare the gap

We send our AI engine two things side by side for each listing:

1. What you wrote — your title, tags, description
2. What buyers are actually searching — the autocomplete data

Our AI engine is given strict rules:

• Use only keywords that appeared in the autocomplete data — never invent buyer language
• Stay within Etsy's hard limits: titles ≤ 140 characters, tags ≤ 20 characters each, exactly 13 tags
• Never use %, &, or : (Etsy doesn't index them well)
• Never invent product details you didn't actually write
• Never call something a “set” if it's sold individually — use “selection”
• Preserve the truth of your listing — only improve how it's worded

If your current title already covers the top searches well, the engine is instructed to leave it alone and tell you so in the gap summary. We do not rewrite for the sake of rewriting.

Step 4 — We build the spreadsheet and email it

The ready-to-paste Recommendations tab and the email summary get delivered together as an Excel attachment.

First report

• Every active listing gets a full rewrite recommendation, including a brand new description. This is your baseline.
• Expect the report to take longer to arrive (typically 15 minutes) — we're analyzing every listing from scratch.

Every report after

• We only re-analyze listings whose buyer search trends have shifted since last time. If the words buyers are typing into Etsy haven't changed for a given listing, we reuse the last recommendation rather than burn time and money producing an identical one.
• This is why your second and third reports are usually faster, and why most listings will say “unchanged” or carry forward the previous priority. A listing that doesn't appear with a new recommendation isn't being ignored — it means the keyword landscape for that listing is stable, so our previous advice still stands.
• New listings you've added since the last report are always analyzed fresh.
• Listings where you've manually updated the title or tags will also be re-evaluated next cycle — we'll re-score them against fresh keyword data.

How often reports come

You get one report every 7 days. There's no monthly plan and no day-of-week picker — your first report fires the moment you connect Etsy, and subsequent reports follow weekly.

Right now, we optimize English-language listings for the U.S. Etsy market. Our keyword data comes from Etsy U.S. autocomplete (the same dropdown a buyer in Chicago or Dallas sees).

If your shop has translations into other languages (German, French, etc.), we don't touch those — Etsy keeps them separate and the buyer search patterns are completely different. The primary listing copy that we optimize is what most international buyers see anyway, because Etsy translates titles dynamically for users browsing in other languages.

Bottom line: if your primary listing language is English, you're fully covered. If your primary listing language is something other than English, contact us before signing up — the tool is built around English buyer searches and won't be effective for other markets yet.

The standard report tells you exactly what to change. The Auto-Apply dashboard — included with every subscription — lets us make those changes for you on Etsy with one click per listing, only when you say so.

How it works

1. Open your dashboard at etsy.simplyautomated.co/apply
2. You'll see every recommendation, sorted by priority (lowest title score first)
3. Each row shows: the current title, the proposed new title, expandable details for tags and description
4. Click “Check Etsy” (optional) to verify that the listing on Etsy today still matches what our report saw — useful if you've made manual edits since the report came in
5. Click “Apply” on any listing you approve

What happens when you click Apply

1. We send the new title, tags, and description directly to Etsy's API
2. We then immediately re-fetch the listing from Etsy and confirm Etsy actually accepted every field
3. Only if every field matches exactly do we mark it “Applied & verified on Etsy”
4. You receive a confirmation email with the full before/after so you have a paper trail
5. The listing moves to the “Applied & verified” section of the page with a timestamp

If Etsy rejects any field (rare — usually because Etsy enforces an extra rule on a specific category), we mark the listing “Failed” with the exact reason Etsy gave, so you know what to fix. Nothing is silently changed without confirmation.

What Auto-Apply will NOT do

• We never apply a change you haven't clicked Apply on. There is no “auto-apply everything” mode by design — you review every change before it goes live.
• We never touch photos, price, quantity, shipping profiles, or variations.
• We never apply the same change twice. Once a listing is marked Applied, it disappears from the pending list until the next cycle generates new recommendations for it.

Why we verify after applying

Etsy's API sometimes returns a “success” response while silently rejecting tag rules (e.g. a category that requires specific tags). We never trust the success response alone — we always re-read the listing to confirm Etsy stored the new values. This is the difference between “we sent it” and “it's actually live on Etsy.”

• Title score (1–10) — Combines how many of the top buyer search terms your title contains, how well-placed they are (front of title matters more on Etsy), and whether you're wasting characters on words buyers don't search.
• Tag score (1–10) — How many of your 13 tag slots are pulling weight. Tags that don't match any real search query score lower. Generic single words (e.g. “gift”) score lower than specific multi-word phrases (e.g. “gift for new mom”).

Scores below 5 are urgent. Scores 5–7 have meaningful gains available. Scores 8–10 are already strong — the report will usually tell you to leave those alone.

• We do not change everything on Day 1. Etsy's algorithm reads frequent listing edits as instability and can temporarily reduce reach. Recommended pace: update no more than 5 listings per week. Watch traffic for 2 weeks before the next round.
• We do not invent keywords. If a phrase isn't in actual buyer autocomplete, we won't suggest it — no matter how trendy or how often other tools recommend it.
• We do not edit product facts. If your listing says “100% cotton,” we will never suggest a rewrite that changes that. We only improve how the existing facts are worded for SEO.
• We do not touch sold-out or expired listings. Only active listings get analyzed.
• We do not store your Etsy password. We connect through Etsy's official OAuth flow — you grant us read/write access through Etsy itself, and you can revoke that access from your Etsy account settings any time.

Week 1 (first report)

• Open the Recommendations tab in the Excel file — it's already sorted lowest title score first.
• Pick the 5 lowest-scoring listings. These are bleeding the most visibility.
• For each: paste the new title, the new 13 tags, and the new description into Etsy. Or click Apply on the dashboard to push them with one click.

Weeks 2–3

• Don't touch anything. Let Etsy re-index and let the data settle.
• Watch your Etsy stats: views per listing, search impressions, favourites.

Week 4

• Compare the new scores for the 5 listings you updated. Most should be higher.
• Pick the next 5 lowest-scoring listings and repeat.

After 2–3 cycles, you'll have moved through your most underperforming listings. From there, the cadence drops — most of your shop is dialled in, and reports will mostly say “no change needed” with occasional small adjustments as buyer trends shift.

SEO improves how findable your listing is when buyers search. It does not change:

• Whether your photos make people want to click (that's a separate problem)
• Whether your price is competitive
• Whether your reviews and shop policies build trust
• Whether your product is something buyers actually want right now

A perfectly SEO-optimized listing of an unwanted product won't sell. But an SEO-optimized listing of a well-photographed, well-priced, in-demand product can compound dramatically over weeks. Think of our report as the layer that gets buyers to your listing — the rest of the conversion is yours.

• Help & questions: reply to any report email; you'll reach a human.
• Change notification email: dashboard → Settings.
• Cancel: dashboard → Settings → Cancel subscription. Billing stops at the end of the current cycle.
• Disconnect Etsy: dashboard → Connections → Disconnect, or revoke directly from Etsy's app permissions page.