Finding Your Next Etsy Bestseller: A Keyword Research Walkthrough

Most keyword advice assumes a number Etsy does not publish. Search volume — how many people typed a phrase last month — exists inside Etsy's own analytics and nowhere else. No third-party tool has it, including this one, and the ones that show it are showing you a model.

So this walkthrough is built on what Etsy does publish: what is already listed, what it costs, and who ranks for the phrase today. That turns out to be enough to choose between two product ideas — it just won't tell you the size of the crowd.

Step 1: Search the market before your shop

Open Product Research and search the thing you are considering making — not the phrase you would list it under, the object itself. The search reads Etsy's public marketplace, so it works before you have connected anything.

Each result comes back with what Etsy publishes about it: the title, the price in the seller's own currency, how many people have favourited it, and a link to the listing. That currency detail is not pedantry — a page of results for an English keyword routinely mixes USD, EUR, GBP and more, so a column of numbers is not a column of comparable numbers.

What this step cannot tell you: monthly sales, growth, or an opportunity score. Etsy's search response carries none of those, so Atlas leaves them empty rather than modelling them. A tool that hands you “est. 400 sales/mo” for an arbitrary listing is guessing, and you cannot tell how badly.

If you looked around the product tour before signing up, one thing will be missing here, and deliberately so. The tour's Product Research page carries a headline strip and a Trending Now row; your signed-in page does not. Those figures come from a hand-built sample catalogue, because “trending” and “growth” cannot be computed from a search response at all. Rather than show you invented numbers once you are looking at your own account, the page hides them.

It is worth knowing which of the two you are looking at, because it is the difference between a demonstration and a measurement — and it applies to the keyword side as well, where the tour shows volume and competition scores that the live page does not.

Step 2: Read the shape of the results

Two panels appear once a real search is up, and both are computed from the results already on your screen rather than from another request. Common words shows what the sellers who rank for this term agree on putting in a title. Price Levels shows where their prices actually sit.

Read them together. If every title carries the same three words, those words are the price of entry, not your differentiator. And if the prices cluster tightly, you are looking at a category where buyers have a settled expectation — worth knowing before you price against it. Our guide on pricing for real profit picks up from there.

Both panels follow whatever filters you have applied, so narrowing the price range narrows what they describe too.

Step 3: Test the phrase itself

Now switch to Keyword Research and search the phrase you would actually list under. One search returns two measured things: how many active listings Etsy matches for that term, and the price range across the results it returned.

That match count is competition, not demand. Forty thousand listings tells you how many sellers are already there; it says nothing about how many buyers are searching. A low count can mean an untapped niche or a phrase nobody uses, and this data cannot distinguish the two — which is why the next step matters more than the number.

The same panel shows the top listings for the term with their positions, sorted by Etsy's own relevance. If one of them is yours, it is marked Your listing. Note what these results are: a snapshot of today's search, not a tracked ranking history — the panel says so itself.

Step 4: Look at who is winning it

The most useful part of a crowded result is the sellers in it. From a Product Research result you can open the shop behind it and see its public profile: when it opened, its all-time sales, its review count and average, its favourites, and how many listings it currently has active.

This is where a phrase becomes a decision. Ten thousand competing listings owned by shops with six reviews each is a different proposition from two thousand owned by three shops with fifty thousand sales between them. The count alone reads identically in both cases.

Step 5: Keep the shortlist

Keyword Research keeps a list of tracked keywords, and it fills up from one place: starring a keyword in the Atlas browser extension while you are on Etsy. The web page shows what you have starred; it is not where you add them.

That is deliberate — the moment you decide a phrase is worth watching is usually the moment you are looking at it on Etsy, not the moment you are sitting in a dashboard.

What to actually do this week

1. Pick one product idea and search the object in Product Research. Read Common words before anything else — it tells you what the category calls itself.
2. Search two competing phrases for the same product in Keyword Research and compare the match counts. Take the smaller one only if step three below agrees.
3. Open the shops behind the top three results for the phrase you prefer. Sales and review counts decide whether that competition is beatable.
4. Star the two or three phrases worth revisiting from the extension, so the shortlist is waiting next time instead of being re-derived.

For the modules themselves in full, see Using Product Research and Using Keyword Research. If you want the reasoning behind how Etsy ranks any of this, our post on how the search algorithm actually works covers it with sources.