Original data · Etsy search
Original research on how Etsy search actually works — built from aggregate analysis of 200,000+ real Etsy keywords in the Listogics corpus. We publish the shape of Etsy search — distributions and medians, never any single shop's numbers — so any seller can see the patterns and target the searches they can actually win. Ten reports so far:
The big picture: Etsy is a long-tail marketplace where demand and competition rise together, so the biggest keywords are the most crowded — and the high-demand, low-competition "easy keyword" is essentially a rounding error.
Read the report →How Etsy searches are structured: 83% are 2–3 words, the average is 2.6 words, and 89% of terms fit inside Etsy's 20-character tag limit — the data behind "how long and how many words should my tags be."
Read the report →How word count changes everything: median competing listings fall from 160,730 for one-word terms to 392 for six-word phrases (~410× fewer), and difficulty falls off a cliff after four words. Proof of the long-tail advice.
Read the report →Where the audience really is: for the same keyword, Google gets a median 17× more searches than Etsy, and 91% of keywords are searched more on Google — so getting your listings found on Google is a bigger opportunity than most sellers realize.
Read the report →The category map: half of Etsy's in-demand searches sit in just three categories (Home & Living, Jewelry, Art) — and the biggest categories are the most crowded. Even the least-competitive category faces ~15,000 rivals, so no category is "easy".
Read the report →Keyword difficulty & demand: more than half of scorable in-demand keywords are "very high" difficulty (90+), the median is 98, and ~76% of keywords get under 100 searches a month. The winnable space is the long-tail.
Read the report →The vocabulary of Etsy search: gift words appear in 6.7% of in-demand searches and personalization words in 5.1%. The top words are broad, crowded nouns — proof you win by combining them into specific phrases, not using them alone.
Read the report →Etsy runs on gifting: weddings are the #1 occasion by far — in 3.7% of in-demand searches, ahead of Christmas — and 1 in 10 searches names an occasion. The "day" holidays are smaller than sellers assume.
Read the report →The other half of gifting — the recipient: Mom is the #1 gift recipient, searched about 3× as often as Dad, "gifts for her" beats "gifts for him", and 30% of gift searches name who it's for. Teachers, nurses and pet parents form a quieter tier.
Read the report →How shoppers describe what they want: "custom" is the #1 descriptor and beats "personalized" more than 2 to 1 — while "handmade", Etsy's whole identity, is barely searched (0.3%), and the trendy aesthetic words are smaller than the hype.
Read the report →Most Etsy SEO advice is folklore — "use long-tail keywords," "don't chase broad terms" — repeated without numbers. We have a corpus of 200,000+ real Etsy keywords with live search and competition data, so we can check which advice the data actually supports and publish what we find.
Every figure here is an aggregate: distributions, medians, and shares across the corpus. We never publish a single keyword paired with its stats — that raw lookup is the paid product. A competition count of 0 is treated as "no figure posted" (unknown), not zero competitors, so the numbers never overstate how winnable a term is. The reports are a cross-sectional snapshot, refreshed quarterly, and are directional rather than Etsy-official.
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