Original data · Etsy keyword difficulty

How hard is it to rank on Etsy?

We scored 13,486 in-demand Etsy keywords for difficulty. The answer is sobering: more than half are "very high" difficulty (90 or above out of 100) and the median keyword scores 98. Add in that most keywords barely get searched, and the real strategy comes into focus — the winnable space is the specific long-tail.

Built from Listogics' keyword corpus · 17,540 demand-bearing keywords · data through 2026-08-11 · aggregates only.

57%
of scorable in-demand keywords are "very high" difficulty (90+ out of 100)
98
the median difficulty score — most keywords sit near the top of the scale
76%
of Etsy keywords get fewer than 100 searches a month

Most in-demand keywords are dominated by established shops

Keyword difficulty estimates how hard it is to rank on the first page — 0 is wide open, 100 is swamped. Across the in-demand keywords we can score, 57.1% land in the "very high" band, and the median keyword scores 98. In other words, the typical Etsy keyword with real demand is one a newer shop realistically can't win.

Share of in-demand keywords, by difficulty band

Very low (under 60) 20.6%
Low (60-69) 6.4%
Moderate (70-79) 7.6%
High (80-89) 8.3%
Very high (90-100) 57.1%
What it means for your shop: chasing the obvious, popular keywords is a losing game for a new store — those are exactly the "very high" difficulty ones. The free keyword tool flags the low-competition gaps so you spend your 13 tags where you can actually rank.

And most keywords barely get searched

Difficulty is only half the picture. Demand on Etsy is spread across a huge number of specific, low-volume phrases: of the keywords with known search data, 76.0% get fewer than 100 searches a month. So the handful of high-volume "head" terms aren't just the most competitive — they're also the exception, not the rule. The demand you can actually reach is scattered across the long-tail.

The two facts together: the popular keywords are both the most competitive and a tiny slice of total demand. Cover many specific long-tail phrases — each with modest but real demand and far less competition — and those small pockets add up. See how demand and competition vary by category.

Where a new shop can actually win

It's not hopeless — it's specific. About 34.6% of the scorable keywords fall below "very high" difficulty (under 80), and those winnable keywords are almost always long-tail: multi-word phrases a real shopper types, like "silver stacking ring" instead of "ring". They have less demand each, but you can rank for them — and you have 13 tags to cover a lot of them.

Methodology

Figures are aggregates over Listogics' keyword corpus — 101,806 Etsy keywords gathered from keyword-research data and public top-shop tag reports, with data through 2026-08-11. The difficulty analysis covers the 13,486 demand-bearing keywords (at least 100 monthly searches) that carry a difficulty score. Difficulty is eRank's keyword-difficulty score (0–100) where available, or estimated from the competing-listings-to-searches ratio for keywords eRank has not scored (the same estimate the product uses); keywords with neither are excluded from the difficulty bands. The demand figure covers all 73,086 keywords with a known monthly-search number. We report distributions and aggregate shares only — never a single shop's data and never a keyword paired with its numbers. Figures are directional, not Etsy-official.

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