Well what can I say! I decided to close my Etsy shop with the aim of improving my SEO. Closing the Etsy shop was a big decision for me as I have received quite a lot of orders via Etsy. However, after checking out various areas of my site I think closing the Etsy side of my business has been the right thing to do because I feel it was causing problems such as:
- conflicting information on Google as there was definitely some duplication on information on both my webshop and the Etsy shop due to the fact I had similar products on both shops.
- difficult pricing of postage charges on the Etsy shop compared to the webshop so I found sometimes when I received large orders that the postage would be more expensive than what the Etsy shop would calculate and I was having to absorb the costs into my business.
- the charges that Etsy was making on running the shop was becoming rather high to the point that for a big order the charges were equivalent to the cost of one of my products which would mean I was giving away a product for free when I received these orders.
- when calculating the postage costs I felt as though I couldn’t go above a certain level otherwise I would price myself out of the market for my products.
- I found that several regular customers moved from the Etsy shop to start shopping on my webshop which has a lot more choice than the Etsy shop due to the availablity to collect your order from my webshop which I did not include on my Etsy shop.
As you can see there have been many factors which have contributed to me closing the Etsy shop and it has not been a decision which I have taken lightly. Only time will tell if I have made the right decision. So I will be keeping a close eye on my Google ranking, analytical data and SEO analysis to see how everything changes or stays the same over the next few weeks.
After closing the Etsy shop, I feel a whole lot happier and ready to take on the webshop to push it further so that my products become more popular with customers in the UK. I’m not saying I won’t ever go back to Etsy but for the time being my webshop is enough. As I am already posting to customers in all four corners of the UK. The way to increase my customer base is by good old word of mouth and advertising my business. Maybe even attending a few craft fairs over the coming few months to get my products noticed by more people. 🙂
As for the SEO of my site that is “work in progress” at the moment and I will be working to improve this behind the scenes in the near future. It is amazing what you have to learn to do as a food blogger. There are some great tips on Charlotte’s Lively Kitchen blog which I look at regularly just to keep me on the right track. It is not just about the baking put it that way. I have learnt all about headings and meta-descriptions this week yet I thought I had been using these effectively enough but apparently not. I have labelled all my photos on the blog, deleted a lot of redirects and changed titles of some blog posts. All with the SEO and google ranking in mind.
Although the webshop is going to be my focus point it is the blog which I want to spend more time on. So writing more posts and sharing more recipes will be my aim. Hope you will visit my webshop soon as there are new products being added all the time. It would be great if you would try something for that special occasion or even just a tea time treat.