eBay Titles Matter More Than Ever!

Great listings starts with great eBay titles.

Optimized eBay titles helps your listings be found in eBay and Google search results. Titles are key information for shoppers who increasingly buy on mobile. Furthermore, along with your hero image, or first  photo, the title is what’s going to catch buyers’ eyes. Your title can inspire shoppers to click on your listing.

Yet many sellers are not optimizing their eBay titles!

Small wonder, since eBay’s own Seller Center doesn’t even mention titles in its enumeration of listing best practices. And eBay’s Help page about optimizing listings for best match just says, “Write a clear and concise title with correct spelling and no more than 80 characters.” Correct spelling should go without saying. But while “clear and concise” may be concise, it’s not particularly clear!

So just what constitutes an effective title for your eBay listing?

Let’s start with eBay’s stipulation of “no more than 80 characters.” To write an effective title, you should use as many of those characters as possible — at least 75, if not more. And those characters should comprise keywords: the words that buyers use when searching for your item.

Keywords are attributes that describe your item, such as brand, size, color, model, and, of course, “the noun”, meaning what the item is, such as a dress. They are terms that buyers will type into a search engine to help them find an item like yours. In other words, think like a buyer. What words would someone looking for your item, type into the search bar? Use THOSE words.

So it’s important to think like a buyer when composing titles for your listings.

Keyword order is important, too. In general, lead with the item’s brand name. But if there’s no brand name, lead with the keywords that most clearly and concisely tell buyers what the item is. For example, if you’re listing unbranded Thanksgiving place mats featuring a cornucopia design, don’t lead with the keyword “Placemats”. Instead you’d  want to lead with “Thanksgiving cornucopia”, then”Placemats”. Why do this? Because the attribute of most interest to a potential shopper is Thanksgiving or cornucopia, not placemat.

Similarly, if the item is a no- name brand, don’t lead with brand in the title.

Rather lead with what’s of interest. Is it a cell phone case or a dress? Or perhaps the pattern of polka dot or plaid is most appealing. Use eBay search. See what eBay suggests when you type in relevant keywords.

You can actually enlist the help of eBay’s search engine, to help you determine the most important keywords for your item and in what order you should put them. To find out how, check out my YouTube video “How to Write Great Titles for Your eBay Listings Quickly” . This tip will save you time. Let eBay search tell you exactly how buyers search for your item!

Here are some additional tips for optimizing the titles of your listings.

Titles are not sentences; think “Keyword Keyword Keyword”  Never waste valuable characters on words such as “L@@k” or “Wow” or “Beautiful”, because nobody searches for those. Using terms like these are “old school eBay” used in years past. They are not effective now.

Don’t include excessive punctuation such as exclamation points, quotation marks, commas, etc.  It’s not needed and wastes valuable characters. Also avoid special characters, such as stars, hearts, or emojis.  Style your title in conventional title case, capitalizing the first letter of each keyword. Avoid UPPER CASE TITLES and rAnDom UpPeR aNd LoWeR CaSe TitLeS as they are hard to read! Remember most of your shoppers are on mobile. Again, think like a buyer.

If you’ve got listings that have been up for awhile with no sales, try tweaking their titles using the tips in this post and in my YouTube video. HERE is some additional information to move your listings ahead in eBay search results.

Titles aren’t rocket science.

But they can mean the difference between an item that sells and one that doesn’t. Because so many shoppers are on mobile know that your pictures and your titles are what shoppers see first.  Done right, they land you in front on more shoppers and the RIGHT shoppers. Titles are THAT important.

Attention to titles pays off in better eBay and Google search ranking. And that means more sales!