My Store: So confused....Products, Tagging, descriptions and 3rd party referrals?

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Aloha my Zazzle family,

First a brief backstory so you may understand my questions:

I am an artist. I found zazzle long ago as a place to just pop in some of my art and designs so they just don’t die un-viewed somewhere in some random dusty hard drive. I was happy about this, zazzle being an avenue to show something live, and it was exciting to see the designs come to life on products. Therefore, I randomly made a bunch of stores which reflected my diverse interests in life because everything could not easily be folded together in one store.

Now older, I am back and taking a serious look at zazzle ( especially my tropical one ) like it could be a place for real revenue. I noticed that almost ALL of my sales come from 3rd party referrals. This being said, I checked out my tags and titles and descriptions and they were seriously lacking. I’m taking a hard look at SEO and tagging now and wondering how these 3rd parties even found me. I get basically NO organic IN ZAZZLE traffic… how is this happening?

I don’t design customizable products. I create mostly tropical decor ( especially the store linked below ) and all of it looks more like what what you would find in a department store. Now that I am back looking at zazzle, I am working on SEO, and I realized that zazzle uses more of a old tagging system for search results- IE: One word bubbles “Tropical, blue, ocean, Island, floral” and you get lost in the sea of millions- BUT zazzle also says that they promote your products through google etc which google prefers long tail keywords. IE: “Moody tropical palm tree patterned shower curtain” and keyword rich descriptions.  I’m at a loss here.. now that I am optimizing, whats the best tagging strategy and what do you all use?

If I use all long tail keywords, I wont be found in zazzle marketplace by shoppers, so any new 3rd parties won’t have the ability to find me and promote outside either. If I use all one word keywords, I essentially do not get showcased in google search - logically. So, If I provided a mix of long and short keywords I cut my chances on either side by 50%?  Has this been what you all have experienced?

Then, there is z-rank now, and also zazzle wants us to add media and mockups, optimization of products etc etc… It seems like a lot of work for minimal rewards. Am I just wasting my time?

This is the only real place I have to showcase my artworks. Society6- even though they kept me as an artist- is practically dead. Redbubble is a nightmare. I do not know how to build websites, I have no real time I can dedicate to promote myself. Am I the only one like this here? Everything I find here seems customizable and I feel like a fish out of water. Should I just give up on the extra work of SEO optimization and just continue my path of posting artwork for the simple joy of it?

Any real thoughts, opinions and feed back on your experiences you have would be great

My store:

https://www.zazzle.com/store/_healani_art

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Just my two cents worth: I think your artwork is absolutely beautiful and definitely sellable here. It is hard to get noticed without doing a lot of promoting on social media but I think it would be worth the effort.

As for keywords, I use a mainly longtail keyword phrases and according to Google; ‘the Zazzle search engine recognizes and processes long-tail keywords’. Actually Google also gives quite a lot of useful info about tagging. I just searched ‘Does zazzle search engine recognize long tail keywords?’.

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Thank you so much Baylee. I will give it a shot. When I asked google the AI responded to my query and it told me that zazzle does not process long tail. This is very good information. I tried with social too, but I rarely have time for it to be honest. I always just want to make art with my free time, I will take another look at social. Much mahalo!

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Zazzle has become a lot of work with little return on your investment of time. That’s my honest opinion. If you want to create art on Zazzle as a hobby with little expectation of financial return, then go for it. If you’re looking to make a decent amount of extra income each month, well, that’s a pipe dream.

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Firstly I am no expert but I have learnt a few things along my journey. My store is quite niche but I am expanding the items.

The best thing I did was to order my products by “views” and then start looking at those that didn’t have any. This is where I started with deciding if I wanted to keep the designs or not, if keeping then I changed everything including the title! Those that were getting views but no sales I did the same. Anything with sales I left well alone.

My Z rank increased after this as I guess somehow my actions affected the algorithm!

Then I looked at sales to see if I could spruce up the designer images to keep the customer looking at it by showing the item” in different settings. I didn’t touch the title, description or tags!

My store is a hobby and therapy that pays enough for treats! 

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