January is usually one of my slowest months after the holiday rush, but there are a lot of other factors affecting sales. Competition on Etsy has increased by about a third in the last year. Living expenses like food and gas are going through the roof, cutting into how much expendable funds people have to spend on "wants" as opposed to necessities.
Tax season is coming up, and many self-employed people are scrambling to save enough to pay their taxes before the deadline if they haven't been setting aside money for it all along. The war between Ukraine and Russia is worrying. It is affecting imports of wheat and other things that will eventually affect the economy in other countries. People are afraid their countries might also get involved in it at some point. The economy in general is worse and many are predicting a recession is coming, so some people are being more frugal in their spending.
Looking at your titles, they could be improved. One of your titles: Charcuterie Board | Bread Board | Cutting Board | Handle
You use the word Board three times, which will automatically lower your ranking for "keyword stuffing." Don't repeat words in your titles.
A better title: Charcuterie Bread Cutting Board with Handle, Exotic hardwoods, 12” L x 10" W x .75 H
Search engines will combine any word in your title with any other word in your title, even if they are not next to each other, if someone searches that way, so you get the same keywords without a penalty.
| dividers are hard to read, so less buyers will read your title. We are taught sentence structure in school using a comma followed by a space to divide thoughts, so that is what most people are more comfortable reading.
In my titles, I try to get WHAT the item is first in the first 3 or 4 words, then one more long tail keyword buyers might use to find that product. I use the 2nd half of my title for buyers to tell them something more they might want to know about the product, such as size, color, type of woods used, whatever is appropriate for your product that a shopper might want to know without reading the whole description.
Search engines now prefer titles around 80 characters, give or take a few characters. Too short or too long won't rank as well. Your above title is 58 characters, including punctuation and spaces, so you could probably get another keyword phrase in there or tell something more about the product, such as size, or choice of woods, etc. My example title is 84 characters, which is close enough to 80.
Tags should always be 2 or 3 words, use as much as the 20 characters allowed as you can. They don't necessarily have to make sense as a keyword phrase, as long as there are other words in your tags that will combine well with them. The Etsy search engine will combine words from 2 or more tags if someone searches that way. Exact matches are not so important anymore.
If you sell to foreign countries, give measurements in both metric and imperial. People in the US don't know how big a cm is, but most of the rest of the world uses metric and don't understand how big an inch is.
In your descriptions, try to break it up into paragraphs that are 4 or 5 lines long. That will make it easier to read, so more people will bother to read it. Use the keywords in your title in a sentence or two right at the top of your description, while making a selling point and sounding natural.
Then get your measurements or any other important information next, so people don't have to hunt for it. If people read descriptions at all, they usually only scan for the basic information, so make it easy to find.
If you do something on your store every day, whether it is adding a new product or revising an old one, that will make search engines visit your site more often and find your changes fast. Instead of revising all your products in one big marathon, spread them out to a few a day.
It is always a good idea to make changes gradually, because not only does it make your shop appear more active to search engines, you also want to revise a small amount, then wait to see if it made it better or worse. It can take up to a month for things to settle in the search engines so you can really tell what improved things or what was a bad idea. You don't want to make a huge number of changes all at once and then find out what you did was the wrong thing and tanked all your listings at once.
And if a product is already selling well, leave it alone.
