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| Good merch tags start with buyer intent. Think about what your ideal customer would actually type into a search bar, use specific phrases, avoid repetitive or overly broad terms, and tailor your tags to the rules of each marketplace. |
Tags look deceptively simple.
You upload a design, write the title and description, and then the platform gives you a little box asking for tags. So you type whatever seems remotely related:
christmas, shirt, funny, women, gift, holiday, cute, vintage...
Done.
Except those little boxes can have a surprisingly large effect on whether the right person ever finds the product.
And the goal isn’t to come up with as many words as possible.
It’s to figure out what a shopper would actually type when looking for something like your design.
That distinction has become much clearer while I’ve been listing products for Public Nuisance Apparel. A design might contain a black cat, poinsettias, burgundy ribbon, gold stars and a funny Christmas phrase. Technically, dozens of keywords describe it.
That doesn’t mean all of them deserve a tag.
Start with the buyer’s search, not the artwork
This is probably the biggest change I’d make to the way beginners approach tags.
Don’t begin by asking:
What’s in this picture?
Begin by asking:
What would somebody type if they wanted this?
Those questions overlap, but they aren’t identical.
Take our Merry & Unbothered Christmas design.
Visually, it contains a black cat, holly, poinsettias, ribbon and gold decorative elements.
A shopper probably isn’t searching:
poinsettia ribbon star cat illustration
They’re much more likely to search something like:
black cat christmas shirt
funny cat christmas sweatshirt
christmas shirt for cat lover
vintage christmas cat
Those searches describe the thing the customer wants, not merely the objects the artist used to create it.
That’s the mindset I want when I’m choosing tags.
Tags should cover different reasons someone might want the product
A good tag set usually approaches the design from several directions.
You have the subject.
You have the audience.
You have the occasion or situation.
You have the style or aesthetic.
You have the idea, phrase or personality behind the design.
You may also have a niche, hobby, profession, identity or relationship that makes the product relevant.
For example, our Mahjong design could be found because someone wants mahjong merch, because she needs something for mahjong game night, because she's buying a mahjong gift, or because she likes vintage mahjong artwork.
Those are four different search intentions surrounding the same design.
That’s much stronger than using:
mahjong, tile, game, red, green, floral
The second group accurately describes the artwork.
The first group describes why someone might buy it.
Specific usually beats broad
Imagine two tags:
christmas
and
black cat christmas
The first one theoretically reaches a much larger audience.
It also competes with nearly everything humans have ever attached a snowflake to.
The second reaches fewer people, but those people are much closer to the product.
That’s generally the tradeoff with merch keywords.
You don’t necessarily want the largest audience.
You want the most relevant audience you can realistically reach.
That’s why phrases are often so valuable.
Zazzle’s current creator guidance specifically recommends descriptive, relevant tags and says phrase tags can be useful when they reflect searches customers genuinely use. Zazzle currently allows up to 10 tags, with phrase tags containing as many as five words. (Zazzle)
That doesn’t mean every tag needs to be five words long.
It means you shouldn’t be afraid of specificity.
Don’t waste tags repeating the same idea
This one is easy to do without realizing it.
Suppose I use:
mahjong giftmahjong giftsgift for mahjong playermahjong player giftmahjong gift for women
I may feel like I’ve optimized the listing beautifully.
Mostly I’ve said the same thing five times.
Zazzle explicitly advises creators not to repeat keywords across multiple tags and not to create unnecessary plural variations. (Zazzle)
That space could have covered completely different searches:
mahjong game nightvintage mahjongmah jonggmahjong clubfloral mahjong
Now the metadata describes a larger portion of the real market instead of hammering one phrase repeatedly.
Tag the design, not every product it can appear on
This is especially important on a platform like Zazzle.
A design may be transferable across shirts, totes, mugs, stationery and other products. Zazzle therefore advises creators not to use product types as tags unless the product type is actually relevant to the design itself. (Zazzle)
That was interesting to me because the natural instinct is to write things like:
shirt, t shirt, sweatshirt, tee, graphic tee
You can burn half your available tags before you've told the search engine anything meaningful about the artwork.
For a design called Yuletide Social Club — Champagne & Good Taste, I'd rather spend those tags on ideas such as:
champagne christmaschristmas cocktailyuletide social clubelegant christmasvintage holiday
Those are the concepts that distinguish the design.
The marketplace already knows what physical product you put it on.
Generic “gift” tags aren’t automatically useful
This gets complicated because platforms handle tags differently.
On Etsy, buyer-oriented terms such as “gift for dog mom” or other occasion-based phrases can be useful, and Etsy encourages sellers to use all 13 available tags with varied, natural-sounding phrases. (Etsy)
Zazzle is more restrictive.
Its current tagging guidance specifically discourages generic marketplace-wide words such as gift, gifts, gift idea, custom, personalized, merchandise and similar terms because they could apply to enormous numbers of products. (Zazzle)
That’s a perfect example of why copying the same SEO formula from one marketplace to another can go wrong.
Good keyword research is transferable.
Platform rules are not.
Zazzle and Etsy want slightly different things
If you sell on multiple platforms, this distinction matters.
Etsy currently gives sellers 13 tags and recommends using every one of them. Etsy specifically encourages diverse multi-word phrases rather than wasting tag slots on isolated words. It also uses categories and attributes as additional search signals, meaning information already supplied through an attribute doesn’t always need to be repeated in tags. (Etsy)
Zazzle currently allows 10 tags and places a particularly strong emphasis on relevance, avoiding repetition and avoiding generic words that apply to large portions of the marketplace. (Zazzle)
So the principle is the same:
Help the search system understand exactly what the design is.
But the mechanics are different.
That’s why I wouldn’t blindly copy a Zazzle tag block into Etsy—or vice versa.
The search bar is one of the simplest keyword tools you have
Before paying for elaborate SEO software, type your idea into the marketplace itself.
Start with something broad.
Maybe:
mahjong
Then see what the search interface suggests.
Try:
mahjong christmasmahjong giftmahjong game nightvintage mahjong
Do the same on Google.
Do the same on Pinterest if it’s a visually driven niche.
Etsy itself recommends using search-bar suggestions to help identify the kinds of phrases shoppers are using. (Etsy) Zazzle likewise points creators toward tools such as Google Trends, Google Search and keyword-research tools when developing titles and tags. (Zazzle)
Autocomplete isn’t perfect market research.
But it’s considerably better than sitting at your desk inventing phrases nobody has ever typed.
Search volume still isn’t the whole story
This connects directly to the merch research we’ve already been doing.
A phrase can have huge search volume and still be a lousy merch keyword.
People might search “black cats” because they want breed information, adoption advice, photographs, folklore or Halloween history.
Someone searching “black cat Christmas shirt” is telling us something very different.
That’s why I care about buyer intent more than raw volume.
For tags, I’d rather have a smaller phrase that accurately identifies the shopper than a gigantic keyword that vaguely describes the subject.
Style words can be surprisingly useful
Merch buyers don’t always search by subject alone.
They also search for a look.
That makes words and phrases such as:
vintage christmasretro halloweengothic floraldark academiamid centurycottagecore
potentially useful when they genuinely match the design.
The important part is genuinely.
Calling everything “vintage,” “retro,” “boho,” “minimalist,” and “aesthetic” because those words sound searchable is just another form of keyword stuffing.
A keyword should earn its place by accurately describing the product.
Your phrase can be a keyword too
Sometimes the slogan itself is the most distinctive search term you have.
Our Christmas design says:
That phrase belongs somewhere in the metadata because someone who has seen the design elsewhere—or simply loves the wording—may search it directly.
The same applies to something like:
Elegance With an Exit Strategy
or
or
A distinctive phrase can become part of the product’s identity.
And unlike something broad like funny shirt, you have a realistic chance of owning that association inside your own catalog.
Think in keyword families
When I’m working out tags now, I find it useful to think in families rather than hunting for ten random words.
Take a hypothetical Yuletide Social Club design.
The central subject gives us champagne Christmas.
The occasion gives us Christmas party.
The aesthetic gives us elegant Christmas and vintage holiday.
The concept gives us Yuletide Social Club.
The activity gives us Christmas cocktails.
The audience might suggest something like holiday hostess if the artwork and marketplace rules make that appropriate.
Now the tag set has structure.
Each phrase is doing a different job.
Don’t make every similar product compete for exactly the same searches
Suppose you make six Christmas sweatshirts.
If every one of them uses:
christmas, holiday, festive, christmas shirt, christmas sweater
you haven’t really created six SEO opportunities.
You’ve created six products competing for the same broad terms.
The black-cat design can lean into cat Christmas.
The champagne design can lean into cocktail Christmas.
A book design can lean into bookish Christmas.
A Mahjong design can lean into mahjong Christmas.
They can share some relevant seasonal language while still targeting different corners of the market.
That’s also a much healthier way to build a collection.
The artwork is related.
The SEO doesn’t have to be identical.
Tags aren’t permanent
One thing I don't want to do with Public Nuisance is publish a product and then assume the metadata is sacred forever.
If something gets no visibility, the tags are one of the things worth reviewing.
Maybe the wording is too broad.
Maybe we optimized around terminology shoppers don't actually use.
Maybe the seasonal phrase changed.
Maybe another synonym is more common.
Both Zazzle and Etsy encourage sellers to revisit their metadata rather than treating search optimization as a one-time exercise. Zazzle allows creators to edit tags after publication, while Etsy explicitly recommends using shop statistics to identify underperforming listings and refresh their tags and titles. (Zazzle)
That’s important.
SEO isn't a tattoo.
You can change it.
A simple test before publishing your tags
Before I publish a product, I want to be able to look at every tag and answer one question:
Can I realistically imagine a shopper typing this into a search box because she wants something like this design?
If the answer is yes, the tag probably belongs.
If the only reason I included it is “this word technically appears somewhere in the artwork,” I’d reconsider it.
If it repeats another tag almost word for word, I’d replace it.
If it could describe half the products on the marketplace, I’d get more specific.
And if it has nothing to do with the design but supposedly gets lots of searches?
Delete it.
Good tags describe demand, not desperation
That may be the simplest way I can put it.
Weak tagging tries to appear in as many searches as possible.
Good tagging tries to appear in the right searches.
You don't need a shopper searching for “Christmas” to find your black-cat sweatshirt among a million unrelated products.
You need the person searching for a funny, stylish black-cat Christmas design to encounter something that looks exactly like what she had in mind.
That's what tags are really for.
Not convincing the algorithm that your product is relevant to everything.
Helping it understand exactly who this product is relevant to.
And once you start thinking that way, choosing tags gets considerably easier.
