Introduction
Every print-on-demand artist worth their salt (or paint) knows that using heaps of relevant tags is the best way to get eyeballs on your art. But a recent-ish change on Redbubble means the order of your keywords is suddenly way more important! I will show you why, and how to use it to your advantage.
Remind Me What Tags Are?
Tags are just another word for keywords. Use tags to describe your artwork – colours, subject matter, medium, brand, style, etc. If someone is searching the web, typing into the search box on Google or any other site, and what they type matches your keywords, your work will appear for them. So it’s important that the keywords you pick are numerous (more chance to be seen) and relevant (give the people what they are actually looking for).
Let’s look at Redbubble’s artwork uploader, where we can input tags. We’ll use my Budgie Beak design as the example.
For each artwork, you can input a title, tags, and a description. Tags are delimited (separated) with commas. They recommend using only 15, but you can input a maximum of 50 tags. I very rarely use that many.
For this artwork, I have input 22 tags. They reflect the subject matter (budgies), the colours (blue, yellow), my name (jessicaamber), and intended audiemce (kids).
I input these tags just in the order I though of them, but does the order of my tags matter? Yes!
The Golden Keyword
From hereon, I’m going to refer to the very first tag you have in the tags box as the ‘golden keyword‘.
In my example above, the Golden Keyword is the word ‘budgie‘.
Now, let’s look at the published page for this artwork – specifically, the bottom of the page, that shows all the tags you’ve used.
The first section of tags, labelled, ‘Mask Tags‘, pairs my tags with the product I’m looking at – in this case, masks. So if someone sees my mask, and wants to pursue other masks with beaks, they could click the tag ‘beak mask’.
The second section, ‘All Product Tags‘, shows my tags exactly as I input them, without being attached to any specific product.
And the third section, ‘Other Products‘, shows my very first keyword paired with other popular Redbubble products, like t-shirts and stickers. If someone likes a budgie mask enough to click my listing, they’re likely to click on other budgie-themed products like shirts.
Did you notice that for each of these tag lists, the tags appear in the same order I typed them in Redbubble’s upload screen?
Not only that , but see how the golden keyword is the first keyword to appear in every section?
And, perhaps most importantly, it’s used at the start of every tag in the ‘Other Products’ section.
The Impact of the Golden Keyword
Why is it important that my first keyword is ‘budgie’? I will show you.
Let’s say that a potential customer clicks on that ‘budgie t-shirts‘ tag. That will bring up this search result:
3,014 results…and not one of them will be my art, because I don’t have this budgie design uploaded on t-shirts, or any other product. I only have it enabled on masks.
And more importantly, the word budgie is so generic that even if I did have other budgie art on shirts, it probably wouldn’t show up because the category is too crowded.
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Long story short…
if your golden keyword is too generic, and someone clicks one of those tags, they’re no longer looking at your art, and you’re losing the chance for a sale.
The most obvious solution would be to put this artwork on as many other products as possible. But that’s not always wise. In my example of a budgie beak artwork, it’s not going to look good on a shirt or a backpack. People won’t want to buy it, so it’d be a waste of my time to do that.
​So, what else can I do?
Username as Golden Keyword
How about if I change my current golden keyword, ‘budgie’, to something else? For example, my username, JessicaAmber.
Using your username as a product tag can be an effective strategy for keeping people looking at your art only, assuming your name is unique enough that nobody else is using it as a tag.
Let’s go to the published page’s tags…
With ‘jessicaamber‘ being the new golden keyword, suddenly all the tags in ‘Other Products’ will bring people to pages full of my art!
​What happens if I click ‘jessicaamber t-shirts‘?
You guessed it – only my products will appear, meaning that all the customer’s attention stays on me.
Recommended Post
Redbubble Update: Shortened Product Descriptions
While you’re editing your tags, you may need to edit your descriptions too, due to a 2021 Redbubble update truncating them. Find out more in this blog post.
Artwork Title as Golden Keyword
There are some cases where there is a better option than your username for the golden keyword. And that is when you have a artwork title that is uniquely yours.Â
Let’s use another design of mine as an example. This design is called “Thanks, It’s the Depression“
These are the tags I’ve chosen for the artwork:
I’ve used ‘thanks its the depression‘ as the golden keyword. It’s pretty unique, right? I chose this phrase for an artwork in part because there was almost no art using that phrase on Redbubble. ​
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Let’s see what happens when I click on ‘thanks its the depression stickers‘.
Only four results come up, and two of them are mine! This is the case across all product categories. So my art will not be hidden among thousands of search results, which is great.
To effectively use this type of golden keyword, you may want to do some product research on Redbubble. Type in phrases related to your art, and see which ones have very low numbers of results. Then, use that phrase as the golden keyword.
Conclusion
By carefully considering what tag you use as your ‘golden keyword‘, you can more specifically dictate your customer’s experience on Redbubble, gently nudging them towards your desired outcome – keeping them looking at your art until they can’t help but buy heaps of it!
If you have any questions about how to use this strategy, please leave a comment!
Peace, love and effective tags,
Jessica xx