How Our Family Foundations rewrote its titles to say what's in the file

Our Family Foundations makes printables for busy moms, homemakers and homeschooling families, and the catalog covers both halves of that life. In the kitchen there are homestead pantry cookbooks: dry mix recipes for mason jars, just-add-water meals for the pantry shelf, coffee creamers, simmer pots and a book of desserts that use five ingredients or less. For the rest of the house there are homeschool planners, ASL posters, family binders for medical records and emergencies, and end-of-life planners.

The two halves meet in the homeschool unit studies. Sourdough becomes a 22-page science lesson on fermentation for ages 7 to 12, with an optional bread recipe at the end. Others follow a chick from egg to hatching, or cover maple sugaring and honeybees. All of it is an instant download, printed at home.

A buyer can't flip through a PDF before she buys it. Almost everything she knows about a download comes from the photos and the title: what kind of planner it is, who it's for, how many pages it has, and whether she types into it or prints it. For a shop that sells an 80-page family binder and a 465-recipe cookbook bundle, that's a lot to fit into one line.

Some of the shop's earlier titles followed a common Etsy pattern, a run of search phrases one after another so the listing could match as many searches as possible. "Homeschool Planner Printable PDF Homeschool Organizer Daily Weekly Monthly Schedule Lesson Planning Binder" covers a lot of searches. It was written for the search bar, and the same line is what a mom reads when she's deciding whether this is the planner she needs.

The research happens in Alura's keyword research. The shop types in a phrase a buyer might use for one of its products and reads what comes back: Search volume, Competition, which counts the active Etsy listings using the phrase, and KD, a difficulty grade that runs from Minimal to Extreme. Similar Keywords suggests the next phrase to check, so one search leads to the next.

The shop also searches Etsy itself with Alura's Chrome extension open. On a search results page, the extension lists the listings on that page, and each one opens a listing report with estimated sales. For a shop that sells digital files, that's a quick way to see which planners and cookbooks buyers are already choosing, and how those listings word their titles before the shop writes its own.

The rewriting happens in Alura's listing editor, and the shop types most of its titles itself. The plain name of the product moves to the front. The number that matters goes in: pages, posters, planning sheets. The title says whether the file is printable or fillable, and any phrase that was already said once comes out. Nothing changes on Etsy until the shop clicks Publish changes, and Listing history keeps the earlier version if a rewrite doesn't sit right.

The AI does more of the work elsewhere in the listing. Alura suggests tags and writes alt text for the photos, and on some listings the shop ran Alura's AI optimization instead of rewriting by hand. All of it lands in the same editor, next to the titles the shop wrote itself.

Here are four titles, before and after. Each one now starts with what the product is, keeps or adds the count where there is one, and drops phrases that repeated. The family binder gained its page count. The pantry planner now names the six planning sheets and the 14-page guide that come in the file. The ASL set kept its 100 posters and cards and dropped the repeated "sign language".

The photos were already doing some of this. The family binder's cover image says 80+ pages in a bright badge. Now the title says it too, in the words a buyer reads before she ever taps the photo.

The shop's advice is for anyone selling digital files. A buyer comparing two planners can't hold either one, so tell her what she'd be holding. Give the number of pages, recipes or cards. Say whether it prints, fills in on a tablet, or both. And name who it's for, whether that's a beginner, a homeschool family or a parent setting up an emergency binder.