How PeteyCo rewrote its paper craft titles in shoppers' words

PeteyCo makes printable paper crafts. A buyer downloads a PDF, prints it on cardstock, colors it in, then cuts and folds. Fold it open and a 3D bedroom, kitchen or home office pops up off the page. Each room works on its own or joins others to make a dollhouse, and some kits bundle four rooms.

The range has grown well past bedrooms. There are pop-up castles, a haunted house for Halloween, a Hansel and Gretel story in four scenes, fairy tale paper puppets and a pop-up soccer stadium. A line of 1:24 scale furniture kits builds a kitchen, a sofa set or a nursery from printed cardstock, and the kitchen goes together in about 30 minutes. The nursery doubles as a baby shower activity, with a crib that can hold a small gift. Cardstock, glue, scissors and something to color with are all it takes. The shop has a 4.89 star rating from 142 reviews.

A shop full of paper rooms has a naming problem. The same product can be a dollhouse kit, a coloring activity, a pop-up card, a kids' craft or a miniature, depending on who is looking. A parent planning a rainy afternoon and a miniature collector building a 1:24 scene type very different things into Etsy search.

Many of PeteyCo's earlier titles were written to list what's inside. "Medieval Paper Puppets: Dragon, Knight, Wizard, Princess Castle Figures" is an accurate inventory of the sheet. It also leaves out what the puppets are for, and what kind of activity a buyer is shopping for.

The research happens in Alura's keyword research. PeteyCo types in a phrase and reads the numbers beside it: Search volume, Competition, which counts how many active Etsy listings use the phrase, and Trend. The Similar Keywords panel shows related phrases, which helps when one product could be called five different things.

Phrases worth keeping get saved with Save keyword, and the saved lists follow the catalog. Each product family has its own list, so the castle words sit together, the dollhouse furniture words sit together, and the seasonal words have a place of their own. When there's a long set of candidate phrases to compare, Bulk Search checks up to 100 of them in one run instead of one at a time.

The Chrome extension adds a second view. On an Etsy search page, its panel lists the listings shown for that search, so PeteyCo can see what a shopper sees for a phrase before deciding to use it.

With a list open, PeteyCo works through a product family in Alura's listing editor. Each listing has a listing score from 0 to 100, with separate grades for photos, video, title, description and tags, which makes the weak spots easy to find.

The work is split. AI drafts tags and the alt text for the photos. Some titles start from an AI suggestion too, mostly on the 1:24 furniture kits, where the change is small. The bigger rewrites, like the castles and the puppets, are typed by hand.

Nothing reaches Etsy until PeteyCo clicks Publish changes. When an AI version doesn't sound like the shop, Revert all or Restore version in Listing history puts the earlier one back. PeteyCo keeps some suggestions and rolls others back.

Here are four title rewrites, before and after. All were typed in the editor, and the after versions are live on Etsy now. The before titles listed the contents, the format and the delivery method. The after titles name the kind of thing a shopper searches for: a template, a printable, a Halloween coloring activity, a storytelling activity. They keep the file formats.

The puppets went from a list of characters to a Fairy Tale Theater with a job to do. The haunted castle became a template and a Halloween coloring activity. The blank dollhouse became a printable paper dollhouse and an easy craft for kids. Two of them also drop "Instant Download" from the end. The listings still say they're digital downloads, and the space in the title goes to words about the craft itself.

For other sellers of printables: before you write a title, picture the person who needs the thing. Then write down what they would call it. Keep the details that help a buyer decide, like the scale or the file type, and cut the ones that only matter to the person who made it.