How to Use eRank: A Step-by-Step Workflow for One Etsy Listing

October 13, 2026

To use eRank, sign up free, connect your Etsy shop (eRank can read it but cannot change it), fix what Health Check flags, run a Listing Audit on one weak listing, research replacement phrases in the Keyword Tool, star the good ones into a Keyword List, and then rewrite that listing’s title, tags and description yourself. That last step is the one eRank mostly leaves to you. This guide walks through each step in order, says which plan limit you will hit first, and covers the part after the research, where most sellers stall.

Every plan limit, tool name and quoted line about eRank below was read from erank.com and help.erank.com as of October 2026. eRank changes its tools and limits, so check the live page before you rely on a number.

What eRank is for, before you start

eRank is a research and audit suite for Etsy sellers. Its own plans page sorts the tools into four jobs: Keyword Research, Competitor Analysis, Trend Tracking and Shop Health, plus a Chrome extension that shows its data while you browse Etsy. It answers questions like “what are buyers typing?”, “which of my listings is weak?” and “what is selling in my category this month?”.

It is less of a writing tool. eRank has an AI Listing Helper that drafts titles, tags and descriptions, but it is capped per day on every plan. So the most useful way to think about learning eRank is this: eRank tells you what to change. You still have to make the change. If you go in expecting it to hand you a finished listing, the dashboards will feel like a lot of homework. If you go in with one listing to fix, they make sense quickly.

So pick one listing before you sign up. Ideally one that gets views but few sales, or one that used to sell and has gone quiet. Every step below is easier with a real listing in mind.

Step 1: Sign up and connect your shop

Create a free account at erank.com. The free plan has no time limit and needs no card. Then connect your Etsy shop. eRank’s getting-started guide is explicit about what that connection allows:

eRank only has the ability to read your shop’s data. It is not able to make changes to your Etsy listings in any way.

That matters for two reasons. You can connect without worrying that something will be edited behind your back. And nothing you decide inside eRank reaches Etsy until you go and type it into Shop Manager yourself.

Connecting is what unlocks the shop-specific tools: Listing Audits, Traffic Stats and Health Check. On the free plan you can connect one shop and eRank tracks up to 50 of its active listings. If your shop is larger than that, the free plan will analyse only part of it, which is worth knowing before you conclude a listing is missing.

Step 2: Read the dashboard and run Health Check first

After connecting, you land on the dashboard. Two habits save confusion here:

• Press “Refresh Data” after you change anything. eRank’s own guide tells you to click the “Refresh Data” button in the top right “each time you make changes to your listings or want to see the latest data”. Without it, you can fix a listing and keep looking at the old numbers.
• Open Health Check before anything else. It flags spelling errors, missing tags, missing photos and one-word tags across the shop. These are the cheapest fixes you will ever make, and they need no keyword research at all.

Health Check is where to spend your first fifteen minutes. A listing with nine tags instead of thirteen, or a tag like “gift” on its own, is losing reach for a reason that has nothing to do with clever keywords. Fill the empty slots and turn single words into phrases a buyer would actually type. Our guide to using all 13 Etsy tags covers what a good tag set looks like.

The dashboard also has a Spotted on Etsy report, which shows where eRank found your listings in the first 100 results for keywords, with Etsy’s personalisation and ads stripped out. Treat it as a rough signal rather than a ranking you can promise yourself: real shoppers see personalised results.

Step 3: Audit the one listing you picked

Now open Listing Audits and run it on your chosen listing. eRank describes the audit as checking “how well it complies with Etsy’s guidelines” and its guide says it evaluates “nearly all parts of a listing”. You get a breakdown of the title, tags, description and attributes, with suggestions.

Read the audit with eRank’s own golden rule in mind, quoted from its getting-started guide:

Never touch the SEO of a listing that is performing well for you.

That rule is the most useful sentence in the whole onboarding. An audit will find something to improve on almost every listing, including ones that sell steadily. Audit the weak listing, leave the strong ones alone, and you avoid the most common way new eRank users hurt their own shop.

Write down what the audit flags in plain words: “title repeats the same phrase twice”, “two tags are single words”, “description opens with shipping info”. That list is your brief for step 6.

Step 4: Find better phrases with the Keyword Tool

The Keyword Tool is where most people start, and it works better as step 4, once you know what you are trying to fix. Type the main thing your item is, the way a buyer would say it: “ceramic mug”, not “handmade artisan drinkware”.

For each phrase the tool shows how often it is searched, how much competition it has, and how its interest has moved over time. What to look for:

1. Phrases that describe your item exactly. A popular phrase for a slightly different product brings views that never convert.
2. Longer phrases with a clear buyer. “Personalised mug for teacher” says who is buying and why, and usually has less competition than “mug”.
3. Seasonal phrases with a date attached. A phrase that spikes every November is worth adding in October, then swapping out again.
4. Words buyers use that you don’t. If buyers say “stoneware” and your listing says “ceramic” everywhere, that is a gap worth closing.

On the free plan you get 5 keyword lookups a day, so spend them on your one listing rather than browsing. Our article on finding Etsy keywords for free covers methods that cost no lookups at all, using Etsy’s own search bar.

Step 5: Save the good phrases to a Keyword List

Click the star beside a phrase to save it into a Keyword List. This sounds minor and is the step people skip. Without a list, your research lives in a browser tab you will close. With one, you have the raw material for the rewrite sitting in one place.

Mind the free plan’s limits here. eRank’s guide says “Free members can save up to 5 keywords to one list”, and the plans page shows one Keyword List on Free. So on Free, save only the five phrases you will actually use in the listing.

The browser extension (step 7) uses the same star, so you can add phrases to this list while looking at other shops on Etsy.

Step 6: Rewrite the listing from your list

This is where eRank’s workflow ends and the real work starts. You have an audit telling you what is wrong and a list of phrases buyers use. Now you need:

• a title under Etsy’s 140-character limit that opens with what the item is, using your strongest phrase naturally;
• 13 tags, each a multi-word phrase of 20 characters or fewer, covering different ways a buyer might describe the item rather than repeating the title word for word;
• a description whose first lines say what the item is and why someone would want it, then answer the practical questions (size, materials, what is included, care).

You can do this by hand, and for one listing you should, at least once. It teaches you what a good listing looks like. Our guides on writing an Etsy title and writing Etsy descriptions cover each field.

Using eRank’s AI Listing Helper for the rewrite

eRank’s own tool for this step is the AI Listing Helper, which its plans page says will “Generate optimized titles, tags and descriptions”. The catch is the daily allowance:

Figures from erank.com/pricing as of October 2026. Annual billing is a little cheaper per month.

On the free plan, one AI draft a day means one listing a day. That is fine for fixing a single weak listing. It is the binding limit if you sit down on a Sunday to refresh twenty. Our eRank pricing breakdown goes through what each tier is worth if you are deciding whether to upgrade.

Using a separate writer for the rewrite

The other route is to keep eRank for the research and hand the writing to a tool built for it. That is what ListingBrief AI does: you describe the item and it drafts the title, 13 tags and description, then checks title length, tag count and tag length against Etsy’s limits before you copy them into Shop Manager. The free plan gives 5 generations a day, and Pro at $9.99 a month has no daily cap (fair use). It does no keyword research and tracks no competitors, so it replaces none of steps 1 to 5. It just takes over step 6. Paste the phrases from your Keyword List into the item notes so the draft is built from your research rather than guessed.

Whichever route you take, read the draft before you publish it. Check every claim about size, material and what is in the box against the item itself, because a confident description of the wrong material is worse than a plain one.

Step 7: Install the browser extension for ongoing research

Once your first listing is done, install the eRank extension from the Chrome web store. According to eRank’s guide, on a listing page it shows “estimated sales and revenue, the estimated conversion rate, and the tags that listing uses”, and on a shop page it shows the shop’s sales history and a Tags tab with each tag’s demand and competition figures.

That makes it good for one specific habit: when a competing listing ranks above yours, open it and see which tags it uses. Treat what you see as inspiration for phrases, not a list to copy. Copying another shop’s tags wholesale gives you their listing’s targeting for your item, which rarely fits.

Step 8: Check back, then do the next listing

Give the rewritten listing a couple of weeks before you judge it. Then press Refresh Data, look at its traffic and where it now appears, and decide:

• Views up and sales up: leave it alone. The golden rule now applies to it.
• Views up, sales flat: the search side worked; the photos, price or description are the problem now.
• No change: go back to step 4 and check whether your phrases describe the item as buyers do.

Then pick the next weak listing and repeat. Working through a shop this way, one listing at a time, is slower than rewriting everything in a weekend. It also lets you tell which change actually helped. Our shop-wide listing audit shows how to order the whole shop once you are comfortable with the loop.

Which eRank plan you need for this workflow

If the plan limit you keep hitting is the AI Listing Helper rather than lookups, upgrading eRank is the expensive way to fix it. That limit is about writing, not research, and a free eRank account plus a separate writer often costs less than the next eRank tier. Our eRank review has the longer version of that argument.

When eRank alone is enough

You do not need anything else if:

• you add or refresh a listing or two a week, and one AI draft a day covers it;
• you enjoy writing your own listings and want only the research;
• your listings are close to fine and Health Check fixes are most of what they need.

In that case the free plan, used in the order above, is a complete workflow. Start with one listing, follow the eight steps, and add tools only when a specific limit gets in your way.