How to write listing titles buyers notice

For years the advice was to stuff a title with every word a buyer might type. Brand, item, colour, size, three synonyms, a couple of adjacent brands for good measure. That worked when nearly everyone arrived through a search box.

More and more people now meet their next secondhand item in a feed instead — scrolling, not searching. That changes what a good title does. In a search box a title is a net. In a feed it is a caption, and it has about one second to tell someone what they are looking at.

What to do instead

Write the title the way you would say it out loud to someone standing next to you. "Patagonia fleece, men's large, deep green." Not "PATAGONIA Synchilla Fleece Jacket Mens L Green Outdoor Hiking Retro Vintage 90s".

Three things, in this order, carry almost all the weight:

• The brand, if the brand is the reason someone wants it
• The item, in the words a normal person uses
• The one detail that decides it — size, colour, or the specific model

Everything after that is decoration. If a word is not helping a human recognise the thing, it is costing you the attention you needed for the words that were.

Where the old advice still applies

Search has not gone away. The fix is not to abandon keywords, it is to stop putting them in the title. Put them in the description and in the item specifics, which is where a search engine reads them anyway and where no human has to wade through them.

That split is worth internalising: the title is for people, the fields are for machines. Most listings get this backwards and write a title for the machine that no person wants to read.

A test you can run this week

Pick five listings that have been sitting. Read each title out loud. If you would be embarrassed to say it to a person, rewrite it as a sentence fragment a person would use, move the stripped-out keywords into the description, and leave the photos and the price exactly as they are.

Change one variable at a time or you will not learn anything from the result.