You open your TPT dashboard and see that people are looking at your product.
The views are there.
But the sales aren’t.
So naturally, you start thinking about SEO.
Maybe you need better keywords. Maybe you need more traffic. Maybe you need to rewrite the title.
But before you start changing everything, there’s another question worth asking:
What happens after people find your product?
If teachers are already clicking on your resource but aren’t buying it, getting even more people to the listing may not solve the problem.
You may need to look at the listing itself.
Here’s where I’d start.
1. Look at the title
Your title has an important job: it needs to help a potential buyer quickly understand what the resource is and whether it’s relevant to them.
Ask yourself:
- Is the resource type clear?
- Is the intended grade or audience clear?
- Is the topic or skill clear?
- Does the title accurately describe what the buyer is getting?
- Would a teacher understand the product at a glance?
You don’t need to cram every possible keyword into your title. A clear title is more useful than a long title that tries to say everything. Think about what a teacher needs to know before deciding whether to click. Then ask whether your title delivers that information.
2. Look at the first few lines of your description
A buyer may not read your entire description.
The opening needs to quickly answer:
- What is this?
- Who is it for?
- Why would I use it?
If your description starts with several paragraphs of general information before explaining what the resource actually does, you may be making the buyer work too hard.
For example, instead of leading with a long explanation of the topic, you could get straight to the practical information:
This no-prep reading activity is designed for students in Grades 3–4 and includes differentiated passages, comprehension questions and an answer key.
The buyer immediately knows what they’re looking at. The rest of the description can provide the detail.
3. Look at your preview
Your preview is one of the places where a potential buyer gets to see what they’re actually purchasing.
Ask yourself:
Does my preview help someone make a buying decision?
Can they see:
- the quality of the resource?
- what is included?
- how the resource is structured?
- what the activities look like?
- whether it is appropriate for their students?
- enough of the product to understand its value?
A preview doesn’t need to show everything. But it should give the buyer enough information to feel confident about what they’re getting. If someone has already clicked on your product, this is an important opportunity to help them move from “This looks interesting” to “This is exactly what I need.”
4. Make the audience obvious
One reason a product may attract clicks but struggle to convert is that the right buyer isn’t immediately sure whether it’s actually meant for them. Think about your intended buyer.
Is your resource for:
- a particular grade level?
- a specific age group?
- a particular subject?
- intervention?
- small groups?
- independent work?
- whole-class teaching?
- early finishers?
- assessment?
- homework?
You don’t necessarily need to include all of this in the title. But the listing should make the intended use clear. A teacher shouldn’t have to piece together whether your resource is suitable for their classroom.
5. Explain the problem the resource solves
Teachers aren’t usually buying a PDF simply because it exists. They’re buying something because they have a need.
Maybe they need:
- a lesson that is ready to go
- additional practice
- an activity for a particular skill
- something for early finishers
- a resource for a specific group of students
- an engaging way to teach a concept
- something they can use tomorrow without spending hours preparing it
Your listing should help the buyer see how your resource fits into that situation. Instead of only describing what the resource contains, explain what the teacher can use it for. That’s a subtle but important difference.
6. Check whether the search matches the product
This one brings us back to SEO. Imagine your product is appearing in searches for a particular term. That’s great — but only if the people searching for that term are actually looking for what your product provides. If the search and the product don’t match particularly well, you can end up with plenty of clicks but few purchases. That’s why I wouldn’t automatically interpret low sales as a need for more keywords.
Sometimes the problem is that you’re attracting the wrong people.
Look at the searches bringing people to your product and ask:
If I were searching for this, would this product be exactly what I expected to find?
If the answer is no, that’s useful information. You may need to reconsider the wording, positioning or even which search themes you’re targeting.
7. Consider whether the value is obvious
Sometimes a resource is genuinely useful, but the listing doesn’t communicate that very well.
A buyer might look at the title and think:
“Okay, it’s a worksheet.”
But what makes your resource useful?
- Does it save preparation time?
- Does it include multiple levels?
- Does it provide everything needed for a particular lesson?
- Does it offer a particular format or approach?
- Does it include answer keys, differentiated versions, editable elements or other features that matter to the buyer?
Your listing should make those useful details easy to find. Don’t assume the buyer will work out the value for themselves. Show them.
8. Don’t ignore the product itself
Sometimes we want an SEO explanation because SEO feels like something we can fix. But if people are finding a product and consistently choosing not to buy it, it’s worth considering whether the issue goes beyond the listing.
Ask:
- Does the product meet the need suggested by the title?
- Is the product easy to use?
- Is the content what the buyer would expect?
- Does the quality match the price?
- Does the resource offer something useful or distinctive?
- Does the preview accurately represent the product?
SEO can help the right people find your product. It can’t make an unsuitable product suitable.
9. Don’t make five changes at once
If you’ve identified a product that needs attention, resist the temptation to completely rewrite everything. Start with the biggest opportunity. Maybe the title isn’t clear. Maybe the opening description is weak. Maybe the preview doesn’t communicate the value. Maybe the product is attracting searches that aren’t a good match. Choose one or two changes that address the issue you’ve identified. Then record what you changed.
This matters because you want to be able to look back later and understand what you actually did. If you change the title, description, preview, price and product itself all at once, it becomes much harder to know what made a difference.
10. Give your changes time
This is particularly important with TPT SEO. You make a change. A week later, you look at the numbers.
Nothing obvious has happened.
That doesn’t necessarily mean the change didn’t work. Traffic and sales naturally fluctuate, and products with lower traffic may take quite a while to generate enough data for a useful comparison.
Instead:
- Record your starting metrics.
- Make a small number of purposeful changes.
- Record exactly what you changed.
- Give the changes time.
- Come back and compare the data.
And remember that one week of data rarely tells the whole story. The goal isn’t to react to every small change in your numbers. It’s to look for patterns over time.
So, do you need more traffic?
Maybe. But don’t assume that’s the answer. If a product is getting very little traffic, improving its visibility may be the obvious place to start. But if people are already finding it and aren’t buying, I’d first investigate why.
Think about it this way:
Low traffic → investigate visibility.
High traffic + low sales → investigate conversion.
Low traffic + good conversion → investigate visibility.
And if there isn’t enough data yet, sometimes the right answer is simply:
Wait and keep watching.
You don’t have to change something just because you can.
SEO isn’t just about getting people to your product
It’s tempting to think of SEO as a traffic game.
More searches.
More views.
More clicks.
But those numbers only tell part of the story.
The real goal is to help the right buyers find a product that actually meets their needs — and then make it easy for them to understand why it’s worth buying.
So before you start chasing more traffic, look at the people who are already arriving.
- What are they finding?
- What are they seeing?
- And are you giving them a clear reason to buy?
Sometimes the best SEO improvement isn’t getting more people to your product.
It’s making better use of the people who are already finding it.
Want help figuring out what’s holding your TPT products back?
My TPT SEO & Growth Review looks at your search and product data to identify opportunities, assess your priority products and help you decide what to work on first.
