One tag in eight just repeats the title

A tag is a small space, and sellers spend a surprising share of it saying something the listing has already said. On 26 September 2026 we took every tag on every active listing on Getly and compared it with the words in that listing's own title. 12.1% of all tags simply repeat a word that is already in the title.

That is about one tag in eight. We have written before about how many tags listings carry. This article is about what goes into them, and why the title is the one place a tag should not be copying from.

Why a repeated word adds nothing

Search on Getly reads a listing's title and its tags together. A word that appears in the title is already matched when a buyer types it. Putting the same word into a tag gives the listing a second copy of a word it already had, and it gives the buyer no new way to find it.

A typical example: a listing titled "Minimal Budget Planner Spreadsheet" with the tags budget, planner, spreadsheet, minimal, finance. Four of the five tags are already in the title. Only finance does any new work. The listing effectively has one tag.

The same listing could carry words that its title does not: the software it opens in, the task it solves, the person it is for, the format of the file. Each of those is a phrase a buyer might type that the title, by itself, will never match.

What a tag slot is good for

Think of the title as the name of the product and the tags as every other way someone might describe what they want. Useful tags tend to fall into a few groups:

• Synonyms and near-synonyms. A buyer who types "wallpaper" and a buyer who types "background" want the same file. The title can hold only one of the two words.
• Software and format. Excel, Google Sheets, Canva, Figma, Blender, PDF, PNG. Only 9.53% of descriptions on Getly mention compatibility, software or requirements at all, so the tag may be the only place this information lives.
• Use and occasion. Wedding, classroom, small business, YouTube channel, tabletop game. These describe the job the buyer has, not the product.
• Audience. Teachers, freelancers, beginners, kids, indie developers.
• Style. Watercolour, retro, flat, hand-drawn, photorealistic.

A tag from any of these groups either reaches a buyer the title does not, or confirms to a browsing buyer that the product fits their case. A tag copied from the title does neither.

Where the habit comes from

Repeating the title is the fastest way to fill a tag field. The seller already has the words in front of them, and they are the words that describe the product most accurately. The reasoning is sound: these are the words that matter. The problem is only that the title has already said them.

There is a second reason. Many sellers write the title last, after the tags, or change the title later and forget the tags. A tag that was a genuine addition when it was written can become a duplicate after a rename. That is one more reason to look at the two fields side by side rather than one at a time.

What this does not prove

We are not reporting that listings with fewer repeated tags sell better. We did not measure that, and even if the two moved together, the cause could easily be something else: a seller who writes careful tags probably writes a careful description and chooses better images too. The 12.1% figure is a description of how the catalogue is written, not a ranking factor.

What it does tell you is that a tag field full of title words is common, easy to spot and cheap to fix.

A check you can run today

1. Open one of your listings in the editor and put the title and the tag list next to each other.
2. Cross out every tag whose word already appears in the title.
3. For each crossed-out tag, write a replacement from one of the groups above: a synonym, the software, the use, the audience or the style.
4. Ask yourself what a buyer who has never heard of your product would type into the search box. If that phrase is in neither the title nor the tags, it belongs in a tag.
5. Repeat for your other listings, starting with the one that gets the most attention in your dashboard.

The result is the same number of tags doing more work. It takes a few minutes per listing, and it is the kind of edit that does not change what the buyer receives, only whether they find it.