11d • Business
The Sculptor’s Guide to SEO Product Descriptions - How to write listings that humans enjoy and Google can actually understand.
Following on from yesterdays post about where to sell your STL files, I wanted to do a bit of a deeper dive into SEO for miniature listings – getting your products discoverable by search engines and found by customers!
Search engines aren’t magic, and marketplaces won’t automatically put your creations in front of the right people just because you’ve uploaded something cool. If you want your miniatures to be discoverable — both on Google and within platforms like Cults, Printables and CGTrader — then SEO becomes one of the most important tools in your arsenal. Good optimisation helps your work appear in searches, reach new audiences, and generate sales without relying on the platform’s algorithm deciding to bless you that day. To show you how this works in practice, here’s an example product listing built with SEO in mind, and afterwards I’ll break down exactly what’s happening and why it matters.
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**SEO-Optimised Example Product Listing**
Human Female Wizard – 32mm Scale STL | Pre-Supported | Painter-Friendly Fantasy Miniature
If you’re looking for a character who brings a bit of arcane menace to the tabletop, this Human Female Mage ticks all the boxes. She’s sculpted specifically for 32mm scale gaming, with exaggerated, painter-friendly detail that reads beautifully at arm’s length and prints cleanly even on modest resin printers. I’ve gone for a poised, mid-spellcasting stance — one hand crackling with magical energy while the other braces an ornate staff crowned with a runic crystal.
The robes have layered fabric, deep cuts, and a clean silhouette that makes shading and highlighting an absolute breeze. Painters will get plenty of joy out of the crisp folds, subtle jewellery, and texture shifts from cloth to leather to metal. Everything has been sculpted with the usual care for printability: no unnecessary micro-detail, no nightmare thin bits, and nothing that will collapse into a sad puddle on the build plate of your 3D printer!
Ideal for D&D, Pathfinder, fantasy skirmish games, or simply as a hero to grace your display shelf. Whether you need a wizard, sorceress, enchantress, or spell-slinging mage proxy, she’ll fit right in.
What You Get
- High-resolution unsupported STL file
- Pre-supported STL (professionally engineered for reliable resin printing)
- Lychee .LYS project file (editable supports)
- Single piece solid miniature
- Sculpted in 32mm scale
- Suitable for Anycubic, Elegoo, Phrozen and similar resin printers
- Clean geometry, watertight mesh
Key Features
- Strong, readable pose designed for tabletop clarity
- Deep, stylised detail ideal for contrast paints, glazing, and drybrushing
- Crisp spell effects without fragile components
- Easy-to-paint textures for hobbyists at any skill level
- Clean silhouette that stands out at gaming distance
- Pre-supports tested for minimum cleanup and maximum success rate
Great For
- Player character miniatures
- NPC wizards, mages, ritual casters
- Fantasy wargames and skirmish systems
- Display painting
- Proxies and custom heroes
- Anyone who enjoys painting cloth, texture, and magical effects
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A Note on SEO (so you see what’s happening)
You’ll notice the keywords — female wizard STL, 32mm miniature, fantasy mage, RPG miniature, resin 3D print — are woven naturally into sentences. This makes Google very happy, improves discoverability, and still reads like something a real person wrote… because one did.
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Selling STLs isn’t just about dropping a model onto a marketplace and hoping for the best. The way you describe your miniature plays a massive role in who finds it, how it ranks, and ultimately whether it sells. The good news is you don’t need to become an SEO monk chanting mystical keywords into the void — you just need to understand how search engines think and write in a way that gives them the right signals.
Here’s the exact method I use (and what I recommend to everyone starting out).
1) Write for Humans First
Google has become frighteningly clever. It no longer rewards clunky keyword lists or robotic sentences. What it wants — desperately — is natural, descriptive, readable text that makes sense to a human reader.
The trick is to write normally, but include the kinds of words people might search for, including variants of that word:
- wizard
- mage
- sorceress
- 32mm miniature
- STL file
- fantasy RPG
- resin 3D print
You can't just stuff them all into a list. You need to make sure they are woven naturally into real sentences.
“Human Female Wizard STL designed for 32mm scale tabletop RPGs”is perfect.
“wizard, mage, sorceress, stl, fantasy, female model, print” is the SEO equivalent of a wet, limp handshake and to be avoided at all costs!
2) Avoid Keyword Lists in the Description
Google treats big keyword lists like spam sandwiches. Marketplaces like Cults and CGTrader are somewhat less advanced and do want keyword lists — but in the tags section only so use them appropriately.
Your main description should always read like normal English.
3) Use a Clear, Consistent Structure
Search engines love structure almost as much as us hobbyists love a good drybrush and an excessively sized collection of plastic crack!
Use sections like:
- Short intro
- What’s included
- Key features
- Suggested uses
- Printer/scaling notes
The more predictable your formatting across your whole catalogue, the better Google understands your site.
4) Tell Google What the Model Is
Sounds obvious, but if you don't explicitly say it's a miniature, Google might think it's a video game character, a piece of concept art, or someone’s D&D cosplay.
State things like:
- 32mm scale
- resin printable
- STL file
- tabletop miniature
- RPG / wargaming use
These anchor the listing in the correct search category.
5) Use Natural Semantic Variations
This is the secret sauce.
Instead of repeating “female wizard stl” over and over, use related words that mean the same thing:
- mage
- caster
- spellcaster
- arcanist
- sorceress
- magical hero
- fantasy character
Google recognises all of these as contextually related, which massively boosts your ranking potential.
This is called semantic SEO — or as I like to call it, “words that actually sound right.” If you’re struggling to think of some alternative words, a Thesaurus is your best friend here! Or just Google Synonyms of whatever keyword you’re after.
6) Give Painters Something to Grab Onto
I’m not talking about painting handles or mini grips, but phrases like:
- painter-friendly detail
- clearly defined material separation
- readable silhouette
- contrast-friendly textures
- deep folds for shading
…signal to both humans and Google that this is a miniature sculpture intended for painters, not a generic 3D model/video game asset.
7) Give Printers What They Need Too
Mention 3d printers and slicers in passing:
- resin 3d printers
- Anycubic / Elegoo etc
- Lychee / Chitubox etc
- pre-supported
These aren’t “keywords” — they’re context clues.
8) Use Proper Image SEO
Name your images like:
female-wizard-stl-32mm-printable-miniature-render1.png
Not like:IMG006354998.png(Which tells Google nothing and makes your website look like a jumble sale!)
Add alt text describing the model and you’re golden – something descriptive – don’t try to cram it with keywords, just describe it using meaningful language. An example of good alt text is something like “A render of a 32mm human female wizard miniature posed mid-spell with a crystal-topped staff.”
9) Link Related Products Together
Google loves internal linking almost as much as a hero miniature loves to stand with one foot on a small rock! When the bots arrive to crawl your site, they want to click all the links and find themselves at more of the same kind of thing. Bonus points if you can include links to external sites too!
Include a link to:
- related characters
- similar classes
- sets and bundles
- your resin prints (if you have a store for them)
- your Patreon
This builds SEO strength across your catalogue.
10) Avoid the Temptation to Write Too Little
A one-line description won’t get indexed. Aim for 120–200 words minimum for SEO strength, plus your features and included files sections.
Final Thoughts
SEO isn’t witchcraft — it’s just giving search engines enough information to understand what your miniature actually is. Write your descriptions like you’re talking to another hobbyist across the painting desk, sprinkle in the right vocabulary, and avoid the “keyword soup” approach.
Do that consistently, and your minis will start appearing in more searches, on more platforms, in front of more of the right people… without you having to dance like a performing monkey to please the algorithm gods.
One final little footnote - I've mentioned Google a lot, but other search engines are available and the process for them all is the same!
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The Sculptor’s Guide to SEO Product Descriptions - How to write listings that humans enjoy and Google can actually understand.
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