Most Etsy SEO tools tell you they work. Very few show you the spread.
So here is ours, in full. Every listing run through MintTags, what it scored before, what it scored after, and where the gains actually came from. Including the group where we changed almost nothing, which is the part these posts usually leave out.
All figures below are as of 23 August 2026, across 518 optimized listings.
The headline
81% of listings score higher after optimizing. The average listing goes from 72 to 85 on our 100 point scale.
That scale is ours, and it is worth being precise about what it measures: title keyword placement, tag quality and diversity, description keyword integration, description structure, and category specific practice. It is a measure of whether a listing is built the way Etsy's search wants listings built. It is not a ranking, and nobody can honestly sell you one, because Etsy does not publish rank through its API.
The part that matters more than the average
An average across 518 listings hides the only thing you actually want to know, which is whether it will do anything for your listing. Split by where the listing started:
| Starting score | Listings | Before → After | Average gain | Improved | |---|---|---|---|---| | Under 50 | 78 | 43 → 84 | +41 | 100% | | 50 to 69 | 140 | 66 → 85 | +19 | 100% | | 70 to 84 | 138 | 80 → 85 | +6 | 80% | | 85 and above | 162 | 86 → 86 | 0 | 54% |
Read the bottom row carefully, because it is the honest answer to "will this help me".
If your listing already scores 85 or above, MintTags will not move it. Average gain across those 162 listings was zero. Half came out fractionally worse. A listing that already front loads its keywords, carries thirteen well chosen tags and opens its description with the right 160 characters is finished, and rewriting it is churn.
Everything the tool is worth is in the top two rows. A listing under 50 gained 41 points on average, and every single one of them improved. Not most. All 78.
Why the weak listings gain so much
Nothing clever. They are missing the basics:
Titles run short. The average listing arrives using 84 of the 140 characters Etsy allows. That is 56 characters of keyword space left empty, on every listing, forever. Optimized titles come out at an average of 100 characters, and the gain is mostly that simple.
Tags are partial. Etsy gives you thirteen. Thirteen is not a maximum to approach, it is the number of separate chances your listing gets to match a search. Every optimized listing leaves with all thirteen filled, using multi word phrases rather than single words, and avoiding words already carried by the title, since Etsy indexes those separately.
Descriptions bury the keywords. The first 160 characters are what shows in a search preview. Most arrive opening with a greeting or a brand story.
None of this is a trade secret. It is a checklist, and the reason sellers do not do it by hand is that it takes fifteen minutes per listing and most shops have more than a hundred.
The claim we are not going to make
Here is the number we could put in a headline, and the reason we are not going to.
The busiest shop using MintTags gained 1,588 views across 254 listings over 13 days. That is measured, from Etsy's own view counts, and it is real.
It is also not proof that we caused it. Views move with the season, with a seller's own ads, with new listings, and with whatever Etsy is promoting that week. To show a tool caused a lift you have to compare listings you optimized against listings you did not, in the same shop over the same period, and until recently we were not recording which listings had been through the tool. So we cannot run that comparison on our own history. The second shop we track was flat over the same window.
We have fixed the recording, so that comparison becomes possible from here. When we can run it, we will publish it, including if it says nothing.
Until then: we can show you that listings score better. We cannot yet show you that scoring better sells more. Anybody who tells you otherwise about their own tool is describing a study they have not run.
What this means for your shop
Three practical conclusions from the table above:
- Score your worst listings first. The gain is concentrated almost entirely in listings below 70. If you have a hundred listings and limited time, the bottom twenty are worth more than the other eighty combined.
- Leave your strong listings alone. If something already scores 85 plus, rewriting it is not an improvement, it is a coin flip. Spend the effort on the ones that are actually buried.
- Length is the cheapest fix there is. If you do nothing else today, go and use the other 56 characters of your titles.
You can run any listing through the free Etsy tag generator or check where a listing currently scores with the full optimizer. The numbers in this post will be different next quarter, and we will update them rather than leaving a flattering snapshot up forever.
