SEO and search words in a Mercado Libre listing

Kirill Odintsov

Founder of MercadoRu · Buenos Aires

I sell on Mercado Libre from Argentina, bring goods in from China and run my own warehouse in Buenos Aires. Everything written here has been tested on my own shipments, not retold from someone else’s guides.

Almost everyone arriving on Mercado Libre with Amazon or eBay experience does the same thing. They stuff the description with keywords. They write a paragraph of thirty synonyms, add “best price” and “free shipping” to the title, and wait for growth. It does not come.

The reason is that search inside Mercado Libre is built differently. Some of the familiar places where we put keywords play no part in ranking at all. And in catalogue listings you will not even be allowed to edit the title.

Let us go layer by layer. Where search words carry weight, where they do not, and what part of it the platform’s own AI already does for you.

Keywords get you into the list, everything else does the selling

The main thing to understand before any optimisation. Words from the query are responsible only for getting into the result set. You are either relevant to the query or you are not. After that, positions within the set are decided by things that have nothing to do with the text.

Six things decide the order.

Conversion. How many sales per hundred visits. The weightiest signal, since the platform earns a percentage and it pays it to lift what people buy.
Sales history. Not the all-time total, but recent, over the last few weeks.
Seller reputation. The colour of the thermometer, cancellations, response speed.
Shipping type. Full lifts a listing noticeably higher than shipping from your own warehouse.
Price relative to the other offers on the same product.
Listing completeness. Photos, specifications, description.

Sixty characters of title. The only place where words truly carry weight

The title limit 60 characters, and it is the main textual signal for search. The structure that works:

Product + Brand + Model + main attribute

The order is exactly that. What the person types into search comes first. Not the SKU from the invoice, not the internal name. You need the word the buyer uses for the product.

You cannot put a price, “envío gratis”, “el mejor”, “oferta”, “promoción”, emoji, exclamation marks or symbols like @ # * !. This is a platform rule, not advice. You get paused for it.

The ficha técnica. The second layer almost everyone leaves half-filled

The ficha técnica is the “Características del producto” block, a list of attributes that differs by category. And it is not a formality. Attributes feed the filters in the left-hand column of the results.

A real example. A seller of phone cases did not fill in the model-compatibility field. Formally the listing is in search. But a buyer almost never searches for “funda para celular”. They go into the category and click the “iPhone 15” filter. The listing does not appear in that filter, because the attribute is empty. Half the buying paths are closed off, and the seller is rewriting the title.

Integrators and the platform’s certified agencies agree on one thing. Without a complete ficha técnica there are no top positions. It should be filled in accurately, not with search words. The platform also uses these fields to match your listing to the catalogue.

Words in the description. Where the truth ends

Here one has to be honest, the sources disagree. Some agencies say the algorithm evaluates the first three hundred characters of the description. Others are sure the description plays no part in ranking at all. The platform itself answers vaguely, about the quality of the listing as a whole.

Here is what is known for certain and is worth acting on.

Since 2018 the description has been plain text. HTML templates were dropped, leaving only bold text with links. The bordered tables and banners still doing the rounds in guides are physically impossible.

Stuffing words into the description does not lift a listing. It does spoil readability, readability drags conversion down, and conversion is the main ranking factor. Spam in the description works versus against you, just at one remove rather than directly.

Where to get keywords when Wordstat is not available

Let me say it plainly, so there are no false expectations. A full Wordstat equivalent for Mercado Libre does not exist. Neither free, nor inside the platform itself.

Wordstat does something nobody here offers for free. You type any phrase and get an exact number of monthly impressions, with region and word forms. There is no such button inside the platform. There are workarounds, and each one covers only part of the job.

1. Search autocomplete. Open mercadolibre.com.ar, type the base word and look at the suggestions. It is the most honest source there is, literally what people type inside the platform. Free, two minutes.

2. Tendencias de búsqueda. The platform’s official free section, tendencias.mercadolibre.com.ar. For Mexico .com.mx, for Brazil tendencias.mercadolivre.com.br. Works without registration.

What it does have.

Las búsquedas que más crecieron. The queries that grew most over the week, with their places 1º, 2º, 3º. The most valuable block. It shows what is picking up right now, not perennial leaders like the iPhone.
Las búsquedas más deseadas and Las tendencias más populares. The most frequent queries of the week.
Por categorías. The same thing broken down by category.
Productos más buscados. A general list of about 55 queries, alphabetically.

Now what is missing from it and why that not a Wordstat replacement. You cannot type in an arbitrary phrase or check your own query, it is a showcase of ready-made lists. There are no absolute numbers anywhere either. You can see that a query has grown and where it ranks, but not how many impressions that is. Comparing two of your own title options by frequency will not work.

It is useful in two ways. The first, catching the season. In the Argentine list at the end of July, in the depth of the local winter, you find calefón, termotanque eléctrico, aire acondicionado frío calor. The second, to pick up live phrasings with their tails. Not just heladera, and heladera no frost samsung and heladera bajo mesada. These are ready-made pieces of a title.

And at the same time it proves the lists differ by country. On the same day the Mexican one had airpods, bocina jbl, autos usados, colchón matrimonial. Not a single overlap with the Argentine one.

3. Your own dashboard reports. After a month of selling you have your own statistics on the words people find you by. That is more accurate than any external tool, since it is your product and your category.

4. Free browser extensions. The most underrated one. It installs in Chrome and works right on top of the Mercado Libre page. Open any listing, yours or a competitor’s, and you see the breakdown.

For Brazil there is GoSmarter. It gives a listing score from 0 to 100, visit and sales metrics, conversion, a commission calculator. And most importantly, a list of the words the listing has and the ones it lacks, with search volume. It advertises “free forever, no analysis limit”. That is closer to Wordstat than anything else free, but it is documented only for the Brazilian platform.

For Spanish-speaking countries there is something similar in the Chrome Web Store. Extensions like MercadoLibre Product Analysis, it covers Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Argentina with limited free access, and MercadoPro. Both show sales and visits on other people’s listings. Install them and see for yourself, the quality varies, and the figures come from the platform’s public statistics.

5. Nubimetrics. The only thing that covers Wordstat’s job in full. Demand per query, competition, seller share, trends. Among the platform’s sellers it is the industry standard. And it is paid. That is the honest answer to “what replaces Wordstat”: money.

6. Google’s tools. The platform’s listings index very well, and part of the traffic comes from external search rather than internal. Set the region to Argentina and the language to Spanish.

Keyword Planner gives frequency, but without an active ad campaign it shows ranges like “100–1K”. Enough for prioritising. Google Trends it compares two phrasings and shows the season. In the Southern Hemisphere the season is inverted. December is summer, school starts in March, the Hot Sale is in May and CyberMonday in November. Keyword Surfer is a free Chrome extension that shows search volume right in Google’s results. Of the free options it is the closest to the familiar Wordstat. Search Console after a month or two it starts showing the real queries people find your site by. You will not find more honest figures for free.

Every country has its own words. There is no such thing as “Spanish in general”

The most expensive mistake when going into several countries is copying a title from an Argentine listing into a Mexican one. The same product is called by a different word there, and people simply will not find you.

Uruguay has its own words even relative to Argentina. Trainers there are championes, not zapatillas. Brazil is a separate story, it is Portuguese there, and you cannot translate a Spanish title by ear.

Plus the tone itself. In Argentina and Uruguay it is voseo, vos tenés, elegí, comprá, not tú tienes and elige. Mexicans and Colombians write with tú. For a buyer that is an instant marker that the seller is not local. And then trust drops and conversion with it.

Mercado Libre’s built-in AI. What it does well and where it lies

The platform has its own AI, and it really does save time. Four things are available to a seller.

Description generation and title suggestions from the photo and the product name.
Filling out the ficha técnica. The platform derives some attributes itself from what you have already entered.
Asistente Inteligente. A chat in the seller dashboard that runs on your numbers rather than generic advice. It looks at your active listings, history and metrics, and points out where the price is uncompetitive and which listing has slipped.
Short-video generator for clips, free and unlimited.

And here is where it gets things wrong. This has to be checked by hand every time.

It invents specifications. Compatibility, contents, material and dimensions it fills in from “similar products”. If it gets one wrong, the buyer receives something other than expected, and you get a return and a dent in your reputation. A return costs more than the five minutes saved.

It writes in neutral Spanish. It does not care whether it is remera or playera, it will produce an averaged version. For a listing that is a direct loss of traffic, because nobody types the averaged word into search.

It gives generic phrases. “Producto de excelente calidad” answers not one buyer objection and adds not one keyword.

A note on reviews, given how huge the market is. There are almost no detailed public “works / does not work” breakdowns: the topic lives in the blogs of certified Mercado Libre agencies and in closed seller chats, not on public forums. From what the agencies write, they converge on two things. First: the platform’s native AI is free but requires manual approval of every answer — it publishes nothing by itself. Second: the quality of the result is set entirely by what you feed it — specs, photos, frequent questions, reasons for returns. Given nothing, it produces empty text.

A formula I will agree with. If the account is in order, listings are filled in, criteria exist and drafts get checked, the AI speeds up the work and makes listings uniform in the good sense. If the account is a mess, the AI will multiply that mess, only faster.

The catalogue: where your keywords mean nothing at all

First let me explain what the catalogue actually is, because the term is confusing and nothing further makes sense without it.

A product on Mercado Libre can live in two modes.

Your own listing. You created the listing yourself: your title, your photos, your description. That is how bundles, sets and no-name goods from China live — everything absent from the platform’s catalogue. Here keywords work, and work well.

A catalogue listing. Mercado Libre has one shared listing per specific product — say, a black iPhone 15 128 GB. Every seller of that same product sits on it together. The closest analogue is a shared marketplace listing or Amazon’s buy box. One page, many sellers, and by default the buyer sees one offer, the one the platform picked as the main one.

How to tell you are in it: when publishing, Mercado Libre will itself offer to join a ready-made listing, or your product will be pulled onto a page with someone else’s photos and title. In the dashboard such listings are marked as catalogue ones.

And now the main thing. The content of a catalogue listing belongs to the platform. The title, photos, description, ficha técnica and category cannot be edited — Mercado Libre sets them. You compete for the right to be the main offer, and that is decided by four things: price, reputation, delivery time and terms such as cuotas.

You can see the status in the dashboard. “Ganando” means you are the main offer. “Compartiendo primer lugar” means you share it with someone. “Perdiendo” means you have dropped into “Otras opciones de compra”, where almost nobody will see you.

The conclusion is simple: on catalogue products, work on keywords is wasted time. There you compete on price and logistics. Keywords matter where you create the listing: non-catalogue products, bundles, sets, anything without a ready entry in Mercado Libre’s catalogue.

Checklist before publishing

1. Checked Mercado Libre autocomplete on the domain of the country you need and taken the word the product is called there.
2. Title: Product + Brand + Model + attribute, up to 60 characters, no repeating words from the same root.
3. The title has no price, no “envío gratis”, no “oferta”, no emoji and no exclamation marks.
4. The ficha técnica is filled in completely, especially the fields with filters attached: brand, model, size, compatibility.
5. The description is plain text, the opening lines answer objections, and there is no separate keyword block.
6. Everything the platform’s AI proposed has been reread: specs checked against the product, words swapped for local ones.
7. Checked whether the product has gone into the catalogue. If it has, you work on price and shipping, not on rewriting text.
8. Come back two weeks later and look at conversion: impressions but no sales means the problem is not the keywords.

And one last thing. Keywords get a listing into the results, but price, photos and shipping terms are what sell it. Before investing in the text, work out whether you have any room at all to compete on price.

⭐ By the way: before fighting for positions, check whether the product has any room on price. In the free calculator it shows the break-even ad share and the “zero-profit” price.