Low-hanging fruit for Marketplace SEO

SEO is the magic key that many startups want to conquer. It provides a steady flow of highly relevant traffic, and can in many cases be the difference between success and failure.

While this can be tricky for many businesses, marketplaces in particular are a great fit to climb up the SEO ladder. That's because:

• Marketplaces typically generate a lot of user-generated content

• Marketplaces sell services and products that customers already search for

• Marketplaces can leverage their suppliers for additional hands on deck

In this short guide, we'll take a look at five low-hanging fruits that marketplace startups can pick to quickstart their marketplace SEO.

Optimize user-generated content

Typically, a marketplace creates a lot of user-generated content. Be it product listings, supplier pages, search results or popular questions about products – all can be leveraged to grow the SEO footprint of a marketplace.

Hence, for our first low-hanging fruit, we recommend that startups just optimize and leverage the vast amount of user-generated content that's already there.

For example, for one of our clients, simply changing the title of product pages from:

• "Used Pallet"

to

• "Buy 48 x 40 Used Pallet in Chino, California"

improved organic search impressions and clicks from search engines drastically.

But, not only the content itself can be optimized. Other low-hanging optimization also include keeping product listings alive after expiration (in order to keep the SEO footprint) and to leverage Google's rich results to stand out from the masses.

Categorize your offerings

The second thing to leverage is a marketplace's search. Most marketplaces offer some way of filtering their offerings. It's a crucial part of the customer experience to be able to narrow down a large marketplace to the products a customer is actually looking for.

However, most marketplaces sleep on categorizing their offerings so that search engines can also leverage their SEO inputs to provide narrower results.

The truth is, most marketplace searches are not very good at propagating their options to search engines. They make use of dynamic website updates and quick search to display a narrowed set of options quickly, while search engines prefer a static website with a user-readable URL.

In one of our experiments, a used airplane marketplace went from only using the search engine to categorizing the airplanes by brand on their own little subpage, such as /brand/cessna/.

By leveraging this, more than 40 new subpages got picked up by Google, eventually providing an influx of over 10,000 new organic clicks per month.

Leverage local SEO

In the same realm as our last tip, leveraging local SEO is a must-do. Even if a marketplace – such as an online service provider – does not have a local aspect, providing local subpages can help Google connect marketplaces quicker with new local customers.

To do so, just as in the last example, marketplaces should create subpages such as /country/<country> or /city/<city> in order to get better indexing and local suggestions from search engines.

Expand on user-generated content

In the next step, the magic word is "expansion". Many marketplaces will already see tremendous results in leveraging what they already have. If that's not enough, targeted expansion is the next step.

This can be as simple as creating additional categories, filtering by certain product attributes or can be as far as collecting new data.

One of our clients, MentorCruise, leveraged their in-house data of coaches and knowledge, expanded with a handpicked resource collection to create end-to-end learning guides, raking in north of 25,000 views per month.

Expanding in-house data for SEO is by far the most expensive and time-consuming way of growing a marketplace's SEO footprint covered in this guide. However, it can help break existing boundaries by finding new niches and keyword clusters to explore.

Audit every month

Last, but not least, it's important to stay on top of SEO. Organic traffic from search engines ebbs and flows, and new Google updates can lead to marketplaces losing (or sometimes, surprisingly gaining) spots in the battle for #1.

Not only that, but competitors won't wait around for long due to the transparent nature of SEO. Staying on top of new changes and keeping quality high is key to longevity in SEO.

We recommend our clients and friends to audit their SEO result once per month. The easiest ways to do so is to sign up for Google Search Console, or to leverage more extensive analytics such as ahrefs or twosided.

Leveraging analytics makes sure that any dips in traffic or revenue are easily explained, and hopefully caught early. It also helps to expose new opportunities in SEO that could lead to new pages, categories or locations being interesting for a SEO use case.

One of the leading analytics tools for marketplaces is our software, twosided. If you'd like to give it a try for free, don't hesitate to sign up or get in touch.