Online Marketplaces and eCommerce sites that have lists of items or products face unique Search engine optimization challenges. For the 3 years we have been running Bin press, organic search has been our number one source of traffic, and we’d to learn some lessons the difficult way.
Before we go over a few of the common SEO challenges marketplaces have, here are some definitions of terms I use in the article, for clarity:
Marketplace – A site listing products, services and offerings promoted by users of the site rather than the site administrators. For Examples of marketplaces include eBay, , upwork or Airbnb and so forth Creative Market,. In this article, I will focus on marketplaces with long-lived listings instead of listings that expire quickly (example Craigslist), though some of the advice below can be applied to both.
Projects – For conciseness, I am using for “projects” to the refer to items listed on the online marketplace, whether those are actual products, services, offerings, or anything else.
Listing Pages and Product Pages are not Content Oriented
Google’s official line (I will concentrate on Google, as they are the maintaining engine) is that you should focus on creating great content. If you create great content, people will reference to it, Google will notice it, and traffic will flow from the mountain tops.
While it may be as simple as that for straight up-content pages (such as this blog, for instance), listing pages and eCommerce] product pages are a different species.
Online Most people do not generally share product pages because of “great menu.” Occasionally, some most important word unique or outstanding projects pages get shared or reference to, but, typically, people prefer to reference to a good review of a projects rather than the product itself (if at all). Simply put, most products did not made for very shareable Menu. No matter how brilliant the copy you write for a product, it generally does not make for a very interesting and noteworthy read.
This is especially trustful for user-generated content on online marketplace sites. If you are the best copywriter in the country, you cannot write all of the content for all of the projects offered on their marketplace. Either, even if you can scale the original writing effort by hiring a team of the copywriters and in a lot of the cases, only the person offering the project knows it well enough to describe it from scratch, and the most you can do is try to improve that description.
Similarly, listing pages have an even lower opportunity of being shared or reference to. Why would anyone reference to or tweet about a list of products?
Considering this, there are several thought we can do this achieve better then results with projects pages.
Online Maintenance a strong inner-linking structure in market place
The homepage (typically the page with the highest page authority on a website) would link to mauling pages and some of the project contents. The listing pages, in turn, should link to all of the product pages. Seems obviously, but I have seen some listing contents using POST form in the filtering mechanics, leading to no direct links to product pages from the listing.
Always prefer to use links. If you do use this form, make sure it is a GET form (that creates index enable URLs). But if possible again, because they are the most accessible format for search engines optimization to find of your manut. In addition, be sure to cross link between related products. Also, link to product pages from other contents, such as of your web site and special content you have on the site that might be more shareable organically.
Leverage of your community to buildup links to products pages
Online Marketplaces are unique compared to regular eCommerce / listing sites that they have a active users on both sides of the transactions. While consumers (searchers / Clint) on the online marketplace might share products if they are especially pleased, that is less likely, as mentioned above. On the other hand, the “buyer” (or “producers,” as we like to call them ), have a greater motivation to do so. And, you can help make it happen by educating them in how to provide their products and services.
We did that by constantly talking to our open and learning what worked for them and what didn’t. We generally summarized the things that did work into a guide what we promote as links for publishers when they add new list items.
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